Purchase Plans Research Articles

Learning from Coworkers: Peer Effects on Individual Investment Decisions

We use unique data on employee decisions in the employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs) of U.S. public firms to measure the influence of networks on investment decisions. Comparing only employees within a firm during the same election window and controlling for a metro area fixed effect, we find that the local choices of coworkers to participate in the firm’s ESPP exert a significant influence on employees’ own decisions to participate. Local coworkers’ trading patterns also disseminate to colleagues through the network. In the cross-section, we find that some employees (men, younger workers) are particularly susceptible to peer influence. Generally, we find that more similar employees exert greater influence on each other’s decisions and, particularly, that high (low) information employees are most affected by other high (low) information employees. However, we also find that the presence of high information employees magnifies the effects of peer networks. We trace a value-increasing investment choice through employee networks. Thus, our analysis suggests the potential of networks and targeted investor education to improve financial decision-making.

청년층 임차가구의 주택구입계획과 저축 결정요인에 관한 연구

청년층 임차가구의 주택구입계획과 저축 결정요인에 관한 연구

Bi-stakeholder Conflict Resolution-Based Layout of Construction Temporary Facilities in Large-Scale Construction Projects

Planning a layout of construction temporary facilities (CTFs), a specific construction site layout problem, is crucial to the successful completion of large-scale construction projects. Despite considerable research undertaken, mutual relationships and conflicts between the layout planner and other pre-planning task stakeholders (i.e., for the scheduling of construction activities or the material purchase) are not yet addressed in the layout process. Resolving conflicts is crucial to the layout optimization and this study is among the first to plan appropriate CTF layouts by taking bi-stakeholder conflict resolution into account. A new bi-level mathematical method is developed based on the resolution of conflicts between the CTF layout planner and the material purchase stakeholder, and thus providing an example for future layouts with bi-stakeholder conflicts. In this method, a bi-level programming model is first established to model layout-related goals, constraints, and conflicts. Second, a bi-level genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the model for appropriate layouts. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method, the method is applied to design a CTF layout for the construction of a practical dam project. The results demonstrated that an appropriate layout and a satisfactory purchase plan were determined, and conflicts between the CTF layout and the material purchase were prevented. The contributions of the method are the ability to capture the mutual conflicts of the CTF layout and the material purchase in the bi-level model, the capacity to develop a more efficient and realistic layout, and the practicality to guide planners in other situations.

Development and delivery of an interdisciplinary course in mobile health (mHealth)

BackgroundInterdisciplinary practice is a primary focus within the United States health care system. Despite the existence of interdisciplinary educational efforts in pharmacy for many years, the practice only recently entered mainstream health care education. Informatics offers interdisciplinary educational opportunities. Mobile health (mHealth), an informatics sub-discipline, is the use of mobile devices for health and wellness activities. We used the mHealth domain as the context for an interdisciplinary learning experience for pharmacy and computer science and software engineering (CSSE) students. Educational activityEducational activities focused on creating an mHealth course sequence and an mHealth application (app). Students worked in teams to complete various assignments, including developing and presenting a course proposal, building a purchase plan for mHealth equipment, developing an mHealth app prototype, delivering a disease state presentation (pharmacy students only), developing use case scenarios (CSSE students only), and completing peer evaluations. Critical analysis of the educational activityCourse evaluations were only available from pharmacy students. They indicated an overall favorable rating (mean 3.27–3.55; 4=strongly agree). Survey data collected after students entered the workforce indicated that students felt better prepared than their colleagues to work with individuals from other disciplines (mean 4.82; 5=strongly agree). Students also indicated using the knowledge from course proposal development in their careers (mean 4.27; 5=strongly agree). Through team interactions, students learned from each other while overcoming challenges related to terminology and content areas. Skills learned through team interactions reflect real-world processes and are expected to support students’ future professional responsibilities.

How Freemium Gets Consumers to Pay a Premium: The Role of Loss-Aversion

We consider the optimal pricing of a freemium product offered by a firm to consumers who are loss-averse with stochastic and endogenous reference points, and the role of the consumers' surprise on their purchase decision about the premium version, after experiencing the free version. We formulate the problem as a multistage Stackelberg game and investigate its equilibrium by determining the consumers' optimal purchase plan, the firm's optimal price to charge for the premium version, and the optimal quality level that the firm sets for the premium version. We show that a consumer becomes more willing to buy the premium version if he becomes somewhat dissatisfied to realize that the free version's value is lower than his expectation. This result goes against the common advice by practitioners that the firms must under-promise and over-deliver to ensure higher profitability. We show that the somewhat-dissatisfied consumer is not only more willing to buy the premium version, but he also could pay a price higher than its realized value. This is a result that does not occur when the consumer is satisfied or entirely dissatisfied with the free version. It also explains the real phenomenon in which many consumers run up massive bills in using freemium products. We show that, increasing the premium version's quality could cause the firm to optimally reduce its price, which is in contrast to our common quality-price intuition: a higher quality product should be sold more expensively. When the quality, price and the consumer's purchase plan are jointly optimized, we show that, the optimal price can increase in the order quantity. This behavior counters the common expectation that when the firm has more available units it should sell them cheaper to avoid the risk of unsold inventory.

Interactive fuzzy stochastic multiobjective purchase and transportation planning for food retailing

This paper considers purchase and transportation planning for food retailing in Japan where the food retailer deals with vegetables and fruits which are purchased at the central wholesale markets in several cities, and transports them by truck from each of the central wholesaler markets to the food retailer's storehouse. From a stochastic perspective, by carefully reviewing parameters in our original problem formulation, through the introduction of stochastic parameters, multiobjective linear stochastic programming problems are introduced. By using the typical stochastic models including the expectation model, the fractile model, the probability model together with chance constrained programming, the formulated multiobjective linear stochastic programming problems are transformed into deterministic ones. Assuming the decision maker has the fuzzy goal for each of the objective functions, several interactive fuzzy satisficing methods are presented for deriving a satisficing solution for the decision maker by updating the reference membership levels.

Interactive fuzzy stochastic multiobjective purchase and transportation planning for food retailing

Interactive fuzzy stochastic multiobjective purchase and transportation planning for food retailing

Paulson Plan Credits

The Capital Purchase Plan (CPP) is one of the main ingredients of the Paulson Plan. In accordance with CPP, U.S. federal agencies invested more than $200 billion in approximately 700 financial institutions between 2008 and 2009. This article examines whether this major public intervention helped decrease systemic risk in the banking sector, using the ∆CoVaR (Adrian and Brunnermeier, 2011) as measure of systemic risk at the financial institution level, as well as a difference-in-difference test. The results indicate the significant contribution of the CPP to decreasing recipients’ systemic risk. In this respect, the Paulson Plan clearly met its target goal.

Do Nonexecutive Employees Have Valuable Information? Evidence from Employee Stock Purchase Plans

Using novel data on employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs), we show that aggregate purchases of company stock by lower-level employees predict future stock returns. Firms in the top quartile of ESPP purchases outperform those in the bottom quartile by 10% in the year after purchase. The relation between ESPP purchases and future stock returns is stronger for firms with high information asymmetry. Furthermore, we find that high ESPP purchases are associated with a lower likelihood of breaks in strings of consecutive earnings increases, as well as higher future sales growth and more innovation. These findings support the hypothesis that lower-level employees have information about future firm performance. We examine and reject a number of alternative explanations. Our results have implications for firms using employees as a source of capital, accounting issues related to expensing of equity-based compensation, and disclosure policy. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2226 . This paper was accepted by Wei Jiang, finance.

Advances and trends in bibliographic research: Examples of new technological applications for the cataloguing of the georeferenced library heritage

In the age of digital archives and online data consultation, bibliographic research is considered as a key tool for supporting scientific research and study. The online catalogue allows the achievement of more ambitious aims and global interest thanks to its ability to associate data relating to the geographic contextualization of the catalogued editorial products (deduced from the title and content) with the search for more traditional bibliographic data through the inclusion of a specific and standardized ‘field’. Successively, the locations identified by the cataloguer are georeferenced by using GIS applications, which allows the simultaneous view of the distribution of global and local geographical contexts specific for each item owned by a library, archive or museum. The usefulness of such an application lies in the possibility for the library to have a greater awareness of its collection, thus permitting the acquisition of an additional element of evaluation in the management and planning of purchases and donations. In this way, the ability to filter the information from OPAC search will be combined with the basic research carried out by the user by selecting only the libraries in possession of works related to a specific geographical context, involved in different specific studies (literature, landscape, environment). Although this ability is still limited to a few specific studies, the use of tools that allow an overview of the geographical distribution of places could represent an operating standard through the definition of a special protocol. These tools are now used mostly in experimental studies in which the use of open source software has enabled the creation of maps. This paper shows the state of the art of the applications worldwide presenting experimental case studies (i.e. Coos Bay, Oregon; Basilicata, Italy) and also suggests different applications in the field of national and international protocols of library cataloguing.

Investor Experience and Attention: The Effect of Financial Shocks on Individual Trading Decisions

Using unique data on employee ownership plans sponsored by U.S. public companies, we estimate the effects of the 2008 financial crisis on individual investors’ participation and trading decisions. Consistent with a decreased willingness to take risk, we observe an increase in the average propensity to exercise employee stock options following the crisis, controlling for grant timing and moneyness in addition to time-invariant firm and employee characteristics. However, the results are concentrated among employees with limited experience in option plans prior to the pre-crisis run-up in equity prices. Moreover, we find that low-experience employees also increase their participation in employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs) following the shock. Conditional on initiating participation in ESPPs, we find that they are disproportionally likely to sell the acquired shares both immediately and within the first year of ownership. Since declining to participate in an ESPP amounts to leaving money on the table, our results suggest a new wrinkle in our understanding of how investors’ personal return experiences interact with risk preferences. While negative shocks appear to diminish investors’ appetites for risk, they also mitigate investor inattention. Thus, at least along certain dimensions, they can induce investors to make decisions that are closer to the optimum.

Pricing competition on innovative product between innovator and entrant imitator facing strategic customers

When an innovative product is introduced into the market, innovators always face competition from entrant imitators. Strategic customers may also anticipate this and can design their purchase plans accordingly. In this study, we develop a dynamic game model to formulate the problem associated with competitive product pricing between an innovator and an imitator for obtaining a pricing equilibrium. The influence of various factors on pricing policies, market sales and profits are analysed. We argue that when anticipating forthcoming competitors, innovators should not price too highly in the monopoly stage. The optimal monopoly price decreases with the quality ratio and forms a U shape along with the dimension of customers’ strategic level; however, the right tail of the U is mitigated when the quality ratio increases. In the duopoly phase, the markdown for the innovator and the difference in product cost performance between the innovator and imitator are investigated. We then analyse the value of demand information. The numerical analysis indicates that the value decreases with customers’ strategic level and increases with the quality ratio. The revealing behaviour of the innovator influences the imitator marginally in pricing and considerably in profit. Finally, a medium level is always preferred when the imitator chooses the product quality level.

Fleet Planning Decision-Making: Two-Stage Optimization with Slot Purchase

Essentially, strategic fleet planning is vital for airlines to yield a higher profit margin while providing a desired service frequency to meet stochastic demand. In contrast to most studies that did not consider slot purchase which would affect the service frequency determination of airlines, this paper proposes a novel approach to solve the fleet planning problem subject to various operational constraints. A two-stage fleet planning model is formulated in which the first stage selects the individual operating route that requires slot purchase for network expansions while the second stage, in the form of probabilistic dynamic programming model, determines the quantity and type of aircraft (with the corresponding service frequency) to meet the demand profitably. By analyzing an illustrative case study (with 38 international routes), the results show that the incorporation of slot purchase in fleet planning is beneficial to airlines in achieving economic and social sustainability. The developed model is practically viable for airlines not only to provide a better service quality (via a higher service frequency) to meet more demand but also to obtain a higher revenue and profit margin, by making an optimal slot purchase and fleet planning decision throughout the long-term planning horizon.

Risk Decision Analysis of Logistics Purchasing Based on Mathematical Expectation

The mathematical expectation value method is a commonly used method in risk decision-making. This paper studies the problem of how to arrange the purchase plan in order to get the maximum expected profit; considering the applicable principles of mathematical expectation, the decision method for getting the optimal decision scheme is given. Finally, we do simulation and stability analysis on an example and obtain the reasonable result. This result shows that mathematical expectation value method is effective in solving the problem of risk decision.

Corporate governance and private placement issuance in Australia

AbstractIn this study, we examine the effectiveness of corporate governance in mitigating dilution in the economic and voting interests of existing nonparticipating (retail) shareholders in private placements. Based on a sample of 2420 private placements in Australia from 2001 to 2012, we find support for this proposition through the influence of corporate governance on pricing negotiation and firms’ choice of issuing method in private placements. Specifically, firms with better corporate governance offer private placements with a smaller discount, and are more likely to include a share purchase plan, which protects nonparticipating shareholders from ownership dilution in the placement.

Shopping plans, buying motivations, and return policies: impacts on product returns and purchase likelihoods

Product return behavior and factors that contribute to product returns are an under-researched area, despite significant importance to manufacturers and retailers. The current research attempts to fill the gap by focusing on two factors that shape consumer purchase behavior: (1) whether purchases are planned or unplanned, and (2) whether hedonic or utilitarian motivations drive purchases. The findings show that purchase plans and buying motivations have distinctive and interactive impacts on pre-purchase concerns, self-estimated likelihood of returning purchases, and purchase intentions with or without return policies. When hedonic motivation drives purchases, unplanned (vs. planned) purchases lead to higher return concerns, higher return likelihood, and lower buying intentions. When utilitarian motivation drives purchases, planned and unplanned purchases have comparable return concerns, return likelihood, and buying intentions. This interaction effect on buying intentions dissipates when a lenient return policy is offered.

Analisis Perencanaan Pembelian Bahan Baku Dalam Kaitannya Dengan Efisiensi Bahan Baku Pada PT. Unitex

Purchase of raw materials is an important element in a manufacturing company because this function has a responsibility to obtain raw materials with good quantity and quality and in accordance with the requirements. Raw materials are the main source to produce and create finished goods that will be sold by company and make a profit. The production process can only be done when the supply of raw materials available in suficient quantities. The purpose ofthis study was to observe and analyze how the planning of raw materials and how they affect the efficiency ofthe availability of raw materials, as well as to deepen the blowledge of the author regarding the purchase of raw materials and raw material control. In conducting this study, the author make observations directly to the company as well as conduct interviews and analyze the data obtained. The author uses the method of descriptive analysis of qualitative data to analyze the efficiency ofplanning the purchase of raw material availability.Result of this study indicates that PT Unitex Tbk has not applied the calculation methodfor the management ofraw material inventoo. The purchase planning ofraw materials based on the needs of raw materials that can be seen from the orders of the customers. But overall, the purchase planning ofraw materials in PT Unitex is quite eficient on the availability of raw materials. It is shown that the supply of raw materials is never in a state ofzeroand is always in a state ready for production.
 Keywords: purchase of raw materials, purchase planning, availability of raw materials.

ANALİTİK HİYERARŞİ SÜRECİ İLE AĞIRLIKLANDIRILMIŞ DİNAMİK PROGRAMLAMA MODELİNİN SATIN ALMA SÜRECİNE UYGULANMASI

Decision making is a significant and complex process for businesses. Increase in the number of alternatives and criteria, complicates the decision maker’s role in this process who will make a choice among the conflicting criteria. In this study it is aimed to determine the purchasing and inventory plan in accordance with multiple criteria. This plan is derived by the integration of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), one of the multi criteria decision making methods used for the solution of problems involving quantitative and qualitative multiple criteria, with the Dynamic Programming (DP) model. By using the weights calculated through AHP the optimal result can be obtained with DP for the dynamic inventory and purchasing problem.

Optimization models and algorithms for problems in procurement logistics

Procurement problems study the operational setting of a company that needs to collect products or raw materials from suppliers. In general, the underlying decision processes aim to elaborate a purchasing plan that completely satisfies the products demand while minimizing the procurement costs. Since procurement is a capital intensive decision that typically accounts for a large portion of a firm total cost (regardless of the type of purchased goods), it is of crucial importance to have mathematical models and efficient solution algorithms in place. The present thesis proposes the study, under a quantitative perspective, of different optimization problems arising in the procurement logistics context, namely, the Capacitated Total Quantity Discount Problem (CTQDP), the Traveling Purchaser Problem (TPP), the Restricted Traveling Purchaser Problem with Total Quantity Discount (RTPP-TQD), the Traveling Purchaser Problem under Uncertainty (TPP-U), and the Multi-Vehicle Traveling Purchaser Problem with Pairwise Incompatibility Constraints (MVTPP-PIC). All these problems share some characteristics, as the presence of multiple suppliers and multiple products, as well as the possibility of selecting a subset of suppliers at an operating level. Moreover, in order to be more realistic, each singular problem takes into account one or several complicating features as quantity discount policies, transportation costs and routing optimization, multi-vehicle optimization, data uncertainty, and restrictions on the vehicle loading (capacity constraints or incompatibilities among products). For all these problems, optimization models and solution algorithms (exact and/or heuristic) are proposed, compared, and validated through consistent computational experiments. The solution algorithms generally rely on consolidated mathematical programming techniques and on the analysis of the specific problem.

Modelo de inventarios para control económico de pedidos en empresa comercializadora de alimentos

In this study a proposal to improve the inventory system for a distributor of food in the city of Santa Marta is made, in order to achieve a reduction in inventory costs and increased economic benefit of the organization, through planning and control of purchases and sales of products. The process used is the classification of the products handled by the Company with the ABC method according to importance of each product in the total sales of the distributor; then the model of Economic Order Quantity applies - CEP the right time, in order to systematize the newspapers counts on products stored in the warehouse, establishing records of sales, determine the optimum amount of orders, in which to order merchandise suppliers and minimum reorder quantities.