Winning business strategies are grounded in sustainable competitive advantage. A company has competitive advantage whenever it has an edge over rivals in securing customers and defending against competitive forces. There are many sources of competitive advantage: making the highest-quality product, providing superior customer service, achieving lower costs than rivals, having a more convenient ...

In the current competitive conditions, all the manufacturers’ efforts are focused on increasing the customer satisfaction as well as reducing the production and delivery costs; thus, there is an increasing concentration on the structure and principles of supply chain (SC). Accordingly, the present research investigated simultaneous optimization of the total costs of a chain and customer satisfa...

We investigate in a duopoly setting the consequences of competitive mobile targeting, the practice of firms' setting prices based on consumers' real-time locations. A distinct market feature of mobile targeting is that a consumer could travel across different locations for an offer that minimizes his total cost of buying. This cherry-picking opportunity imposes constraints on firms to carefully...

An integrated model considers all parameters and elements of different deficiencies in one problem. This paper presents a new integrated model of a supply chain that simultaneously considers facility location, vehicle routing and inventory control problems as well as their interactions in one problem, called location-routing-inventory (LRI) problem. This model also considers stochastic demands ...

We apply competitive analysis onto the problem of minimizing the number of queries to an oracle to completely reconstruct a given monotone Boolean function. Besides lower and upper bounds on the competitivity we determine optimal deterministic online algorithms for the smallest problem instances.

In this paper, we propose a location management strategy that minimizes the radio bandwidth cost for paging and location update. The proposed strategy uses the concept of multilayer and is based on the timer-initiated location update and 3-step paging. The system assigns an optimal layer number to a mobile terminal according to the user’s mobility pattern and call arrival rate. The mobile termi...

The research suggests that Chinese companies do not subscribe to ‘western’ strategy theory. As they rapidly internationalise through massive Foreign Direct Investment, Chinese companies are developing new perspectives on achieving competitiveness. A comparison of the Resource-Based View of strategy (RBV) constructs from western literature with identified (indigent) Chinese business strategies f...