A large number of data is needed by the computation of the objective Bayesian network, but the data is hard to get in actual computation. The calculation method of Bayesian network was improved in this paper, and the fuzzy-precise Bayesian network was obtained. Then, the fuzzy-precise Bayesian network was used to reason Bayesian network model when the data is limited. The security of passengers...

Shipping-fee charges by online retailers have been known to impact customers' order incidence and cart size. While the importance of managing shipping fees is well documented, few studies have provided normative guidelines for e-tailers to determine optimal shipping-fee schedules. This paper provides two nonlinear mixed-integer programming models to optimize e-tailers' shipping-fee charges for ...

Drop-shipping is an arrangement whereby an e-tailer, who does not hold inventories, processes orders and requests a manufacturer to ship products directly to the end customers. To explore the economic benefits of adopting drop-shipping distribution strategy in a competitive environment, we investigate the profitability and the efficiency of the drop-shipping channel as compared to the tradition...

Persistent differences in interest rates across countries account for much of the profitability of currency carry trade strategies. The high-interest rate “investment” currencies tend to be “commodity currencies,” while low interest rate “funding” currencies tend to belong to countries that export finished goods and import most of their commodities. We develop a general equilibrium model of com...

Being aimed at the influence of ship-size and cargo-demand changes on container shipping networks, to reveal the evolution process of container shipping networks structure form, this paper respectively designed the operation models for two major container shipping networks structure forms: Multi-port-calling network and Hub-and-spoke network, to maximizing the investment efficiency. Based on th...

Fee-based membership free shipping is an important shipping fee schedule in E-Commerce. This paper studies how the membership free shipping (MFS) program affects firm competition and how to set the membership fee optimally. We find MFS relaxes price competition. The firm that adopts MFS has a higher pricing band than the other firm. Both firms have positive profits, strictly better than when me...

The Internet has radically reduced the cost of collecting and distributing information. Consequently, researchers initially predicted that the resulting price transparency would drive prices toward a single market price. However, this has largely not happened, partly because retailers use shipping costs to make prices less comparable. Using data on 517,048 offers of 895 retailers from a leading...

Rapid loss of sea ice is opening up the Arctic Ocean to shipping, a practice that is forecasted to increase rapidly by 2050 when many models predict that the Arctic Ocean will largely be free of ice toward the end of summer. These forecasts carry considerable uncertainty because Arctic shipping was previously considered too sparse to allow for adequate validation. Here, we provide quantitative ...

I proposed to implement a genetic algorithm [5] to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem. TSP is a classic problem in combinatorial search and optimization that has been well studied. It is often used as a benchmark for combinatorial or black-box optimization algorithms, and is one of the best known problems in graph theory. Applications of TSP include routing (shipping and logistics), job sched...

An important service provided by third-party logistics (3PL) firms is to manage the inbound logistics of raw materials and components from multiple suppliers to several manufacturing plants. A key challenge for these 3PL firms is to determine how to coordinate and consolidate the transportation flow, so as to get the best overall logistics performance. One tactic is to establish consolidation h...