Introduction The Hong Kong Hospital Authority (HA) manages 41 publicly funded hospitals that serve approximately 90% of the seven-million population. The head office of HA is responsible for strategic planning, resources allocation, and monitoring performance of hospitals that are organized into seven geographical clusters. The head office is transforming its population-based internal resources...

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the incidence of strategic behaviour in the UK by means of a questionnaire study performed across three broad manufacturing industriesfood, electrical engineering and chemicals. Of the strategies which have received substantial theoretical attention, R&D and advertising appear widely used, patenting, pricing and excess capacity much less so. Vertical...

Along with a variety of actions to protect the environment, environmentally preferable purchasing (EPP), often referred to as “green purchasing” has been an emerging trend over recent decades all over the world. This trend is considered as a strategic alternative for all stakeholders in the society to promote the sustainable development of global production chain with the active involvement of ...

Consider a retailer announces both the regular price and the post-season clearance price at the beginning of the selling season. Throughout the season, customers arrive in accord with a Poisson process. In this paper we analyze the impact of two types of customer purchasing behavior and two common in-store display formats on the retailer’s optimal expected profit and optimal order quantity. We ...

Using tools from operations research, airlines have, for many years, taken a strategic approach to pricing the seats available on a particular flight based on demand forecasts and information. The result of this approach is that the same seat on the same flight is often offered at different fares at different times. Setting of these prices using yield-management approaches is a major activity f...

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper aims to investigate the effects of supplier collaboration on the firm innovation performance as well as the enabling characteristics of the purchasing function. This is an original contribution as few papers empirically test the effect of supplier collaboration (meant as supplier involvement, development, and integration) on innovation performance and — simultan...

This paper presents a model of a global CO 2 emissions market as envisaged in the Kyoto Protocol. Using an agent-based simulation, six trading regions abstracted from the Annex-I countries are allowed to trade within a market defined by 1) perfect competition, 2) monopoly, 3) monopsony, and 4) unrestrained strategic battling between powerful buyers and sellers. Cost analysis was performed for v...

Strategic evaluation and supplier selection, or strategic supply, is a main subject of supply chain management. Strategic evaluation and supplier selection is a multi-criteria decision problem, considering both tangible and intangible criteria and organizations are seeking various and sometimes opposite objectives in purchasing from suppliers. As the increasing rivalry in Iran’s auto industry, ...

Firms developing new products must often make a trade-o¤ between production costs and product quality: higher quality products are more valued by consumers, but also more costly to manufacture. We analyze the impact of activities that increase consumer value (quality improvement e¤orts) and activities that decrease production costs (cost reduction e¤orts) on the pro…t of a …rm. We demonstrate t...