Sharif Digital Repository

Identifying the factors affecting profitability is important from the perspective of market players. One of the most important benchmarks of firm performance is accounting profit and effective factors analysis so that users of accounting information analyse the factors affecting profit, firm performance and various aspects of its performance and according to estimates Done, make your own decision on how to allocate resources. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of some factors of competitiveness, entrepreneurship and business environment indicators on the profitability of the world’s top companies. For this purpose, 176 top companies in the world from 2013 to 2018... 

The classical single-period problem (SPP) is to find a product's order quantity that maximizes the expected profit in a single period under probabilistic demand. In this paper we consider a SPP model in which a percent of the quantity ordered to the supplier contains defective units and is a random variable with a known distribution function. We assume that the initial inventory at the beginning of the period is a random variable. This assumption, among other applications, may apply to the case where the decision about the order quantity must be made at a time long before the start of the period and the available inventory may decrease stochastically due to several factors, such as... 

This paper points out a flaw in the derivation of the optimal price and warranty length policies proposed by Wu et al. (2006) (Wu, C.C., Lin, P.C., Chou, C.Y. Determination of price and warranty length for a normal lifetime distributed product. International Journal of Production Economics 102 (2006): 95–107). While we show one of the optimal strategies that they considered is incorrect, correct versions of the optimal strategies are presented  

This study provides a stochastic dynamic programming model with a Markov chain that explicitly focuses on the customer as well as a new model for valuing the customers in the banking industry. The proposed framework calculates individual customer’s lifetime value dynamically. The study follows a stochastic dynamic programming model that is based on the Markov chain. The deduced findings are illustrated with supplementary context from an outstanding case study. The findings underline the importance of the stochastic model for calculating customer lifetime value based on customer behavior. The presented framework provides a beneficial way for future research and valuable insight for allocating... 

Identifying the factors affecting profitability is important from the perspective of market players. One of the most important benchmarks of firm performance is accounting profit and effective factors analysis so that users of accounting information analyse the factors affecting profit, firm performance and various aspects of its performance and according to estimates Done, make your own decision on how to allocate resources. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of some factors of competitiveness, entrepreneurship and business environment indicators on the profitability of the world’s top companies. For this purpose, 176 top companies in the world from 2013 to 2018... 

In this paper we develop a fuzzy system to obtain the demand based on input variables of price, warranty length and lead time of order delivery. We use linguistic terms to illustrate the situation of input and output variables and construct a fuzzy rule base. The fuzzy rule base is integrated with a genetic algorithm to construct a hybrid solution method. The best value of price, warranty length and lead time are obtained by maximizing the manufacturer profit. Finally a numerical example is presented to show the performance of proposed approach  

Depletion of fossil fuels has increased the pressure on energy systems to operate in the most efficient and economical mode. This tendency promotes energy systems to operate at optimum operating conditions, which maximizes the system profit over lifetime. Recently, there have been many attempts to maximize lifetime profit. Most of them concentrate on the power generation aspect without incorporating further aspects such as system degradation and profitability through lifetime. However, the main intention of the system operators is to optimize the profitability of system at the moment of operation and not the total profitability through the system lifetime. In this study a novel approach is... 

Numerical calculation of Value-at-Risk (VaR) for large-scale portfolios poses great challenges to financial institutions. The problem is even more daunting for large fixed-income portfolios as their underlying instruments have exposure to higher dimensions of risk factors. This article provides an efficient algorithm for calculating VaR using a historical grid-based approach with volatility updating and shows its efficiency in computational cost and accuracy. Our VaR computation algorithm is flexible and simple, while one can easily extend it to cover other nonlinear portfolios such as derivative portfolios on equities and FX securities. © 2022  

This paper points out an application of the "two-echelon single-period product (newsboy) problem," in which within a limited budget the final product and the raw materials are purchased before the start of the selling period and depending on the demand, the raw materials may be transformed into the finished product during the period. The objective of this problem is to find the order quantities of both the raw materials and the final product at the beginning of the period such that the expected profit is maximized. A new model is first developed for this problem and then a Lagrangian method is proposed to solve it. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the application of the... 

Oil production strategies define to a large extent the future of the world crude oil market. This paper aims at modelling the long-term world crude oil supply and demand, as well as the global oil price. The main assumption is that non-OPEC and OPEC oil producers act as price-taker and strategic players respectively. The world crude oil demand is modelled as a linear price dependent function. We compare four scenarios to diagnose the OPEC’s supply behaviour: “cartel”, “oligopoly”, “mixed-cartel” and “mixed-oligopoly”. A Mixed Complementarity Problem, MCP, is used to find the Nash equilibrium point of each game scenario. The OPEC countries maximize their individual total discounted profits in... 

Cooperative cloud providers in the form of cloud federations can potentially reduce their energy costs by exploiting electricity price fluctuations across different locations. In this environment, on the one hand, the electricity price has a significant influence on the federations formed, and, thus, on the profit earned by the cloud providers, and on the other hand, the cloud cooperation has an inevitable impact on the performance of the smart grid. In this regard, the interaction between independent cloud providers and the smart grid is modeled as a two-stage Stackelberg game interleaved with a coalitional game in this article. In this game, in the first stage the smart grid, as a leader... 

Reserved instances offered by cloud providers make it possible to reserve resources and computing capacity for a specific period of time. One should pay for all the hours of that time interval; in exchange, the hourly rate is significantly lower than on-demand instances. Reserved Instances can significantly reduce the monetary cost of resources needed to process big data applications in cloud. However, purchases of these instances are non-refundable, and hence, one should be able to estimate the required resources prior to purchase to avoid over-payment. It becomes important especially when the results obtained by big data job has monetary value, such as business intelligence applications.... 

In this paper we study envy free pricing problem in general graphs where there is not a seller in every graph's nodes. We assume unique establishment cost for initiating a store in each node and we wish to find an optimal set of nodes in which we would make the maximum profit by initiating stores in them. Our model is motivated from the observation that a same product has different prices in different locations and there is also an establishing cost for initiating any store. We consider both of these issues in our model: first where should we establish the stores, and second at what price should we sell our items in them to gain maximum possible profit. We prove that in a case of constant... 

We develop an integrated vendor-buyer model for a two-stage supply chain. The vendor manufactures the product and delivers it in a number of equal-sized batches to the buyer. The items delivered are presented to the end customers in a display area. Demand is assumed to be positively dependent on the amount of items displayed. The objective is to maximize total supply chain profit. The numerical analysis shows that buyer-vendor coordination is more profitable in situations when demand is more stock dependent. It also shows that the effect of double marginalization provides a link between the non-coordinated and the coordinated case  

In restructured and de-regulated power systems, generating companies (Gencos) are responsible for supplying electricity for both energy and reserve markets, which usually operate simultaneously. In this condition, the question is how much and for what price must each Genco generate for each market to maximize its profit, so this paper intends to answer to this question. In this paper, first, the combined energy and reserve markets are considered, and the Nash equilibrium points are determined. Then, the bidding strategies for each Genco at these points will be presented. The bids for the energy and 10 min spinning reserve (TMSR) markets are separated in the second stage, and again, the... 

Blockchain technology brings about an opportunity to maintain decentralization in several applications, such as cryptocurrency. With the agents of a decentralized system operating independently, it calls for a consensus protocol that helps all nodes to agree on the state of the ledger. Most of the existing blockchains rely on Proof of Work (PoW) as the underlying consensus algorithm, resulting in a significant amount of electricity power consumption. Furthermore, it demands the miner to buy specific computation devices. Besides, a protocol to gather the society-related taxes such as public education funding and charities is lacking in existing consensus algorithms. In response, this paper...