Sharif Digital Repository

This thesis investigated a two-echelon supply chain consists of one retailer and several manufacturers that faces a price and lead time sensitive demand. We use a Stackelberg game for decision analysis of prices and lead times determined by manufacturers as Leader and retailer as a Follower. We assume that demand depends to the retailer’s price. Market share of each manufacturer, is also price and lead time sensitive. Objective of each firm is to determine price and planned lead time to maximize her own profit. We first determine the best response of the retailer to manufacturers’ decision and next at manufacturers’ level, we will solve the problem for one manufacturer at first and then we... 

Nowadays, competition in supplying the requirement of the customer having become so important and curtail between the companies, so marketing plays an important role in the progress of the firms. Therefore, business and marketing concept is one the important tools to achieve their potential goals in the target markets. For Esfahan Steel Company because of their product’s quality, marketing is so significant. With respect to put the third forge will be put into operation perfectly in this company, the production will be increased and reach to 3.7 million tones per year. In this research, we develop a Marketing Plan for the products of this company in the international target market  

Due to violent and ferocious competition and global changes of new trends, directions and new ways of doing business, financial institutions grapple with new challenges and opportunities in today business. The advancement in technology, information and communication has forced banks and financial institutions into hard competition. In this new era technology, people as the customer are the elements on which the banks are concentrating them to manage customer relationship. In this complicated situation, Electronic customer relationship management (E-CRM) is seen applicatory and beneficial solution to improve customers‟ service, develop a profitable and long term relationship and retain... 

Producer-level data for Iranian manufacturing firms shows a large amount of dispersion and concentration in producer level sectoral shares, as well as a very strong relashionship between sectoral shares and markups. We Study the pro-competitive gain from trade in the Iran’s manufacturing sector. Domestic firms in Iranian manufacturing sector are protected via tarfiff and non-tariff barriers enforced by the government. In many sections of manufacturing sector, domestic firms feel little competition and charge high markups. The market power of domestic firms could be reduced by the reduction of tariff rate and increase in import share. As a result of foreign competition pressure, they would be... 

Concentration brings a twofold result to the market. From one side, it reduces the competition and then the number of varieties in the market, which discourages consumption; from another side, however, it reduces the price of goods due to increasing returns to scale and so encourages consumption. This controversial role of concentration raises the question that which degree of concentration might be, say, optimum for the market. Based on the Krugman approach, this study makes a relation between the number of firms, export volume, marginal and average fixed cost of production. We show that when number of firms reduces in the market, export volume could increase because of a reduction in... 

This thesis studies a multi-product location-routing-inventory problem in which location-allocation, inventory and routing decisions are to be taken in a three-level supply chain including suppliers, depots and customers. Each product for each depot could be supplied by more than one supplier and each supplier has a limited supplying capacity per period. Products are distributed from depots to customers by a homogeneous fleet of vehicles. Backlogging is allowable for each customer on the condition of not exceeding a fraction of customer’s demand. A mixed-integer programming formulation is presented to describe the problem then a new hybrid heuristic algorithm based on the simulated annealing... 

The main purpose of this thesis, is the scrutiny of social influences on products sales and prices. That is what probable effects can be imposed on the amount of sale and price of products as a result of customer's satisfaction or dissatisfaction. In this research pricing of a new product is considered which is produced and supplied through market in a monopolized manner for a specific time period. At the first period, people purchase the product given factors such as price, quality, etc. a part of whom, put comments about their experience regarding the product quality on social networks. In following periods, alongside with aforementioned factors, new purchasers also consider positive or... 

In this research, path planning in unknown environment is considered. It is assumed that the robot’s sensors are the only tools to collect information from the scene. Volume of the information gathered from the environment depends on the capability of the sensor. So, a detour from the optimal path is unavoidable. In this research, the basic robot is equipped with a minimal sensing system that only detects the iscontinuities in depth information (gaps). We present some online search strategies that guide such a robot to navigate unknown streets from a start point s to reach a target point t. Then, we empower the robot by adding a compass to patrol more general classes of polygons. We present... 

In the recent years, the existing pressure in order to decrease the expenses and increase in giving service level led to the position in which the outsourcing of different sectors of unimportant actions is welcomed by manufacturing companies or the ones offering service. Since the logistic costs are crocial for companies' budget, the conveyance of logistics is a center of attention in recent years. In such a competitive situation, logistic service providers have to provide high quality with low price services, in which both the cost and service offering level to customers depend on the configuration of flow transmission of physical network. The use of hub network has great benefits for such... 

In field management workflow, after preparation of dynamic reservoir model, next step is determining the uncertain parameters and history matching. In this step, simulation model is conditioned to available field data. In this inverse problem, different geological and petrophysical properties may provide equally good history matches. Such diverse models are likely to show different production behaviors in future. This ties the history matching with the second step, uncertainty quantification of predictions. Multiple history matched models are essential for a realistic uncertainty estimate of the future field behavior.This thesis introduces the application of two novel population-based... 

This research investigates permutation flow shop scheduling problems with sequence-dependent setup times with minimizing the number of tardy jobs as criterion (Fm|prmu, Sijk|ΣUj). A mixed integer linear programming model has been developed for the research problem. As the problem is shown to be NP-hard, several meta-heuristic algorithms based on tabu search (TS) and imperialist competitive algorithm are developed to heuristically solve the problem. In order to find the best meta-heuristic algorithm, random test problems, ranging in size from small, medium, to large are created and solved by the meta-heuristic algorithms. Then, a detailed statistical experiment, based on split-plot design is... 

In electrical energy market, an economic game is running in which, power generating companies compete with each other in order to determine their suitable strategies and gain the highest possible profit. The literature shows the researchers actually use different algorithms to determine their suitable strategies but not Nash equilibrium method. These algorithms can not guarantee that the strategic equilibrium points can be found. In this research, the classic Nash method is used to determine GENCOs appropriate strategies and is simulated on some well known models (Cournot, Supply function equilibrium (SFE) and Bertrand), combined energy and reserve markets will be studied. The results of... 

In literature, substantial works have been done on supply chain coordination. The majority of these works looking for a mechanism that enforces the supply chain members to follow strategies that produce the equilibria of an integrated supply chain, and most of this literature ignores competition between supply chains. In this thesis, we consider two distinct supply chains which compete to each other on the price. We present a method to calculate the equilibria for three structural forms. In the first form, two supply chains are integrated and in the second form, one of the supply chains is integrated and the other one is decentralized. Finally in the third form, both supply chains are... 

Economics have been thought about market, trade and money in many eras. During years, several issues regarding markets and making economic decisions have become more complicated, due to population growth and changes in market structure.we are going to discuss the classic model of Cournot in social networks in two competence companies which both produce identical products. Each individual considers a value for each product. lf friend it an individual buy a product then it can effect the individual's value of product. In this model, each company decides on quantity of its products and the selling price of products is calculated based on the amount of all productions. In Cournot model, at the... 

Nowadays diversion of products from authorized distribution channels to the gray markets has been considered by manufacturers. There many cases that the products of main industries are supplied through gray markets. Gray markets are divided into two categories. The first category is parallel imports where an unauthorized distributor or a third party imports the products from a low price market into a market with high price. In most researches of parallel importation it is assumed that a monopoly manufacturer distributes its products in both two markets. In the second category of parallel importation researches, it is assumed that the manufacturer distributes the products in a certain market... 

This research investigates the competitive behavior of producers in an oligopolistic market structure and presents new approaches to contrive appropriate bidding strategies using game theory. As a case of oligopolistic competition, we have considered a simplified model of electricity markets, and turned our focus to related economic models of competition. In particular, the supply function model has been adopted because of its realistic simulation of the bidding structure in electricity markets, for which, a new method is proposed to provides closed-form expressions in computing Nash strategies. This method is not only capable of computing all Nash equilibriums of the model, but also the... 

In recent years, great attention has been devoted to the design of artificial arms. The most crucial problem in such a design is the trajectory of movement. In this paper, a seven degree of freedom arm is modeled and simulated. Also, the optimization method named “Imperialistic Competitive Algorithm” has been modified and better performance of the new version is presented. Energy optimization is performed based on trajectory of the arm with angular velocity, angular acceleration and joint angles using modified imperialistic competitive algorithm (ICA). Considering ICA as a fast optimization algorithm, it would be reasonable to use this algorithm for robotic purposes for online answering. The... 

Taking into account the impact of advertising on the reference price, we propose an optimal pricing strategy for supply chains in competitive industries subject to reference price effect. Most of researches do not consider the competition among supply chains. An industry with two competing supply chains is considered. Each supply chain includes a manufacturer who sells his/her product via a retailer. There are two types of structures: integrated and decentralized (it is assumed that the relation in a chain is Manufacturer– Stackelberg). Each manufacturer offers wholesale price to his/her retailer anticipating the retailer’s order quantity. In addition, the retailers choose their retail... 

In contrast to traditional Networks where a designer can specify an action plan for each agent, in a network with strategic agents, every agent acts selfishly and chooses his strategy privately so as to maximize his own objective. In this dissertation, we study problems arising in the design of static and dynamic networks with strategic agents. We consider two classes of design problems. In the first class, the designer utilizes her control over decisions and resources in the system to incentivize the agents via monetary incentive mechanisms to reveal their private information that is crucial for the efficient operation of the system. In this class of problems, we address two main challenges... 

Financial distress can propagate through different channels such as bank run, deposit interbank market,networks and asset prices. In this paper, with the assumption of deposit insurance, no linkages between banks, no deposit interbank market and fixed asset prices, we show that asset-side shocks might propagate through both loan interbank market and deposit market. However, when there is aggregate liquidity surplus in the banking system, loan interbank market results in the first best allocation. In contrast, aggregate liquidity shortage does not result in optimum allocation. In the presence of deposit and loan interbank market, not only shocks propagate but also they are magnified with the...