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 ...

Walrasian tâtonnement has been a fundamental assumption in economics ever since Walras’ general equilibrium theory was introduced in 1874. Nearly a century after its introduction, Vernon Smith relaxed the Walrasian tâtonnement assumption by showing that neoclassical competitive market theory explains the equilibrating forces in “double-auction” markets. I make a next step in this evolution by e...

In today’s globally-leveled playing field, forces such as consumer activism, demographic change and technological evolution are forcing industry leaders to continuously evaluate their strategies to achieve or retain competitive advantage. These forces are even stronger in the manufacturing industry, and they are exacerbated by the unintended consequences of accelerating globalization. For insta...

Neoclassical economic and sociological views of discrimination are compared. We summarize economic models of taste, statistical, error, and monopolistic discrimination. Economists argue that competitive market forces should lead to the demise of discrimination in the long run. After explaining these arguments, we present sociological arguments about institutional and social-psychological mechan...

Abstract Firms no longer compete as autonomous entities and prefer to joinin a supply chain alliance to take advantage of highly competitive business situation. Supply chain coordination has a greatimpact on Firm’sstrategic partnering and success in competitive business environment. In this paper, we propose a system dynamics simulation model for strategic partner selection in supply chai...

This paper explores the forces that shaped China’s interprovincial inequality in the last five decades of communist rule. In so far as the change in interprovincial inequality is the result of differential growth in the provincial GDP per capita and provincial economic growth may be decomposed into contributions by total factor productivity and other factor inputs, a new method is introduced, b...

We extend the shallow lake model by adding the capital stock of an industry. A government can mitigate the effects of pollution arising from industrial activities by imposing the requirement to abate emissions. Within this framework two scenarios are examined: in the social optimal benchmark, the social planner optimally allocates investment. In the competitive equilibrium, market forces determ...

1 Market-based transmission investments can play a role in competitive electricity markets. A short-term electricity market coordinated by a system operator provides a foundation for a competitive electricity market. In this setting, locational price differences define the opportunity cost of transmission. The potential to arbitrage these same price differences provides a market incentive for t...

Today's competitive and dynamic environment forces companies to be highly responsive and customer oriented to survive and be successful. Short cycle time operation enables a warehouse manager to be more responsive, flexible and competitive. For example, it more easily handles insertion of late arriving but high priority orders into picking operation. However, to operate in a short cycle environ...