W study sourcing in a supply chain with three levels: a manufacturer, tier 1 suppliers, and tier 2 suppliers prone to disruption from, e.g., natural disasters such as earthquakes or floods. The manufacturer may not directly dictate which tier 2 suppliers are used but may influence the sourcing decisions of tier 1 suppliers via contract parameters. The manufacturer’s optimal strategy depends cri...

March 2011 Abstract: We investigate whether the relationship between competition and stability varies across different bank types for Japanese banks during the period 2000-2009. In general we find that stability varies across bank types, in that banks with a regional focus (Regional, Tier 2 Regional, Shinkin and Credit Cooperative banks) are found to be more stable on average than nationwide (C...

This paper studies the price-quoting strategies used by a tier-two supplier, whose tier-one customers compete for an OEM’s indivisible contract. At most one of the tier-two supplier’s quotes will ultimately result in downstream contracting and hence produce revenue for her. We characterize the tier-two supplier’s optimal price-quoting strategies and show that she will use one of two possible ty...

Successful cooperation between large manufacturers and their suppliers is a crucial aspect, especially in the automotive industry. Such mutually beneficial cooperation requires at least a certain level of integration and interoperation of the partners’ IT and e-business systems. This chapter looks at two approaches in order to achieve this goal: sector-specific harmonization (in the form of ele...

In recent years, model-based diagnostics reasoning systems have provided a major advance in fault isolation and reduction of repair time contributing to the reduction of maintenance cost of automotive and avionics systems. In this paper we highlight the main characteristics of RODON, a commercial modelbased diagnostics reasoner, used in the DX Diagnostic Competition. We present the main ideas b...

We consider a three level supply chain in which a Tier 2 supplier sells to a Tier 1 supplier, which in turn sells to a downstream (Tier 0) firm. The Tier 2 supplier potentially violates social and environmental standards, resulting in harm to the Tier 0 firm. Both the manufacturer and Tier 1 supplier can exert effort to improve the responsibility of the Tier 2 supplier. We show that the manufac...

Application owners are typically concerned about getting the best performance at the lowest cost. When the workload demand for an application is dynamic, lowering the cost necessitates dynamic management of the hosting infrastructure (physical servers or virtual machines). An application deployment is often divided into multiple tiers. The frontend tier is usually stateless, and processes incom...

The eukaryotic CMG (Cdc45, Mcm2-7, GINS) helicase consists of the Mcm2-7 hexameric ring along with five accessory factors. The Mcm2-7 heterohexamer, like other hexameric helicases, is shaped like a ring with two tiers, an N-tier ring composed of the N-terminal domains, and a C-tier of C-terminal domains; the C-tier contains the motor. In principle, either tier could translocate ahead of the oth...