Informs 2015

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INFORMS Philadelphia – 2015
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3 - Have You Been Served? The Relationship between Corporate
Social Responsibility and Lawsuits
Rob Salomon,
Does corporate social responsibility (CSR) protect firms against lawsuits? We
conduct a study of 1047 firms from 46 countries over the period 2002 to 2011.
We find, surprisingly, that CSR is positively associated with lawsuits. However, the
relationship between CSR and lawsuits is moderated by advertising spending.
Firms with high CSR that advertise heavily are buffered from lawsuits. Those
firms with high CSR that maintain a low advertising profile, as well as those that
focus their CSR efforts on social and environmental responsibility, tend to suffer
more lawsuits. These results suggest that as a firm increases its CSR activities, it
also increases its exposure to lawsuits, but differentiated products and good
governance counter the increased risk. We posit that the positive relationship
between CSR and lawsuits is likely a function of putting stakeholder concerns
above shareholder concerns. The findings call for more research on the
contingencies that affect the business case for CSR.
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60-Room 111A, CC
Case Competition II
Sponsor: INFORM-ED
Sponsored Session
Chair: Palaniappa Krishnan, Associate Professor, University of
Delaware, 212 Townsend Hall, 531 S.College Avenue, Newark, DE,
19711, United States of America,
1 - Temporary Staffing at Christie’s
Qing Li, Associate Professor, HKUST, Department of ISOM,
HKUST, Hong Kong, Hong Kong - PRC,
The case is based on an actual challenge faced by Christie’s Hong Kong, the Hong
Kong subsidiary of the renowned auction house. For its biannual auctions, the
company needs to hire 200 to 300 temporary sales assistants and assign them to
different positions on different days. The human resources team believes that the
current manual process of hiring and assignment is labor intensive and is unable
to cope with sudden changes. They are looking to streamline the process and use
decision tools.
2 - Distributions Strategies at Yaka Pharmaceuticals
Kathleen Iacocca, University of Scranton,
439 Brennan Hall, Scranton, PA, United States of America,
Yaka Pharmaceuticals, a large North American pharmaceutical manufacturing
company, is considering changing their distribution strategy. Yaka
Pharmaceuticals has four distribution options. The first option is the buy-and-hold
contract, which was used by Yaka Pharmaceuticals and their distributors until
recently. They moved away from this contract because the government issued a
new law – the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, restricting the channel-stuffing accounting
practice and distributor’s investment buying. Since then the Fee-for-Service (FFS)
contract, initiated by the Big-Three distributors – AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal
Health, and McKesson – has been the contract that is in place. Under the FFS
contract, Yaka pharmaceuticals pays a fee to the distributors for their distribution
services while everything else remains more or less the same as under the buy-
and-hold contract. Executives at Yaka Pharmaceuticals are not happy with the
additional fee for almost the same service they previously received free of charge.
The third option is to work with 3rd party logistics service providers on
distribution. Although it looks promising, Yaka may be traveling down uncharted
waters as the 3rd party logistics providers are just emerging in the pharmaceutical
industry and have yet to be widely accepted. Finally, a consulting company
suggested the Fee-for-Distribution contract, which allows Yaka pharmaceuticals to
work with existing distributors but under a different relationship which resembles
that of a third party logistics contract.
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61-Room 111B, CC
Optimal Power Flow in Electric Power Systems I
Sponsor: ENRE – Energy I – Electricity
Sponsored Session
Chair: Andy Sun, Assistant Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology,
755 Ferst Drive, Atlanta, GA, 30332, United States of America,
1 - Graph-theoretic Convexification of Power Optimization Problems
Javad Lavaei, Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley, 4121 Etcheverry
Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
of America, , Ramtin Madani
The objective is to design efficient algorithms for finding a near-global solution of
a power optimization problem. Our approach is based on the notions of OS-
vertex sequence and treewidth in graph theory, matrix completion, and low-rank
optimization. We apply our results to the highly non-convex optimal power flow
problem. We offer several simulations on the nationwide Polish grid, for which
we find near-global feasible solutions with global optimality guarantees of at least
99.9%.
2 - Computational Advances for Moment-based Relaxations of
Optimal Power Flow Problems
Daniel Molzahn, Dow Postdoctoral Fellow, University of
Michigan, 1301 Beal Avenue, Room 4234A, Ann Arbor, MI,
48109, United States of America, Ian
Hiskens
Optimal power flow (OPF) is the key problem in operating electric power systems.
A hierarchy of “moment-based” relaxations globally solves many non-convex
OPF problems for which existing relaxations fail. After showing the capabilities of
the moment relaxations, this presentation demonstrates how to exploit sparsity
and selectively apply the higher-order relaxation to globally solve large problems.
Other computational advances, including a mixed SDP/SOCP relaxation, are also
discussed.
3 - Strong Socp Relaxations for the Optimal Power Flow Problem
Andy Sun, Assistant Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology,
755 Ferst Drive, Atlanta, GA, 30332, United States of America,
, Burak Kocuk, Santanu Dey
We propose three strong SOCP relaxations for the AC OPF problem. One of these
relaxations is based on a new bilinear extended formulation of OPF. These three
relaxations are incomparable to each other and two of them are incomparable to
the standard SDP relaxation. Extensive computational studies show that these
relaxations have several advantages over existing convex relaxations and provide
a practical approach to obtain feasible OPF solutions with extremely good quality
in real-time operation.
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62-Room 112A, CC
Biofuel Supply Chain and Market Analysis
Sponsor: ENRE – Environment I – Environment and Sustainability
Sponsored Session
Chair: Guiping Hu, Assistant Professor, Iowa State University, 3014
Black Engineering, Ames, IA, 50011, United States of America,
1 - An Optimization Model for Precision Farm Management
Considering Water Resources
Qi Li, Iowa State University, 0076 black engineering, Ames, IA,
50011, United States of America,
Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Guiping Hu
An optimization model is formulated to study precision farm management.
Genotype and phenotype of each crop are considered. In addition, soil fertility,
water holding capability, and land slope have been incorporated. A case study for
central valley in California has been conducted to validate the model considering
the water constraints.
2 - A Bottom-up Equilibrium Model for Emerging Advanced
Biofuel Market
Leilei Zhang, Iowa State University, 3004 Black Engineering,
Ames, IA, 50010, United States of America, ,
Yihsu Chen, Guiping Hu
We develop a bottom-up equilibrium model to study the interactions among the
stakeholders in the biofuel supply chain. We analyze the effects of substitution on
famers’ land allocation, biofuel production, blending, and market prices under a
variety of market structures. Policies impacts are analyzed on biofuel markets and
social welfares.
3 - A Real Options Approach to Study Investment Timing for
Cellulosic Biofuels
Yihua Li, Iowa State University, 3004 Black Engineering, Ames,
IA, 50010, United States of America,
Chung-li Tseng, Guiping Hu
We present a real options approach to evaluate the investment of a new
technology to produce cellulosic biofuels subject to construction lead times and
uncertain fuel price. We conduct a case study on Iowa, in which the decision
maker finds the optimal investment timing subject to production and distribution
constraints.
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