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Given that risk is a pertinent issue in designing supply chain contracts with stochastic demand, Chap. 3 is devoted to developing a mean-risk analysis for the commonly adopted wholesale price contract. The research incorporates contract value risk into the wholesale price contract model. Regarding the contract value risk, it actually relates to the uncertainty in the true value of the contract and arises from various uncertainty sources inherent in the supply chain, such as demand uncertainty, price uncertainty, etc. In addition, given that the supply chain agents with different risk preferences will have different risk attitudes towards the contract value risk, which in turn affects their contracting decisions, the research also considers the degree of supply chain agents risk-aversion towards the contract value risk. This chapter makes the first attempt to assess the efficiency of wholesale price contracts, incorporating contract value risk and risk preferences attached to it; thereby some interesting managerial and academic insights are generated for supply chain contracts.

The rapid development of social network theory provides a new perspective for the research on counter-terrorism, however, current research mostly relates to terrorists and terrorist organizations. Firstly, the “six-element” analysis method for terrorist activities based on social network is proposed in this paper, namely, a variety of sub-networks are constructed according to the correlation among the six elements—people, organization, time, location, manner and event. These sub-networks are assessed through using centrality analysis, cohesive subgroup analysis, spatial correlation analysis, invulnerability analysis and descriptive statistic analysis; the characteristics and laws of terrorist activities are revealed from several different perspectives. Then, the “six-element” analysis method is applied to conduct empirical research on “East Turkistan” terrorist activities since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, so as to effectively identify core people and key organizations of the “East Turkistan” terrorist activity network, to assess the invulnerability of the “East Turkistan” terrorist network and to reveal the temporal and spatial distribution rules as well as the characteristics of the means and manners adopted in all previous terrorist activities. Lastly, the analysis results are interpreted qualitatively. This research can provide a basis for decision making and an analysis method for the identification of core terrorists and key terrorist organizations, determination of the key alert period, location of counter-terrorism and the early warning of the means of major terrorist activities.

Based on the analysis of the basic schemes of a variety of population-based metaheuristics (PBMH), the main components of PBMH are described with functional relationships in this paper and a unified framework (UF) is proposed for PBMH to provide a comprehensive way of viewing PBMH and to help understand the essential philosophy of PBMH from a systematic standpoint. The relevance of the proposed UF and some typical PBMH methods is illustrated, including particle swarm optimization, differential evolution, scatter search, ant colony optimization, genetic algorithm, evolutionary programming, and evolution strategies, which can be viewed as the instances of the UF. In addition, as a platform to develop the new population-based metaheuristics, the UF is further explained to provide some designing issues for effective/efficient PBMH algorithms. Subsequently, the UF is extended, namely UFmeme to describe the Memetic Algorithms (MAs) by adding local search (memetic component) to the framework as an extra-feature. Finally, we theoretically analyze the asymptotic convergence properties of PBMH described by the UF and MAs by the UFmeme.

Project portfolio selection is one of the most important decision-making problems for most organizations in project management and engineering management. Usually project portfolio decisions are very complicated when project interactions in terms of multiple selection criteria and preference information of decision makers (DMs) in terms of the criteria importance are taken into consideration simultaneously. In order to solve this complex decision-making problem, a multi-criteria project portfolio selection problem considering project interactions in terms of multiple selection criteria and DMs’ preferences is first formulated. Then a genetic algorithm (GA)-based nonlinear integer programming (NIP) approach is used to solve the multi-criteria project portfolio selection problem. Finally, two illustrative examples are presented for demonstration and verification purposes. Experimental results obtained indicate that the GA-based NIP approach can be used as a feasible and effective solution to multi-criteria project portfolio selection problems.

In this paper we consider a finite-state financial market with non-proportional transaction cost and bid-ask spreads. The transaction cost consists of two parts: a fixed cost and a proportional cost to the size of transaction. We show that the existence of an optimal consumption policy implies that the market has no strong arbitrage; the opposite, however, is not true, i.e., no strong arbitrage does not imply the existence of an optimal consumption policy. This is in sharp contrast with the case of proportional transaction cost and other cases reported in the literature, where no strong arbitrage is equivalent to the existence of an optimal consumption policy. We also study the relationship between weak arbitrage and strong arbitrage. Different from the market with proportional transaction cost, we find that these two forms of arbitrage are equivalent unless the fixed cost is zero. A necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of an optimal consumption policy is also obtained.

In this paper we consider a financial market model with frictions which include transaction costs, bid-ask spread and taxes. By using optimization, linear and nonlinear programming and convex programming techniques, several necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for the weak no-arbitrage. Some results on state prices are also provided. The results of this paper can provide at least some theoretical insight to the problem.