Abstracts:Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been abundantly applied for portfolio selection, albeit in a single-period framework. However, in reality, portfolio selection and management is a multiperiod process stretched over long investment horizons. Investors often reallocate their capital and rebalance the portfolio based on the changing market conditions and performance of the assets and portfolio as a whole. Since the performance of the assets constituting the multiperiod portfolio changes from one period to another; therefore, it becomes imperative to employ DEA in a multiperiod framework for an efficient portfolio selection. To this end, this article proposes a two-stage multiperiod efficient portfolio selection (MPEPS) approach wherein the assets’ return rates are characterized as trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. The fuzziness in the assets’ returns is handled using the credibility theory. In stage-I, the relational network DEA is employed to evaluate the assets’ periodwise and overall efficiency with variance, entropy as the inputs and return, liquidity as the outputs. In stage-II, an MPEPS model is proposed to maximize the terminal wealth and efficiency, and minimize the CVaR of the portfolio subject to the capital budget, lower and upper bounds on the capital allocated to an asset, no short selling, cardinality, and contingent constraints. The normalized weighted sum approach is employed for solving the proposed model. Moreover, a comprehensive numerical illustration is presented to demonstrate and validate the proposed approach through implementing several investment schemes representing different investor attitudes.

Abstracts:The ascension of technology and evolution of productive processes indicate that leadership must evolve to direct organizations in the transition to the fourth industrial revolution. The main purpose of this article is to study the existing relationship between the competencies of Lean leaders and the competencies of current leaders in Industry 4.0. A systematic literature review was conducted, and we identified 18 Lean leadership competencies and 6 Leadership 4.0 competencies. Our results show the relationship between the leadership competencies using an interpretive structural modeling approach. The analysis of the driving power and dependence power of Lean and Industry 4.0 leadership competencies was performed with the fuzzy Matriced&#x2019; Impacts Croise&#x00B4;s Multiplication Applique&#x00B4;e a&#x00B4; <italic>un Classement</italic> approach. A structural model was elaborated upon and showed the hierarchy among the investigated competencies, indicating the ones that should be prioritized. The principal conclusion of our study is that Lean leaders&#x2019; competencies can sustain the competencies that should be developed in Industry 4.0 leaders. Additionally, strong synergy among the competencies from both approaches is observed. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to present the relationship between Lean competencies and Industry 4.0 leadership competencies. The results obtained in this article may guide the shaping of new leaders who work in an Industry 4.0 environment.

Abstracts:In emerging economies, infrastructure projects are in full swing. There is a wealth of replicable experience for exploitation. Simultaneously, more technologies and methodologies require further exploration. This makes fostering ambidextrous innovation strategies (i.e., the tradeoff between exploitative and exploratory innovation strategies) a common and vital practical issue. Large infrastructure projects are unique one-off endeavors but have somewhat repetitive and persistent characteristics. It is a particular &#x201C;intermediate&#x201D; form between temporary projects and permanent organizations. Previous research on fostering ambidextrous innovation strategies cannot simply be replicated in large infrastructure projects. To address this issue, this article investigates the relationship between team heterogeneity and ambidextrous innovation strategies and also the role of team learning and identification in large infrastructure projects. Data were collected from 269 responses from 31 large infrastructure project delivery teams in China. The findings show that team heterogeneity has a positive linear effect on exploratory and ambidextrous innovation strategies and an inverted U-shaped effect on exploitative innovation strategies; team heterogeneity can better foster ambidextrous innovation strategies through improving team learning; the moderating role of team identification in the overall mechanism differs from the usual assumptions in permanent organizations. Overall, this article extends the existing ambidexterity research in the &#x201C;intermediate&#x201D; form between temporary projects and permanent organizations. It provides insights and guidance on fostering ambidextrous innovation strategies in large infrastructure projects.

Abstracts:Alternative tourism has gained considerable interest among consumers and enterprises in the tourism sector, creating new opportunities for providing high quality and innovative tourist services, while contributing to sustainable development. The Internet plays a key role as a tool for promoting alternative tourism. Motivated by this, this article presents an original research on the evaluation of the content features of the websites of enterprises involved with alternative tourism services in the region of Chania, Greece. The sample consists of 28 websites evaluated over 11 performance criteria through the ELECTRE III multicriteria method. The websites are ranked in a benchmarking context and the results of the evaluation are used to identify the most successful practices, as well as the website features that require improvements for the enterprises to take advantage of the opportunities that arise in the new era of technological innovation in the tourism sector.

Abstracts:Public&#x2013;private partnership (PPP) projects often end in early termination and the governments must compensate private-sector partners and take over project assets. Based on multicountry experience, this article proposes a systematic approach on when and how to compensate efficiently and fairly. A compensation model was first developed to quantify the amount paid to the private-sector partners when early termination occurs, and built upon that, an incentive model was proposed to analyze the incentives of both contracting parties. We then testified our propositions through two realistic cases. In line with the incomplete contract theory and the reference point theory, the findings demonstrate that the proposed compensation method increases the the private sector&#x0027;s incentives of relationship-specific investments, but discourages its efforts to prevent early termination in serious risk scenarios. This article not only contributes to the theoretical development of PPPs on contract design and incentive mechanisms, but also offers solutions for practitioners in the early termination of PPP projects.

Abstracts:This article aims to align business strategy and knowledge creation in banking industry through knowledge management (KM) approach by maximizing the tangible and intangible resources. Prior study offered more general context of KM approach while misplaced and less discussed practical process of knowledge sharing practices in the context of banking industry. We developed research model by focusing on banking organization, especially in a developing country. The authors use literature review and document analysis of business strategy in bank. This article integrated and analyzed knowledge gap and business strategy to develop a comprehensive approach for banking company. The gap between what a bank knows and needs to know is an internal knowledge gap, in a sense representing the strengths and weaknesses of a &#x201C;the alignment between knowledge&#x2013;business&#x201D; analysis. The gap between what they know and what its competitors know is an external knowledge gap. It represents the opportunities and threats of a knowledge&#x2013;business analysis. In addition, there is still no specific team, department, and strategy to manage knowledge assets. The results of this research may help finance companies and managers to initiate KM or to encourage knowledge sharing in banking organization. Therefore, managerial level is supposed to develop a strategy and regulation to encourage employee&#x0027;s participation in knowledge transfer schema. We combined numerous methods and theories namely Zack and Nonaka models as tools to solve the obstacle of alignment between business-knowledge strategic gap and knowledgesharing schema.

Abstracts:Motor vehicles are composed of a large number of parts, and planning the maintenance activities of different parts is a crucial decision that affects system reliability, operation costs, and capacity requirements of service providers. We propose a systematic method to determine the critical parts that should be handled with extra preventive maintenance (PM) and prepare alternative PM plans with different levels of cost and capacity usage. Our method uses a multicriteria decision-making approach to determine the critical parts and conducts statistical reliability analysis with failure data and expert knowledge to create the maintenance plans. We use the proposed method in a case study to determine optional PM packages that would support regular PM practices in the after-sales service of a large motor vehicle manufacturer. The main aim of the case study is to increase the satisfaction of customers who are more sensitive to failures, such as carriers of food and medical supplies. The results show that the optional PM packages can decrease the cost of failures while obeying the capacity limitation of the company.

Abstracts:There is a continuing interest in exploring the impact of operational excellence (OE) on operational performance. Several OE practices such as Lean, Agile, and Six Sigma are well recognized. However, not all OE deployments in firms have been successful, and a failure of such efforts has often been expensive. Past research reveals several critical failure factors (CFFs) that lead to OE deployment failures in firms. We present these CFFs as an integrated model, based on two dominant schools of OE that promote technical and behavioral factors independently. Further, we validate their direct and mediating relationships through an empirical examination of 663 responses collected from 153 manufacturing units across the USA, U.K., China, and India. This article contributes to the OE body of knowledge by examining the significant direct and mediating effects of behavioral and technical CFFs on the OE failures. Our findings reveal that the technical CFFs mediate the impact of behavioral CFFs on OE failures. Consequently, several managerial and theoretical implications are presented.

Abstracts:Privacy concerns of users threaten the usage of online social networks (OSN). In this regard, privacy preserving of OSN emerged as a convincing solution for preserving the privacy of users and uncovering useful insights from the social network data. In this article, we propose a novel algorithm based on the fuzzy sets and rewiring algorithm for preserving the privacy of users. This article presents the algorithm called privacy-preserving rewiring algorithm (PPRA), which can be used for anonymizing the social network data. The algorithm is validated by showing its effectiveness on four real-world datasets across three major graph mining tasks. The proposed PPRA algorithm will help in preserving the privacy of users in the OSN graph while simultaneously maintaining the utility that can be generated from the OSN graph structure.

Abstracts:This article concerns the channel coordination of a two-echelon elderly healthcare service supply chain consisting of an elderly service integrator and a service provider to satisfy uncertain demand. Such channel coordination is achieved using a loss-sharing contract embedded with options, and the optimal service capacity and service sales effort are derived under a game-theoretic model. Results show that the loss-sharing contract, if used alone, cannot coordinate the supply chain effectively, and it needs to be combined with some options to achieve desired channel coordination. For the case of put option contract, the elderly service integrator will order the maximized service capacity initially. This is however, in contrast with the case of the bidirectional option contract where the integrator will order the minimized service capacity at the highest option price. Several managerial implications of the results are discussed, and some suggestions for implementation of the flexible coordination mechanisms for the government are provided.