主题: Allocating Coalition Payoffs under Diminishing Marginal Contributions: An Analytic Nucleolus Solution and Its Applications in Operations Management

主讲人：冷明明教授

香港岭南大学终身教授

电脑与决策科学系教授和主管

已经连续两年成功获得香港政府研究经费资助（RGC）

时间：2018年4月12日 下午3点至4点

地点：MBA阶梯教室

Abstract: The nucleolus in cooperative gametheory is an important solution concept for researchers in many academic areas.However, the lack of analytic (closed-form) solutions for the nucleolus limitsits applications in the analysis of n-player allocation problems. Weinvestigate whether there exists a set of coalitional games for which we canderive an analytic nucleolus solution, and explore how our results can beapplied to solve allocation-related operational problems. We consider diminishingcontributions games, which represent a set of coalitional games that exhibitdiminishing marginal contributions with respect to coalition size. For suchgames, we develop a necessary and sufficient condition for the non-emptiness ofthe core, which is different from but simpler than the Bondareva--Shapleycondition. Then, we obtain an analytic nucleolus solution for diminishingcontributions games with a non-empty core, and examine the least core value forthe games with an empty core. We study a code-sharing game, a group-buyinggame, and a scheduling profit game to demonstrate the existence of diminishingcontributions games and illustrate the applications of our analytic results inoperational problems. We also investigate increasing marginal cost games. Ouranalytic results are expected to help researchers investigate allocationproblems analytically rather than numerically.

Biography: Professor Mingming Leng is aProfessor of Operations Management in the Department of Computing and DecisionSciences of the Faculty of Business at Lingnan University. He is also theFounding Director of the Master of Science Programme in eBusiness and SupplyChain management. Professor Leng holds a Ph.D. degree in ManagementScience/System from McMaster University’s DeGroote School ofBusiness, Canada. He is currently interested in operations and supply chainmanagement, game theory, and interface between operations and otherdisciplines. He has published a number of papers in top-tier orhighly-respected journals such as Operations Research, Production andOperations Management, Naval Research Logistics, IIE Transactions, OperationsResearch Letters, Decision Sciences, European Journal of Operational Research,and others. Moreover, Professor Leng is a member in the Editorial Review Boardof Production and Operations Management, and the Associate Editor for INFOR:cnformation Systems and Operational Research. In addition to academicexperiences, Professor Leng has five years working experience in industry.