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Can the efficiency in container stacking be increased? Impact with publications
In the competitive world of large container terminals, like the terminals in Rotterdam, it is of vital interest to be as efficient as possible. Container stacking rules are an important factor hereby. Bram Borgman, Eelco van Asperen and Rommert Dekker, investigate two concepts to increase efficiency in container stacking and compare them to several benchmark algorithms in their 2010 article in the OR Spectrum in 2010. The first concept is to use knowledge about container departure times, in order to limit the number of reshuffles. They stack containers leaving shortly before each other, on top of each other. The second concept is the trade-off between stacking further away in the terminal versus stacking close to the exit points and accepting more reshuffles. They find that even when imperfect or imprecise departure time information is used, this will lead to significant improvements in efficiency over the benchmarks. Is it useful for a firm to have a banker on the firm’s board of directors? In the 14th volume of the Review of Finance Ingolf Dittmann, Ernst Maug and Christoph Schneider analyse the role of bankers on the boards of directors of German non-financial companies for the period from 1994 to 2005. They find that bankers who are represented on a firm’s board, foremost promote their own bank’s business as lenders and as merger and acquisition advisors. They only find little evidence that bankers who are on the boards of non-financial firms as capital market experts, help these firms to overcome financial constraints. They however didn’t find evidence for the proposition that bankers are on a firm’s board just to monitor the banks interest in the firm. Consistent with these findings, they find evidence that suggests a negative causal effect of the presence of a banker on the firm’s board on firm performance. Do experts’ comments improve the quality of model-based forecasts? Forecasts based on models (model-based SKU-level forecasts) are often adjusted by experts to make the forecast according to them more precise. Philip Hans Franses and Rianne Legerstee propose in their article in the Journal of Forecasting in 2010 a statistical methodology to test whether these experts really improve the forecasts with their comments. They analyse this question using data from a very large database concerning monthly sales of pharmaceutical products in 35 countries and the forecasts of these sales by the model and by the experts. They find that in seven categories the adjustments of the expert forecasts are at best equally as good as the model, but are more often even worse than model-based forecasts. They also find that this is because experts put too much emphasis on their own judgement and too little on the model.
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