Paradigmatic Shifts in Automobile Manufacturing
ABSTRACTOne of the greatest problems facing the U.S. auto industry is the erosion of its manufacturing base. Another is the increasing challenge from Japan, which keeps building on its solid postwar accomplishments mapped out by such pioneers as Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo. Their enduring legacy includes a reliance on the firm's human resources for maintaining productivity and quality control. The Japanese paradigm thus has a built-in mechanism for self-improvement and competitiveness enhancement.The continued strife in Detroit suggests that the older American paradigm must be restructured; its top-down way of conducting business must allow labor to become a genuine partner with management instead of an adversary. The Japanese immigrant plants in the United States clearly show the way to do this. While such restructuring is frequently time-consuming, the period available for reform dwindles as the Asians keep strengthening their U.S. operations.
Japanese automobile manufacturing in an American setting
Abstract The growing force of Japanese manufacturing in the automobile industry is analyzed in its postwar formative stages, its export surges during the oil shortages of the last decade, and the current start-up of assembly plants in the United States. The immigrant plants demonstrate a new successful operating paradigm which revolves around a cooperative compact with labor and continuous innovation in cost and quality control work routines. The U.S. factory floor is being transformed under the Japanese paradigm as work responsibility is invested in front-line personnel recruited from the surrounding American locale.
When to Cross the Spread? Trading in Two-Sided Limit Order Books
In this paper the problem of optimal trading in illiquid markets is addressed when the deviations from a given stochastic target function describing, for instance, external aggregate client flow are penalized. Using techniques of singular stochastic control, we extend the results of [F. Naujokat and N. Westray, Math. Financ. Econ., 4 (2011), pp. 299--335] to a two-sided limit order market with temporary market impact and resilience, where the bid ask spread is now also controlled. In addition to using market orders, the trader can also submit orders to a dark pool. We first show existence and uniqueness of an optimal control. In a second step, a suitable version of the stochastic maximum principle is derived which yields a characterization of the optimal trading strategy in terms of a nonstandard coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equation (FBSDE). We show that the optimal control can be characterized via buy, sell, and no-trade regions. The new feature is that we now get a nondegenerate no-...