Purpose Making decisions on preventive maintenance (PM) policy and buffer sizing, as is often studied, may not result in overall optimization. The purpose of this paper is to propose a joint model that integrates PM and buffer sizing with consideration of quality loss for a degenerating system,...

To gain a better understanding of the financing motive theories of trade credit, we trace a sample of young firms from their start in 2004 through 2011 and document two main empirical regularities. First, we find that supplier lending is only a supplementary form of financing among these firms,...

Roughly one-third of our sample firms show substantial ownership structure changes over time. Growth potential, risk sharing, and demand for external capital seem to be the main reasons behind dilutions of ownership structures, and these firms show strong growth in the following five years....

To encourage users’ exercise participation and retention, fitness app developers add group-level social interaction functions to apps and augment the app design with more group-level gamification features. For example, app users are guided to join a group in order to share workout experiences...