Seungbeom Kim’s research while affiliated with Hongik University and other places

In a demand driven market, optimal allocation of capacity to the demand has been one of the major issues. In this paper, we consider a single global freight firm allocating its capacity to its own regional sales offices. The firm sells cargo space based on two types of contracts: long-term and spot sales. Regional sales offices utilize their effort to generate more demand in their designated region. In other words, it is assumed that the demand is dependent on their efforts. First, we find a closed-form solution for the optimal level of the efforts of a single sales office in a specific region. Then, we study the case when the firm allocates its limited total capacity to two sales offices. We investigate different methods of capacity allocation: decentralization, centralization, and mixed, by conducting numerical studies. Different from the traditional finding, we suggest that the decentralization method is not always dominated by the centralization method.

The office environment has changed rapidly due to the recent COVID-19 outbreak. Companies consider various types of remote work environments to contain the spread of the virus. Among them, a satellite office is a type of remote work environment where a number of employees are allocated to their nearest office. The benefits from satellite offices are twofold: The significant reduction of travel distance also reduces the amount of carbon emission and fuel consumption. In addition, dividing employees into smaller groups significantly reduces the potential risks of infection in the office. This paper addresses a satellite office allocation problem that considers social and environmental sustainability and infection control at work. In order to evaluate the effect of different satellite office allocation, quantitative measures are developed for the following three criteria: carbon emission, fuel consumption, and the probability of infection occurrence at work. Simulation experiments are conducted to investigate different scenarios of regional infection rate and modes of transportation. The results show that adopting satellite offices not only reduces carbon emission and fuel consumption, but also mitigates business disruption in the pandemic.

A variety of countries have instituted market liberalisation to develop their economies in the footsteps of more developed countries and changes in market system significantly influence a firm’s behaviour and performance. This paper investigates the impact of market liberalisation on a firm’s strategy of technology exploration in South Korea. We find that there is a U-shaped relationship between market liberalisation and technology exploration. In addition, we find that financial slack and industry concentration negatively moderate the curvilinear relationship between market liberalisation and technology exploration, while business group positively moderates this relationship.

In this study, an optimal maintenance policy is developed for a k-out-of-n: G system subject to two types of maintenance services, preventive maintenance and corrective maintenance. We investigate the optimal replacement age when a component failure is not detected immediately until a k-out-of-n: G system fails. The optimal maintenance policy is determined to minimize the expected total system cost when a generalized block replacement model is developed using downtime period. It is assumed that component failures are not monitored until a system failure, thus, a k-out-of-n: G system failure occurs. The downtime period of each failed component using order statistics for life time and age distributions for a k-out-of-n: G system is investigated. Numerical examples are discussed in order to demonstrate the applicability of the methodology derived from this paper.

To optimize the firm’s profit during a finite planning horizon, a dynamic programming model is used to make joint pricing and inventory replenishment decision assuming that customers are loss averse and the firm is risk averse. We model the loss averse customer’s demand using the multinomial choice model. In this choice model, we consider the acquisition and transition utilities widely used by a mental accounting theory which also incorporate the reference price and actual price. Then, we show that there is an optimal inventory policy which is base-stock policy depending on the accumulated wealth in each period.