The ability to consider and analyze different stakeholder interests is a skill required of today’s business students. This paper describes a 35-minute experiential exercise using Tinkertoys® or Legos® to demonstrate and reinforce the concept of stakeholder management. The exercise, the Tower Building Challenge (TBC), is targeted toward classes in business ethics, strategy, or decision-making and requires students to work in groups to build a tower with the underpinning challenge that each group member has a different interest in how the tower (...) should be built. Student feedback reflects on the difficulty of satisfying all stakeholders when making business decisions, the importance of making the interests of stakeholders transparent to enhance cooperation and the effectiveness of the decision-making process, and the need for stakeholder management when considering business decisions that impact stakeholders. Following this experiential exercise, students’ preliminary understanding presents an opportunity for a deeper discussion of stakeholder management. Specifically, students are prompted to consider stakeholder interests as joint, rather than opposed, when engaged in stakeholder management. (shrink)

A long-standing problem in biology, economics, and social sciences is to understand the conditions required for the emergence and maintenance of cooperation in evolving populations. This paper investigates how to promote the evolution of cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Differing from previous approaches, we not only propose a tag-based control mechanism but also look at how the evolution of cooperation by TBC can be successfully promoted. The effect of TBC on the evolutionary process of cooperation shows that it can (...) both reduce the payoff of defectors and inhibit defection; although when the cooperation rate is high, TBC will also reduce the payoff of cooperators unless the identified rate of the TBC is large enough. An optimal timing control of switched replicator dynamics is designed to consider the control costs, the cooperation rate at terminal time, and the cooperator’s payoff. The results show that the switching control between an optimal identified rate control of the TBC and no TBC can properly not only maintain a high cooperation rate but also greatly enhance the payoff of the cooperators. Our results provide valuable insights for some clusters, for example, logistics parks and government, to regard the decision to promote cooperation. (shrink)

• 15% of your grade: a short (1,500 word limit) paper due at 4 pm on September 26, on an assigned topic distributed two weeks in advance of the due date • 15% of your grade: an in-class mid-term exam on either October 23 or 30 (exact date TBC) • 30% of your grade: a longer (2,500 word limit) paper due by 4 pm on November 25, on an assigned topic distributed two weeks in advance of the due date • (...) 30% of your grade: a final exam on December 8 (1:00-2:50 p.m.) • 10% of your grade: participation in recitations.. (shrink)

Porosity is considered as one of the most important indicators for the characterization of the comprehensive performance of thermal barrier coatings. In this study, the ultrasonic technique and the artificial neural network optimized with the genetic algorithm are combined to develop an intelligent method for automatic detection and accurate prediction of TBCs’s porosity. A series of physical models of plasma-sprayed ZrO2 coating are established with a thickness of 288 μm and porosity varying from 5.71% to 26.59%, and the ultrasonic reflection (...) coefficient amplitude spectrum is constructed based on the time-domain numerical simulation signal. The characteristic features f 1, f 2, A max, Δ A of the URCAS, which are highly dependent on porosity, are extracted as input data to train the GA_BPNN model for predicting the unknown porosity. The average error of the prediction results is 1.45%, which suggests that the proposed method can achieve accurate detection and quantitative characterization of the porosity of TBCs with complex pore morphology. (shrink)