Strategic interaction of original equipment manufacturers between outsourcing and purchasing in a quality-differentiated market.

Economic globalization has swept the whole world. To focus on their main business, enterprises that are referred to as original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) outsource non-core production activities to contract manufacturers (CMs). By constructing a two-level supply chain consisting of two competing OEMs and one upstream CM, the strategic interaction of the OEMs between outsourcing and purchasing is studied. Specifically, the CM can offer custom- and predefined modes of original equipment manufacturing (namely, CO mode and PO mode, respectively). The former mode enables OEMs to determine product quality, while the latter only allows them to purchase from several quality configurations. The results show that, first, since the CO mode allows the adopter to lead the product design, whether to choose this mode depends on the required R&D cost. Interestingly, however, a lower R&D cost does not necessarily result in the adoption of the CO mode if the product quality difference is small under the PO mode. Second, the optimal purchasing strategy of an OEM is indifferent to the outsourcing mode (CO and PO) of its rival but significantly affected by the quality cost. However, compared to the PO mode, choosing the CO mode would cause the competitor to suffer more profit losses. Third, differing from the prior literature, this paper finds that when the downstream OEM can make quality decisions, although this may lead to profit loss of the contract manufacturer in some channels, it could benefit the CM overall.

[Interference Detection and Quality Assessment of Pulse Signal on Android Platform].

The collection process of the pulse signal is easily disturbed by the noise, that will reduce the quality of the signal, and affect its applications on the healthy monitoring system. In order to solve this problem, this paper analyzes the causes of the generation of interference during pulse signal acquisition and the characteristics of interference performance, and puts forward the corresponding detection algorithm for pulse signal interference section. Based on this algorithm, a Cascaded Layer-by-Layer Discrimination method is proposed to evaluate the quality of pulse signals, in which pulse signals are divided into available signals and unavailable signals. Experimental results on PC and Android platform show that the proposed algorithm can detect the interference segment accurately in the pulse signal in real time, and improve the usability of the evaluation for pulse signal.