مقاله سال ۲۰۱۷

 مجله امگا – Omega

Decisions to locate facilities such as plants, warehouses and shopping malls are very important, and are often classified as strategic decisions [32,26,16,27]. They usually result in significant fixed costs and more importantly they have considerable impacts on growth prospects of a firm. Moreover, relocating facilities is usually not easy and very costly. As a result, location decisions are made carefully as the executives are aware of their significant economical importance.

To our knowledge, there has been no literature on managerial perceptions of risk specifically for location decision-making problems. However, many studies of risk taking by business executives and managers have attested the importance of risk assessment and management to decision making from the managerial perspective [6]. Most managers interviewed in these studies depicted themselves as risk averse or risk seeking. It has been inferred that their risk attitudes could be attributed to cultural, organizational, occupational and individual differences. Given the substantial impact of a facility location decision, it is arguable that the decision maker may not always be risk neutral, a common assumption in the facility location literature.

It is assumed that the decision maker is risk neutral in all the early and much of the recent facility location literature, in particular, on the median and center problems. However, there are studies that introduce the notion of volatility to these classical location problems. Table 1 summarizes the risk analysis measures used in these studies. The probability-related measure approach seeks to maximize the probability to achieve a target level of distance or coverage. Value-at-risk (VaR) and conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) are popular measures of risk in finance. β-VaR and β-CVaR at a probability level β are defined, respectively, as the β-quantile of a random loss (or cost) and the conditional expected loss (or cost) exceeding β- VaR [28].