The Nonstationary Staff-Planning Problem with Business Cycle and Learning Effects
针对高技能员工培训成本与需求波动问题，提出战略层面的最优人员配置策略，并利用实证数据探讨不同行业中的政策含义，发现需求波动会降低平均生产率，且企业应根据商业周期和培训时长调整招聘与解雇政策。
Managing highly skilled employees is extremely complex because of the need to balance the costs and time lags associated with their training against the need to meet demand as quickly as possible. Unlike previous approaches to this problem in the staffing literature, this paper develops an optimal staffing policy at the strategic level to cope with nonstationary stochastic demand for a staff characterized by unproductive apprentice employees and fully productive experienced employees. The paper then explores the implications of this policy in different industries, using empirical data. Aside from the optimal policy, this paper's primary results include: (1) demand volatility reduces average productivity, most especially under conditions of low (or slightly negative) growth and—nonintuitively—low employee turnover or knowledge obsolescence rates; (2) there is a trade-off between meeting demand and high productivity; (3) firms with longer business cycles should smooth their hiring and firing policies; and (4) firms in industries with longer training times should smooth their hiring and firing policies. The paper also explores the possible rewards from reducing training times and turnover rates. Finally, it discusses managerial implications and possible future directions in research.