optimal dynamic pricing of inventories with stochastic demand over finite horizons in many industries managers face the problem of selling a given stock of items by a deadline we investigate the problem of dynamically pricing such inventories when demand is price sensitive and stochastic and the firm s objective is to maximize expected revenues examples that fit this framework include retailers selling fashion and seasonal goods and the travel and leisure industry which markets space such as seats on airline flights cabins on vacation cruises and rooms in hotels that become worthless if not sold by a specific time we formulate this problem using intensity control and obtain structural monotonicity results for the optimal intensity resp price as a function of the stock level and the length of the horizon for a particular exponential family of demand functions we find the optimal pricing policy in closed form for general demand functions we find an upper bound on the expected revenue based on analyzing the deterministic version of the problem and use this bound to prove that simple fixed price policies are asymptotically optimal as the volume of expected sales tends to infinity finally we extend our results to the case where demand is compound poisson only a finite number of prices is allowed the demand rate is time varying holding costs are incurred and cash flows are discounted the initial stock is a decision variable and reordering overbooking and random cancellations are allowed

is coal desulphurisation worthwhile evidence from the market abstract the paper develops a forward looking way to estimate the economic benefits of research and development on coal desulphurisation the methodology makes use of survey based techniques pioneered in environmental economics the empirical results illustrate the difficulty of configuring desulphurised coal to meet the requirements of existing electricity generating plants in addition to estimating the returns to investment in coal desulphurisation the contributions of the paper are in extending survey based valuation to meet the needs of r d investors for intelligence about the prospective value of their investments and using robust estimation techniques to reduce the influence of outliers

a nonparametric approach to modeling choice with limited data choice models today are ubiquitous across a range of applications in operations and marketing real world implementations of many of these models face the formidable stumbling block of simply identifying the right model of choice to use because models of choice are inherently high dimensional objects the typical approach to dealing with this problem is positing a priori a parametric model that one believes adequately captures choice behavior this approach can be substantially suboptimal in scenarios where one cares about using the choice model learned to make fine grained predictions one must contend with the risks of mis specification and overfitting underfitting thus motivated we visit the following problem for a generic model of consumer choice namely distributions over preference lists and a limited amount of data on how consumers actually make decisions such as marginal information about these distributions how may one predict revenues from offering a particular assortment of choices an outcome of our investigation is a nonparametric approach in which the data automatically select the right choice model for revenue predictions the approach is practical using a data set consisting of automobile sales transaction data from a major u s automaker our method demonstrates a 20 improvement in prediction accuracy over state of the art benchmark models this improvement can translate into a 10 increase in revenues from optimizing the offer set we also address a number of theoretical issues among them a qualitative examination of the choice models implicitly learned by the approach we believe that this paper takes a step toward automating the crucial task of choice model selection this paper was accepted by yossi aviv operations management

simulation study of the price differentiation effect in a stochastic deteriorating inventory with heterogeneous consumers freshness sensitivity a fixed price policy regardless of expiration date may result in unsold inventory and sales loss price reduction over time as the expiration date approaches motivates customers to purchase all items including the ones that are left with only a short interval until their expiration we conduct a discrete event simulation that captures the main characteristics of this phenomenon results show that a moderate differentiation of price increases profits by 6 a larger differentiation reduces profits profits are the highest for freshness oriented customers a fixed price policy is preferred in an environment of large variance and expected near term expirations

beyond hofstede and globe improving the quality of cross cultural research journal of international business studies 2010 41 1259 1274 doi 10 1057 jibs 2010 41 overview of 41 8 hofstede and globe in cross cultural research while hofstede s work was not the first systematic study on crossnational cultures his seminal book culture s consequences international differences in work related values 1980 succeeded in putting cross cultural analysis at the forefront of international business ib research in a later paper he boldly asserted that the business of international business is culture 1994 1 despite the criticisms that have been voiced against his work see mcsweeney 2002 oyserman coon kemmelmeier 2002 hofstede s influence on the fields of ib and management is undeniable according to harzing s publish or perish citation index as of june 2010 there were over 54 000 citations to his work this is a remarkable record that attests to first the growing popularity of cross cultural research in light of continued internationalization of the world economy and second hofstede s personal impact on scholarly research this jibs issue brings together 10 articles on culture and ib all of which were submitted to the editorial team led by jibs editorin chief lorraine eden while the articles were independently submitted through the regular double blind reviewing process the decision to join them in one collection creates in effect a special issue on culture in international business research which the jibs editors hope will be widely read and cited by ib scholars in general terms the papers in this collection fall into one of two categories 1 articles and commentaries about conceptual and methodological issues associated with hofstede s oeuvre vs the global leadership and organizational behavior effectiveness globe project s cultural dimensions and 2 articles and perspectives that use culture and or cultural dimensions as well as the operational measurement thereof to explain differences in behavior and practices across countries the common feature of all these scholarly pieces is that they challenge particular assumptions often made too easily in conventional cross cultural research the first paper in this collection is a perspective written by franke and richey that cautions against questionable generalizations from small numbers of countries in international business research using statistical analysis to support their assertion franke and richey argue that in order to draw credible generalizations in ib a minimum of 7 10 countries must be used this is an important message researchers should never formulate strong conclusions about the impact of cultural dimensions on journal of international business studies 2010 41 1259 1274 2010 academy of international business all rights reserved 0047 2506

nonlinear pricing in markets with interdependent demand this paper provides a mathematical framework for modeling demand and determining optimal price schedules in markets which have demand externalities and can sustain nonlinear pricing these fundamental economic concepts appear in the marketplace in the form of mutual buyers benefits and quantity discounts the theory addressing these aspects is relevant to a wide variety of goods and services examples include tariffs for electronic communications services pricing of franchises and royalty fees for copyrighted material and patents this paper builds on several previous results from microeconomics and extends nonlinear pricing to markets with demand externalities the implications of this price structure are compared to results obtained for flat rates and two part tariffs in a similar context a case study is described in which the results were applied to planning the startup of a new electronic communications service

firm specific assets multinationality and financial performance a meta analytic review and theoretical integration through a meta analysis of 120 independent samples reported in 111 studies we test the predictions of internalization theory in the context of the multinationality performance relationship findin

an analysis of bid price controls for network revenue management bid prices are becoming an increasingly popular method for controlling the sale of inventoryin revenue management applications in this form of control threshold or bid prices are set for the resources or units of inventory seats on flight legs hotel rooms on specific dates etc and a product a seat in a fare class on an itinerary or room for a sequence of dates is sold only if the offered fare exceeds the sum of the threshold prices of all the resources needed to supply the product this approach is appealing on intuitive and practical grounds but the theory underlying it is not well developed moreover the extent to which bid price controls represent optimal or near optimal policies is not well understood using a general model of the demand process we show that bid price control is not optimal in general and analyze why bid price schemes can fail to produce correct accept deny decisions however we prove that when leg capacities and sales volumes are large bid price controls are asymptotically optimal provided the right bid prices are used we also provide analytical upper bounds on the optimal revenue in addition we analyze properties of the asymptotically optimal bid prices for example we show they are constant over time even when demand is nonstationary and that they may not be unique

asymmetric information in cattle auctions the problem of revaccinations the authors acknowledge the help of chris boessen glenn grimes joe horner robert larson k c olson and kurt richter this revision is dated july 2004

operations research in inventory management a review and critique the objectives of inventory management including the relevant related costs are examined in this paper a brief review of standard problems that have been effectively solved is presented however we point out that a serious gap exists between theory and practice in many organizations suggestions are made for bridging this gap finally a list is provided of a number of research problems whose implementable solution would have a major beneficial impact on the practice of inventory management

managing capacity in tightly constrained systems abstract many make to order firms face total expected demand in excess of available capacity this is particularly true in the short range for capital intensive firms such as those in the flow process industry firms making short life cycle products such as those in high fashion apparel industry and printing shops in such situations the manager is left with the difficult task of allocating the available capacity between competing classes of products and or customers at the same time the manager is faced with the challenge of achieving delivery dependability and speed in order to stay competitive in this paper i describe the problem contrast it with a class of problems known as perishable asset revenue management problems review recent literature that presents alternative approaches for managing capacity such as capacity rationing improved coordination mechanisms and subcontracting and discuss fruitful avenues for future research

optimal pricing for information goods with piracy and saturation effect we analyze the pricing decision of a firm selling a product for which there is a significant and continuous saturation effect over time and that can be pirated assuming that the firm uses a skimming strategy we solve three profit maximization models given demand that is linearly decreasing in price few prices can be used over the life of the product the effects of both piracy and saturation are combined in the first model in the second model the firm can invest in technology or copyright enforcement to reduce piracy the third model describes the case in which piracy leads to increased awareness of the product and increased demand numerical sensitivity analysis and examples are used to illustrate the results the results indicate that under strong piracy and saturation effects a skimming strategy is suboptimal

prescribing product upgrades prices and production levels over time in a stochastic environment abstract competitive pressures cause the price of high technology products to erode over time the purpose of this paper is to describe a decision support tool to maximize profit by prescribing three related decisions product upgrading pricing and production levels a stochastic dynamic programming dp model prescribes when to upgrade a product and what new technologies to incorporate to maintain product competitiveness and profit margins it deals with the two major sources of risk demand and the lead time required to complete an upgrade the objective of the dp model is to maximize expected profit over a given planning horizon decision variables prescribe which alternative upgrades to implement and when pricing and production levels benchmarking computational tests are described along with an example demonstrating model application managers can use this dp model to coordinate decisions related to product upgrading pricing and operations management to better meet business objectives

chapter 11 pricing models in marketing publisher summary this chapter brings together a set of diverse efforts in the recent literature on the modeling of price decisions and related questions in marketing there has been an impressive growth in the array of topics investigated in the literature various trends in the development of pricing models are evident from the foregoing review first one trend has been to develop theoretical models to describe observed pricing strategies in the marketplace and to derive conditions under which certain strategies are optimal this trend is clearly evident when one considers the area of dynamic pricing models another trend is an attempt to develop pricing models in which certain aspects of consumer behavior e g asymmetric response to price increases versus price decreases are incorporated this development is quite recent and does offer a large potential a third dominant direction is the use of game theoretic models for developing equilibrium pricing strategies

consumer animosity in the global value chain the effect of international production shifts on willingness to purchase hybrid products the escalation of international offshoring and outsourcing in recent years has resulted in a proliferation of hybrid products for the typical multinational enterprise with multiple country affiliations for branding design manufacture assembly and parts sourcing however little has been written regarding the impact of consumer animosity on such hybrid activities or the role of universal values in a hybrid production animosity model in this paper we extend the consumer animosity literature to a firm s global integration activities for hybrid products we posit that consumers willingness to purchase wtp a complex hybrid product is negatively affected by partial production shifts to an animosity evoking country and that self reported animosity toward the country predicts lower wtp above and beyond consumer ethnocentrism and perceived product quality in addition we hypothesize a negative relationship between conservation values and wtp hybrid foreign products and a positive relationship between openness values and wtp hybrid foreign products a study of 319 us consumers revealed consistent support for these hypotheses with the exception of the conservation values wtp relationship practical implications and future research directions are discussed

a multiproduct dynamic pricing problem and its applications to network yield management a firm has inventories of a set of components that are used to produce a set of products there is a finite horizon over which the firm can sell its products demand for each product is a stochastic point process with an intensity that is a function of the vector of prices for the products and the time at which these prices are offered the problem is to price the finished products so as to maximize total expected revenue over the finite sales horizon an upper bound on the optimal expected revenue is established by analyzing a deterministic version of the problem the solution to the deterministic problem suggests two heuristics for the stochastic problem that are shown to be asymptotically optimal as the expected sales volume tends to infinity several applications of the model to network yield management are given numerical examples illustrate both the range of problems that can be modeled under this framework and the effectiveness of the proposed heuristics the results provide several fundamental insights into the performance of yield management systems

desire to acquire powerlessness and compensatory consumption three experiments examine how power affects consumers spending propensities by integrating literatures suggesting that a powerlessness is aversive b status is one basis of power and c products can signal status the authors argue that low power fosters a desire to acquire products associated with status to compensate for lacking power supporting this compensatory hypothesis results show that low power increased consumers willingness to pay for auction items and consumers reservation prices in negotiations but only when products were status related the link between powerlessness and compensatory consumption has broad implications both for consumers health and well being and for understanding the psychological state of power

a market discovery algorithm to estimate a general class of nonparametric choice models we propose an approach for estimating customer preferences for a set of substitutable products using only sales transactions and product availability data the underlying demand framework combines a general nonparametric discrete choice model with a bernoulli process of arrivals over time the choice model is defined by a discrete probability mass function pmf on a set of possible preference rankings of alternatives and it is compatible with any random utility model an arriving customer is assumed to purchase the available option that ranks highest in her preference list the problem we address is how to jointly estimate the arrival rate and the pmf of the rank based choice model under a maximum likelihood criterion since the potential number of customer types is factorial we propose a market discovery algorithm that starts with a parsimonious set of types and enlarge it by automatically generating new types that increase the likelihood value numerical experiments confirm the potential of our proposal for a realistic data set in the hospitality industry our approach improves the root mean square errors between predicted and observed purchases computed under independent demand model estimates by 67 to 93 this paper was accepted by serguei netessine operations management

nonlinear pricing to produce information we investigate the firm s dynamic nonlinear pricing problem when facing consumers whose tastes vary according to a scalar index we relax the standard assumption that the firm knows the distribution of this index in general the firm should determine its marginal price schedule as if it were myopic and produce information by lowering the price schedule bunching consumers at positive purchase levels should be avoided as a special case we also consider a market characterized by homogeneous consumers with a static but unknown demand curve we show that when there are repeat purchases the forward looking firm should tend towards penetration pricing otherwise its strategy should tend towards skimming we extend our insights to more general settings and discuss implications for pricing product lines

the effect of market segmentation with demand leakage between market segments on a firm s price and inventory decisions abstract in this paper we address the simultaneous determination of price and inventory replenishment in a newsvendor setting when the firm faces demand from two or more market segments in which the firm can set different prices we allow for demand leakage from higher priced segments to lower priced segments and assume that unsatisfied demand can be backlogged we examine the case where the demands occur concurrently without priority and are met from a single inventory we consider customer s buy down behavior explicitly by modeling demand leakage as a function of segment price differentiation and characterize the structure of optimal inventory and pricing policies

profit maximizing perceptual positions an integrated theory for the selection of product features and price an important component of marketing strategy is to position a product in perceptual space but to realize a perceptual position we must model the link from physical characteristics to perceptual dimensions and we must use this model to maximize profit this paper integrates psychological theories on how consumers process information with economic models and psychometric measurement and it develops a theory for selecting physical features and price to achieve a profit maximizing perceptual position the theory begins with a lancaster like transformation from goods space to characteristics space and investigates the implications of a mapping to a third space perceptual space we show that all products efficient in perceptual space must be efficient in characteristics space but not conversely but consumers vary in their preference and the way they perceive products thus we introduce distributional components to the theory and derive both geometric and analytic methods to incorporate this consumer heterogeneity next we investigate costs and derive a perceptual expansion path along which a profit maximizing position must exist conjoint analysis and quantal choice models provide the measurements to implement the theory the theory is illustrated with a hypothetical example from the analgesics market and some of the potential psychometric measurements are illustrated with an empirical application in the communications market

joint inventory allocation and pricing decisions for perishable products abstract we jointly determine the price and the inventory allocation for a perishable product with a predetermined lifetime we assume that the price of the product increases as the time when it perishes approaches as in the airline industry demand for the product is price sensitive to maximize the expected revenue we developed a discrete time dynamic programming model to obtain the optimal prices and the optimal inventory allocations for the product with a two period lifetime we then proposed three heuristics when the lifetime is longer than two periods the computational results showed that the expected revenues from the proposed heuristics were very close to that of the optimal solution we extended these results to i the case where the price for the product consistently decreases and ii the case where the price for the product first increases and later decreases

managerial metric use in marketing decisions across 16 countries a cultural perspective research on metrics is consistently designated a priority by academics and practitioners however less is known about how culture and cross national differences can potentially impact metric use which is theoretically and managerially limiting this work develops a model that examines national and organizational cultural antecedents while controlling for the decision setting testing the model on data collected from 4384 managerial decisions from 1637 firms in 16 countries reveals that both levels of culture are associated with metric use but each has varying effects our results enable multinational executives to better understand and increase managerial metric use across different cultures and settings

optimal policies of yield management with multiple predetermined prices it is a common practice for industries to price the same products at different levels for example airlines charge various fares for a common pool of seats seasonal products are sold at full or discount prices during different phases of the season this article presents a model that reflects this yield management problem the model assumes that 1 products are offered at multiple predetermined prices over time 2 demand is price sensitive and obeys the poisson process and 3 price is allowed to change monotonically i e either the markup or markdown policy is implemented to maximize the expected revenue management needs to determine the optimal times to switch between prices based on the remaining season and inventory major results in this research include 1 an exact solution for the continuous time model 2 piecewise concavity of the value function with respect to time and inventory and 3 monotonicity of the optimal policy the implementation of optimal policies is fairly facile because of the existence of threshold points embedded in the value function the value function and time thresholds can be solved with a reasonable computation effort numerical examples are provided

analytical solutions to the dynamic pricing problem for time normalized revenue abstract in this work we consider dynamic pricing for the case of continuous replenishment an essential ingredient in such a formulation is the use of time normalized revenue or profit function in other words revenue or profit per unit time this provides the incentive to sell many items in the shortest time and of course at a high price moreover for most firms what matters most is how much revenue or profit is achieved in a certain time frame for example per year this changes the problem qualitatively and methodologically we develop a new dynamic pricing model for this formulation we derive an analytical solution to the pricing problem in the form of a simple to solve ordinary differential equation ode equation the trajectory of this ode gives the optimal pricing curve unlike many of the models existing in the literature that rely on computationally demanding dynamic programming type solutions our model is relatively simple to solve also we apply the derived equation to two commonly used price demand functions the exponential and the power functions and derive closed form pricing curves for these functions

ex ante evaluation of the economic impact of agricultural biotechnology the case of porcine somatotropin advances in biotechnology are leading to the creation of products which are expected to have a significant impact on agricultural production much discussion in the literature has focused on possible impacts of biotechnology on agriculture kalter and tauer hueth and just stallman and schmid but few quantitative estimates of the probable impact exist this paper examines the impact of a new growth hormone porcine somatotropin pst on the u s pork industry our approach is generally useful for ex ante analyses of new biotechnologies where experimental estimates of the impact of the technology are available and where the nature of the commodity produced may be affected by the new biotechnology pst is a naturally occurring somatotropin protein produced in the pig s pituitary supplemental pst has been shown in experimental research to lead to improvement in average daily gain improvement in feed efficiency and change in carcass composition of the pig by converting fat to lean meat the purpose of this paper is to simulate the likely impact of supplemental pst use on prices and quantities of pork at the retail and farm levels and on net benefits of producers and consumers the approach taken here to quantifying the impact of pst is in the spirit of previous ex ante approaches to estimating returns to agricultural research norton and davis this study explicitly takes into account a interrelationships between the domestic hog and pork markets b interrelationships between pork and other meats c interrelationships between the domestic and international mar

an optimal dynamic policy for hotel yield management abstract most research into the yield management problem has generated variations on the marginal seat revenue models that are based on simplifying assumptions about the demand process and heuristic decision rules in this paper a dynamic programming formulation of the problem is given allowing for general demand patterns and a policy that is based on time and the number of vacancies furthermore this policy incorporates both revealed price and hidden price market behavior it is shown that this formulation has a simple closed form solution that can be efficiently computed as a result a more general formulation of the problem with an optimal solution is available to hotels and airlines the particular application that motivated this model development is that of yield management for small hotels

individualism and stock price crash risk employing a sample of 26 473 firms across 42 countries from 1990 to 2013 we find that firms located in countries with higher individualism have higher stock price crash risk furthermore individualism can be transmitted by foreign investors from overseas markets to influence local firms crash risk and can exacerbate the impact of firm risk taking and earnings management on crash risk moreover the positive relation between individualism and crash risk is amplified during the global financial crisis and attenuated by enhanced country level financial information transparency and the adoption of international financial reporting standards

revenue management with limited demand information in this paper we consider the classical multifare single resource leg problem in revenue management for the case where demand information is limited our approach employs a competitive analysis which guarantees a certain performance level under all possible demand scenarios the only information required about the demand for each fare class is lower and upper bounds we consider both competitive ratio and absolute regret performance criteria for both performance criteria we derive the best possible static policies which employ booking limits that remain constant throughout the booking horizon the optimal policies have the form of nested booking limits dynamic policies which employ booking limits that may be adjusted at any time based on the history of bookings are also obtained we provide extensive computational experiments and compare our methods to existing ones the results of the experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of these new robust methods

perishable asset revenue management with markovian time dependent demand intensities many industries face the problem of selling a fixed stock of items over a finite horizon these industries include airlines selling seats before planes depart hotels renting rooms before midnight theaters selling seats before curtain time and retailers selling seasonal items with long procurement lead times given a sunk investment in seats rooms or winter coats the objective for these industries is to maximize revenues in excess of salvage value when demand is price sensitive and stochastic pricing is an effective tool to maximize expected revenues in this paper we address the problem of deciding the optimal timing of price changes within a given menu of allowable possibly time dependent price paths each of which is associated with a general poisson process with markovian time dependent predictable intensities we show that a set of variational inequalities characterize the value functions and the optimal possibly random time changes in addition we develop an efficient algorithm to compute the optimal value functions and the optimal pricing policy

customer evaluation of products in a global market marketing scholars interest in the influence of source countries on product evaluations has intensified during the past twenty five years as this research tradition has evolved the literature has gradually gained more depth and sophistication nevertheless research in this area lacks a common conceptual framework furthermore research priorities with regard to the role of this area of inquiry within the broader field of consumer behavior marketing and general business decisions have not been made clear this article rationalizes the buying decision processes within the context of source country influences and offers a conceptual framework for further development in addition it links country level considerations to firm level decisionmaking thus providing a foundation for meaningful managerial decisions

impacts of foreign policies on the gains from research and promotion abstract this paper compares the direct and indirect effects of rest of the world row policy on welfare in country a the direct effect due to the change in world price caused by the policy in the absence of research promotion induced shifts in supply demand and the additional or indirect effect of the policy on the welfare gain to country a from its investment in research and promotion the results showed that the reduction in aggregate economic benefits from research promotion due to a world price reducing policy in row could be in the range of 25 50 of the direct reduction in social welfare due to the row policy in the case of australian beef veal it is possible for the welfare impact of the row policy via research payoff in country a to exceed the direct welfare cost

design and evaluation of a dynamic capacity apportionment procedure abstract deploying a decision theory based approach we develop a heuristic for short term constrained capacity allocation to multiple product classes in make to order manufacturing attempting to maximize profit by discriminating between product classes efficacy of the heuristic is evaluated by comparing its performance to a base case and an upper bound under a wide variety of operational conditions such as variations in profit attractiveness capacity tightness customer order size structure customer order rate structure and demand coefficient of variation considering three different scenarios of time variant order rate of products the results indicate that the heuristic is effective in obtaining increased profit when capacity is very tight and products are well differentiated on average it yields an increase of 9 38 in total profit with a concomitant decrease of 0 85 in capacity utilization the results of this study serve to highlight the value of proactively seeking to differentiate products particularly when demand exceeds capacity

dynamic pricing of multiple home delivery options abstract online grocers accept delivery bookings and have to deliver groceries to consumers residences grocery stores operate on very thin margins therefore a critical question that an online grocery store needs to address is the cost of home delivery operations in this paper we develop a markov decision process based pricing model that recognizes the need to balance utilization of delivery capacity by the grocer and the need to have the goods delivered at the most convenient time for the customer the model dynamically adjusts delivery prices as customers arrive and make choices the optimal prices have the following properties first the optimal prices are such that the online grocer gains the same expected payoff in the remaining booking horizon regardless of the delivery option independently chosen by a consumer second with unit order sizes delivery prices can increase due to dynamic substitution effects as there is less time left in the booking horizon

brand origin recognition accuracy its antecedents and consumers cognitive limitations an ever growing literature has reported consumer bias toward national origins of products and has explored factors that moderate such bias researchers have assumed if only tacitly that consumers are knowledgeable of brand origins and that this knowledge is a significant influence that drives judgments of product quality brand attitudes and choice behavior in the marketplace using categorization theory and attribute diagnosticity as the theoretical foundation our research reveals that consumers actually have only modest knowledge of the national origins of brands and that american consumers proficiency at recognizing foreign brand origins is predicted by variables such as socioeconomic status past international travel foreign language skills and gender in the second of two studies we determined that brand origin recognition is based largely on consumers associations of brand names with languages that suggest country origins these studies ultimately lead us to conclude that past research has inflated the influence that country of origin information has on consumers product judgments and behavior and its importance in managerial and public policy decisions

the cultural relativity of organizational practices and theories this paper summarizes the author s recently published findings about differences in people s work related values among 50 countries in view of these differences ethnocen tric management theories those based on the value system of one particular country have become untenable this concept is illustrated for the fields of leadership organization and motivation a key issue for organization science is the influence of national cultures on introduction management twenty or even 10 years ago the existence of a relationship be management and tween management and national cultures was far from obvious to many and it national cultures may not be obvious to everyone even now in the 1950s and 60s the dominant be lief at least in europe and the u s was that management was something univer sal there were principles of sound management which existed regardless of na tional environments if national or local practice deviated from these principles it was time to change local practice in the future the universality of sound manage ment practices would lead to societies becoming more and more alike this ap plied even to the poor countries of the third world which would become rich as well and would be managed just like the rich countries also the differences be tween management in the first and second world capitalist and socialist would disappear in fact under the surface they were thought to be a lot smaller than was officially recognized this way of thinking which dominated the 1950s and 60s is known as the convergence hypothesis during the 1970s the belief in the unavoidable convergence of management prac tices waned it was too obviously in conflict with the reality we saw around us at the same time supranational organizations like the european common market which were founded very much on the convergence belief had to recognize the stubbornness of national differences even within existing nations regional dif ferences became more rather than less accentuated the welsh the flemish the basques the bangladeshi the quebecois defended their own identity and this was difficult to reconcile with a management philosophy of convergence it slowly became clear that national and even regional cultures do matter for management the national and regional differences are not disappearing they are here to stay in fact these differences may become one of the most crucial problems for man agement in particular for the management of multinational multicultural orga nizations whether public or private

research payoffs from quality improvement the case of protein in australian wheat a model is developed for evaluating the size and distribution of the economic benefits from research that improves the quality of an export commodity quality improvement achieved by research or by agronomic practices shifts the domestic and or excess demand curves for an export commodity research costs are not modeled but any shift in the supply curve due to a change in yield for example accompanying the quality improvement is included the model is used to estimate the gains from research that increases protein content in australian wheat it is estimated that australia has the potential to obtain net benefits up to a 53 million per year from a one percentage point increase in the protein content in wheat over 90 of these gains accrue to wheat producers

optimal bundle formation and pricing of two products with limited stock abstract in this study we consider the stochastic modeling of a retail firm that sells two types of perishable products in a single period not only as independent items but also as a bundle our emphasis is on understanding the bundling practices on the inventory and pricing decisions of the firm one of the issues we address is to decide on the number of bundles to be formed from the initial product inventory levels and the price of the bundle to maximize the expected profit product demands follow a poisson process with a price dependent rate customer reservation prices are assumed to have a joint distribution we study the impact of reservation price distributions initial inventory levels product prices demand arrival rates and cost of bundling we observe that the expected profit decreases as the correlation between the reservation prices of two products increases with negative correlation bundling cost has a significant impact on the number of bundles formed when the product prices are low the retailer sells individual products as well as the bundle mixed bundling when they are high the retailer sells only bundles pure bundling the expected profit and the number of bundles offered decrease as the variance of the reservation price distribution increases for high starting inventory levels the retailer reduces bundle price and offers more bundles the number of bundle sales decreases and the number of individual product sales increases when the arrival rate increases since the need for bundling decreases impacts of substitutability and complementarity of products are also investigated the retailer forms more bundles or charges higher prices for the bundle or both as the products become more complementary and less substitutable

improving generalizations from multi country comparisons in international business research in this paper we address the problem of questionable generalizations from comparing small numbers of countries in international business ib research we illustrate the misleading results that can arise from sparse samples whether the relationship between national level variables is strong economic development and corruption or weak population density and trust we show that 35 of recent international comparisons in leading ib journals examined just two or three countries and present an exploratory analysis of 123 variables that reveals typical correlations across countries to be rather moderate average r 0 24 to help interpret extant study findings we provide formulas and graphs based on bayesian analysis and introduce a method of combining results from multiple international comparisons we also describe methods for designing studies to give stronger evidence of relationships between variables our results suggest that a minimum of 7 10 countries may support credible international generalizations but only when overall trends are very strong a key strategy for improving ib generalizations is to use larger samples of countries because research based on common sample and effect sizes may lead to generalizations that the findings do not justify

a taxonomy and research overview of perishable asset revenue management yield management overbooking and pricing this paper proposes the term perishable asset revenue management to denote the field that combines the areas of yield management overbooking and pricing for perishable assets after summarizing the characteristics common to problems in this field the paper discusses the objectives and constraints faced by decision makers then it offers a comprehensive taxonomy with 14 different elements and reviews the research that has been done related to each element finally it suggests some important areas of future research that can help bridge the gap between theory and application

airline seat allocation with multiple nested fare classes this paper addresses the problem of determining optimal booking policies for multiple fare classes that share the same seating pool on one leg of an airline flight when seats are booked in a nested fashion and when lower fare classes book before higher ones we show that a fixed limit booking policy that maximizes expected revenue can be characterized by a simple set of conditions on the subdifferential of the expected revenue function these conditions are appropriate for either the discrete or continuous demand cases these conditions are further simplified to a set of conditions that relate the probability distributions of demand for the various fare classes to their respective fares the latter conditions are guaranteed to have a solution when the joint probability distribution of demand is continuous characterization of the problem as a series of monotone optimal stopping problems proves optimality of the fixed limit policy over all admissible policies a comparison is made of the optimal solutions

price guarantees in dynamic pricing and revenue management we present a new model for revenue management of product sales that incorporates both dynamic pricing and a price guarantee the guarantee provides customers with compensation if prior to a fixed future date the price of the product drops below a level specified at the time of purchase we consider the problem of simultaneously determining optimal dynamic price and guarantee policies for items from a fixed stock when demand depends both on the price and on the parameters of the price guarantee the model can be used for pricing any items with limited availability over a fixed time horizon we formulate this model as a discrete time optimal control problem prove the existence of its optimal solution explore some of the structural properties of the solution present lower bounding heuristics for solving the problem and report numerical results

understanding consumer animosity in an international crisis nature antecedents and consequences the nature antecedents and consequences of consumer animosity during the 1997 asian economic crisis are investigated based on a large scale survey of 2000 adult consumers representative of five affected nations indonesia malaysia singapore south korea and thailand an animosity model was developed and tested with the us and japan as target countries as predicted stable and situational animosity reduced willingness to buy products from a perceived hostile national entity affective evaluations and cognitive judgments were negatively influenced by situational animosity but not by stable animosity as expected situational animosity was increased by external attribution perceived external control and stable animosity implications of these findings are discussed and directions for future research suggested

interpreting societal culture value dimensions societal cultural value dimension scholarship can both learn from and inform the family of interrelated approaches to culture research in ib that appear in recent commentaries it can exchange insights about societal values and meaning systems with neo institutional and institutional logics research it can also exchange insights with dual processing cognition theories that are used to understand individuals in an international context by treating societal culture values and institutional characteristics as essential to interpreting personal values and attitudes rather than merging them integrating culture related specialties by exchanging insights can promote the further development of research in each of these societal and individual level fields

optimal dynamic pricing for expanding networks this paper analyzes the dynamic pricing decision of a monopolist marketing a new product or service whose consumption value increases with the expansion of the network of adopters we characterize an optimal pricing strategy which maximizes the present value of the monopolist s profits subject to the dynamics of the demand for network access these dynamics depend among other factors on the current price and consumer anticipations about future network growth we examine the effects of changes in the growth anticipations and the discount rate on the optimal equilibrium access price and network size it is shown that higher growth anticipations and a lower discount rate result in a lower equilibrium price and a larger network

optimal pricing policy in the presence of experience effects i introduction in this paper we analyze the problem of optimal intertemporal pricing for a monopolist when cur rent and past output affect future cost and or demand conditions through experience in production and or in consumption learning by doing the experience curve contagion habit formation bandwagon and snob effects are all examples of terminologies used to describe such situations we call these experience effects for convenience and explore profit maximizing pricing behavior when such effects exist in the traditional profit maximization model a firm chooses the price output combination so as to maximize short run i e current profits the familiar mc mr equality given that price is higher than average variable cost and a nonbind ing capacity constraint is a necessary condition for price takers as well as price makers this as sumes that the current pricing decision has no bearing on the future so that long run profit is maximized by a series of short run maximizing

evaluating returns to agricultural research a review this paper reviews and compares the most common approaches used to evaluate public agricultural research investment ex post studies fall into two major groups a consumer and producer surplus analyses estimating average rates of return to research and b production function analyses estimating marginal rates of return to research ex ante studies fall into four groups a those using scoring models to rank research activities b those employing benefit cost analysis to establish rates of return to research c those using simulation models and d those using mathematical programming to select an optimal mix of research activities

blind network revenue management we consider a general class of network revenue management problems where mean demand at each point in time is determined by a vector of prices and the objective is to dynamically adjust these prices so as to maximize expected revenues over a finite sales horizon a salient feature of our problem is that the decision maker can only observe realized demand over time but does not know the underlying demand function that maps prices into instantaneous demand rate we introduce a family of blind pricing policies that are designed to balance trade offs between exploration demand learning and exploitation pricing to optimize revenues we derive bounds on the revenue loss incurred by said policies in comparison to the optimal dynamic pricing policy that knows the demand function a priori and we prove that asymptotically as the volume of sales increases this gap shrinks to zero

hiring and leasing with nonlinear prices this paper examines the problem of a monopolist setting an optimal nonlinear pricing schedule in the face of consumers of unknown type who arrive randomly over time and self select a choice of hire period the major determinant of pricing policy is the customer arrival distribution with the overall level of price higher than in the atemporal yield management nonuniform pricing solution by a margin which increases with the average frequency with which potential customers arrive by contrast the solution is generally fairly insensitive to variations in the time rate of discount although there is a tendency for the rate of price discount to increase with increases in the time discount rate

quality differentiation and conditional spatial price competition among hotels abstract it is generally accepted that location is the dominant product attribute for hotels accordingly studies on price competition have often utilized fixed geographic boundaries when defining competitive sets when travelers are willing to substitute location and quality however the spatial extent of competition can depend on the hotels quality therefore it can be hypothesized that geographic boundary of price competition among hotels is conditional on quality differentiation through an empirical analysis based on two stage least squares modified to test for spatial price competition the present study finds that hotels compete with more distant neighbors of similar quality than those who are quality differentiated in addition the results also suggest possibility of cooperation among neighboring hotels similar in quality implications and suggestions are presented along with the findings of the study which is expected to contribute to the literature by suggesting a new perspective on the relationship between quality differentiation and price competition among hotels

service cancellation and competitive refund policy although previous research demonstrates the profitability of partial refund policies in a monopoly setting there is a certain lack of ubiquity in practice about these refunds in competitive service markets this raises the question of how a partial refund policy may work and whether it is even sustainable in a competitive environment this study investigates how competition may influence the profitability and the equilibrium choice of refund policies it is shown that partial refunds may endogenously change the nature of strategic interaction between service providers from local monopolies into a competition regime which moderates the gains from exploiting the efficiency enhancing effect of partial refunds a whole range of pure strategy equilibria can be obtained as a result of the interplay between the efficiency improving and the competition intensifying effects when the capacity is small large such that the efficiency improving the competition intensifying effect is dominant both firms in equilibrium follow identical partial zero refund policies moreover interestingly the symmetric firms may end up in an asymmetric equilibrium in which one firm follows a partial refund policy and the other adopts a zero refund policy

beyond country image favorability how brand positioning via country personality stereotypes enhances brand evaluations across four lab experiments and a field study we find that brands are evaluated more favorably when the brand is positioned in a manner that is congruent with the brand s home country personality stereotype than when brand positioning is incongruent results demonstrate that cultural authenticity mediates this effect we also uncover a moderating effect whereby brands are viewed more favorably when brand positioning and country personality stereotypes are incongruent rather than congruent under conditions of consumer animosity toward the firm s home country this study is the first to demonstrate how international firms can leverage country of origin personality stereotypes as a brand building advantage

multi dimensional price elasticity for leisure and business destinations in the low cost air transport market evidence from easyjet this study investigates the price elasticity of demand in the european low cost carrier lcc industry by analysing internet fares for all easyjet flights departing from the amsterdam schiphol airport towards 21 european destinations between march and september 2015 results suggest that the price elasticity of demand greatly varies across different dimensions ranging from 0 535 for the business oriented route of hamburg to 1 915 for the leisure oriented route of split price elasticity is also found to be higher for reservations made more days in advance for reservations and departures occurring on weekends and for flights taking off during lunchtime and in the summer period all results are consistent with the different behaviours of leisure and business passengers and the ongoing increase in the business component of the lcc passenger mix

consumer demand for rice grain quality and returns to research for quality improvement in southeast asia abundant world rice supply has led to renewed interest in improving grain quality of modem rice varieties implicit prices of grain characteristics are estimated for thailand indonesia and the philippines these prices are used to evaluate rice breeding goals and to estimate returns to research for quality improvement results indicate that the past focus on physical quality improvement was appropriate and future welfare gains are possible from chemical quality improvement returns to quality improvement are substantial and indicate underinvestment in this type of research as asian rice production grew faster than population from 1965 to 1980 the real price of rice declined in world markets and several asian countries flinn and unnevehr greater supply and falling prices have increased concern for rice grain quality improvement in national and international research programs in tropical asia khush in this article the consumer goods characteristics model develo ed bv ladd and suvannunt is used to estimaie thedimplicit prices of rice grain quality characteristics in thailand indonesia and the philippines these estimated implicit prices answer three questions a do observed consumer preferences correspond to measures of quality used to screen material in breeding programs b are consumer preferences similar across countries so that quality improvement can be undertaken at the international level c what are the returns to re

quantity discounts managerial issues and research opportunities marketing managers frequently administer pricing policies involving substantial quantity discounts however our understanding of the precise role of these discounts and their design is quite limited this paper reviews and integrates the economics and marketing literature and presents a detailed analysis of the policies of four firms in order to i specify the variety of motivations for quantity discounts ii provide guidelines to managers in designing quantity discount schedules and iii set out the most fruitful directions for future research

multi product pricing for electric power abstract this paper describes methods for determining the prices for a discrete set of interrelated products offered by a single supplier each product has a fixed marginal rate per unit the demand for each product depends upon the price levels of all the products and the supplier s cost function depends upon the demands for all the products for specific demand function forms methods are described for determining the prices that maximize a weighted sum of net revenue and consumer surplus

an expectancy model of chinese american differences in conflict avoiding this paper develops an expectancy model for chinese american differences in conflict avoiding and tests this model using a scenario study with respondents from taiwan and the us our results show that a higher chinese tendency to avoid conflict is explained by higher chinese expectations that direct conflict will hurt the relationship with the other party and by greater concern for the other party among chinese it is not however explained by differences in the expected career costs benefits of good bad relations with others also chinese are more sensitive to hierarchy than americans so that avoiding is heightened more for chinese than for americans when the other party is of higher status qualitative results suggest that chinese american differences in time frames may also explain differences in avoiding implications for businesses and management are suggested journal of international business studies 2006 37 76 91 doi 10 1057 palgrave jibs 8400172

acting on anger cultural value moderators of the effects of consumer animosity the recent rise in protectionism and demonization of foreign countries has increased the risk of brands falling victim to the negative effects of consumer animosity or strong negative affect directed at a foreign country we investigate the role of cultural values as moderating the relationship between consumer animosity and willingness to buy the combined results of a meta analysis and six experiments in the us and china offer strong evidence that collectivism and long term orientation mitigate the negative effects of consumer animosity and support the contention that animosity s effect on willingness to buy is much stronger than on product judgments

a nonparametric approach to multiproduct pricing developed by general motors gm the auto choice advisor website http www autochoiceadvisor com recommends vehicles to consumers based on their requirements and budget constraints through the website gm has access to large quantities of data that reflect consumer preferences motivated by the availability of such data we formulate a nonparametric approach to multiproduct pricing we consider a class of models of consumer purchasing behavior each of which relates observed data on a consumers requirements and budget constraint to subsequent purchasing tendencies to price products we aim at optimizing prices with respect to a sample of consumer data we offer a bound on the sample size required for the resulting prices to be near optimal with respect to the true distribution of consumers the bound exhibits a dependence of o n log n on the number n of products being priced showing thatin terms of sample complexitythe approach is scalable to large numbers of products with regards to computational complexity we establish that computing optimal prices with respect to a sample of consumer data is np complete in the strong sense however when prices are constrained by a price ladderan ordering of prices defined prior to price determinationthe problem becomes one of maximizing a supermodular function with real valued variables it is not yet known whether this problem is np hard we provide a heuristic for our price ladder constrained problem together with encouraging computational results finally we apply our approach to a data set from the auto choice advisor website our analysis provides insights into the current pricing policy at gm and suggests enhancements that may lead to a more effective pricing strategy

optimal inventory policy for a perishable item with demand function sensitive to price and time abstract we formulate a model for determining the optimal pricing order quantity and replenishment period for perishable items with price dependent and time dependent demand the items have a fixed shelf life and the demand rate decreases linearly in the selling price and polynomially over the time after replenishment until it vanishes either at the reservation price or at expiration time we prove that the three variable profit maximization problem can be reduced into a single variable problem in which the variable is the duration of the replenishment period we show that the profit function is strictly pseudo concave and provide means of obtaining the optimal policy three numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the model accompanied by a sensitivity analysis

pricing non storable perishable goods by using a purchase restriction with an application to airline fare pricing abstract the aim of this paper is to address the pricing problem of non storable perishable goods or services such as airline seats and hotel rooms by incorporating the use of purchase restrictions such as the advance booking requirement that is commonly used by airlines and hotels we will show that there exists an optimal pricing policy of at most three prices which can be obtained by solving a series of linear programming problems we will demonstrate that when applied to airline fare pricing the monotonicity condition of the model is equivalent to the requirement that business travelers are less price elastic than leisure travelers we will further illustrate the applicability of the model through a numerical example in the context of airline fare pricing by incorporating the impact of various fences

on optimal service capacity allocation policy in an advance selling environment in continuous time abstract based on some general reasonable assumptions this paper employs the techniques of calculus of variations and optimal control theory to derive 10 main propositions associated with a service provider who aims at maximizing the present value of revenues profits over a planning horizon in continuous time employing an aggregate pricing response function that is dependent on excess capacity and a convex service cost formulation the results show that i for a zero discount rate and unanticipated competitive entry units of service capacity are allocated evenly over time ii for a zero discount rate and anticipated competitive entry units of allocated service capacity are increasing over time iii for a positive discount rate and unanticipated competitive entry units of allocated service capacity are decreasing over time and iv for a positive discount rate and anticipated competitive entry units of allocated service capacity are increasing over time or are decreasing at first then increasing later in addition the questions of how deep a service firm should advance sell whether advance selling is optimal in continuous time and whether excess capacity could be an optimal strategy have been addressed furthermore related sensitivity analyses are performed and endpoint constraints together with alternative shapes of the service cost function are discussed the managerial implications of the study s results have been demonstrated

market structure and the value of overselling under stochastic demands in the operations management literature traditional revenue management focused on pricing and capacity allocation strategies in a two period model with stochastic demand inspired by travel and lodging industries we examine a two period model in which each seller may also adopt the overselling strategy to customers whose valuations are differentiated by timing of arrivals widely seen as a popular hedge against consumers skipping reservations we extend the stylized approaches of biyalogorsky carmon fruchter and gerstner 1999 and lim 2009 to understand the value of overselling under various market structures we find that contrary to existing literature the impact of period two pricing competition from overselling spills over to period one such that overselling may not always be a weakly dominant strategy once unlimited early demand ceases to hold in a duopoly regime we provide some numerical studies on the existence of multiple equilibria at the capacity allocation level which actually lead to different selling strategies at the equilibrium despite identical market conditions and firm characteristics

integration of pricing and capacity allocation for perishable products abstract for years pricing and capacity allocation decisions in most revenue management models have been carried out independently this article presents a comprehensive model to integrate these two decisions for perishable products we assume that the supplier sells the same products to different micro markets at distinct prices throughout the sales season the supplier faces decisions as to which micro markets or customer classes should be served and at what prices we show that i at any time a customer class is active being served if and only if the price offered is over a threshold level but the optimal price may not be the highest one of the supplier s choice ii when the price decision is made in conjunction with inventory it is similar to the procedure shown in pure pricing models i e the optimal price comes from a subset of prices that forms a maximum increasing concave envelope iii because of dynamic changes in the optimal prices the nested price structure does not necessarily hold in general and needs to be redefined and iv the optimal pricing and capacity control policy is based on a sequence of threshold points that incorporate inventory price and demand intensity numerical examples are provided

asset selling problems with holding costs abstract sequential stochastic assignment problems now comprise a significant literature that includes such important economical applications as the classical asset selling problem and labor market analysis job search in this type of problems there is a stream of bidders to whom several identical units at the disposal of the decision maker have to be sold in this paper we incorporate holding costs to be incurred on the units say assets at hand into the classical model optimal strategies are defined as selling decision rules which maximize the total expected net reward from the units we take advantage of the specific structure offered by the framework of sequential stochastic assignment to get explicit results for the optimal strategies it is further shown how to implement these results for important specific bid distributions

de globalization theories predictions and opportunities for international business research de globalization now a distinct possibility would induce a significant qualitative shift in strategies structures and behaviors observable in international business ib coming to terms with this qualitative shift would require ib research to develop a much deeper integration of politics the key driver of de globalization to support such integration this paper introduces two relevant theories of de globalization from political science liberalism and realism both predict de globalization under current conditions but lead to different expectations about the future world economy liberalism suggests a patchwork of economic linkages while realism predicts the emergence of economic blocs around major countries this paper discusses the resulting opportunities in three areas of ib research political strategies and roles of multinational enterprises mnes global value chains and the role of the national context for political strategies and roles there is a need to explore how regular business activities and deliberate political agency of mnes affect the political sustainability of globalization for value chains questions include their future reach and specialization changes in organizational forms and the impact of political considerations on location decisions research opportunities on national contexts relate to their ability to sustain globalization and their connection with economic and military power

heuristics for pricing and positioning a product line using conjoint and cost data designing and pricing a product line is the very essence of every business in recent years quantitative methods to assist managers in this task have been gaining in popularity conjoint analysis is already widely used to measure preferences for different product profiles and build market simulation models in the last few years several papers have been published that suggest how to optimally choose a product line based on such data we formalize this problem as a mathematical program where the objective of the firm is either profit or total welfare unlike alternative published approaches we introduce fixed and variable costs for each product profile the number of products to be introduced is endogenously determined on the basis of their desirability fixed and variable costs and in the case of profits their cannibalization effect on other products while the problem is difficult np complete we show that the maximum welfare problem is equivalent to the uncapacitated plant location problem which can be solved very efficiently using the greedy interchange heuristic based on past published experience with this problem and on simulations we perform we show that optimal or near optimal solutions are obtained in seconds for large problems we develop a new greedy heuristic for the profit problem and its application to simulated problems shows that it too runs quickly and with better performance than various alternatives and previously published heuristics we also show how the methodology can be applied taking existing products of both the firm and the competition into account

optimal pricing and advertising policies for a one time entertainment event abstract we consider the problem of pricing and advertising a one time entertainment event three pricing policies are characterized and contrasted namely dynamic price dp constant price cp and two market price tmp in this last scenario the selling season is composed of a regular price period and a last minute price period with the switching date between the two markets being determined endogenously we show that the price is monotonically increasing over time in the dp scenario and that the last minute price is larger than the regular price in the tmp scenario in all three cases advertising is non increasing over time which is a feature often encountered in finite horizon dynamic optimization advertising models finally we compute the cost of simplification which is the difference in profits under dynamic pricing and constant pricing among other results we obtain that this loss is independent of the market size and increasing in the number of available tickets

joint production and pricing decisions with setup costs and capacity constraints we consider the problem of setting prices and choosing production quantities for a single product over a finite horizon for a capacity constrained manufacturer facing price sensitive demands there is a fixed cost per production run and a variable cost per unit produced both of which may vary by period we characterize properties of the optimal solution considering cases with constant and time varying capacity and with and without speculative motive for holding inventory we show that counter to intuition optimal prices may increase as the capacity increases even when capacity is constant over the horizon we also show that increases in capacity do not always exhibit diminishing marginal returns our procedure produces solutions with much higher profits than can be obtained from a sophisticated sequential procedure in which a well informed and optimum seeking marketing department makes pricing decisions and the manufacturing department seeks to satisfy the resulting demands at minimum cost our results also suggest that firms with seasonal demand and tight capacity constraints should be more aggressive in setting prices to manage their demands than what is typically done in practice finally we discuss how a decision maker can use our procedure as an aid in solving multiproduct versions of the problem

values schemas and norms in the culture behavior nexus a situated dynamics framework international business ib research has predominantly relied on value constructs to account for the influence of societal culture notably hofstede s cultural dimensions while parsimonious the value approach s assumptions about the consensus of values within nations and the generality and stability of cultural patterns of behavior are increasingly challenged we review two promising alternatives the constructivist approach centering on schemas and the intersubjectivist approach centering on norms and the evidence that demonstrates their usefulness in accounting for international differences in the behavior of managers employees and consumers we propose a situated dynamics framework specifying the role of values schemas and norms in accounting for cultural differences and delineating conditions under which each causal mechanism is operative values play a more important role in accounting for cultural differences in weak situations where fewer constraints are perceived schemas play a more important role when situational cues increase their accessibility and relevance and norms play a more important role when social evaluation is salient directions for future research based on this integrative framework and its implications for the measurement of culture and application in ib are discussed

equilibrium price dispersion under demand uncertainty the roles of costly capacity and market structure when capacity is costly and prices are set in advance firms facing uncertain demand will sell output at multiple prices and limit the quantity available at each price i show that the optimal price strategy of a monopolist and the unique pure strategy nash equilibria of oligopolists both exhibit intrafirm price dispersion moreover as the market becomes more competitive prices become more dispersed a pattern documented in the airline industry while generating similar predictions the model differs from the revenue management literature because it disregards market segmentation and fare restrictions that screen customers

revenue management without forecasting or optimization an adaptive algorithm for determining airline seat protection levels we investigate a simple adaptive approach to optimizing seat protection levels in airline revenue management systems the approach uses only historical observations of the relative frequencies of certain seat filling events to guide direct adjustments of the seat protection levels in accordance with the optimality conditions of brumelle and mcgill 1993 stochastic approximation theory is used to prove the convergence of this adaptive algorithm to the optimal protection levels in a simulation study we compare the revenue performance of this adaptive approach to a more traditional method that combines a censored forecasting method with a common seat allocation heuristic emsr b

us versus them or us versus everyone delineating consumer aversion to foreign goods this paper presents evidence that international animosity and consumer ethnocentrism are distinct constructs that play different roles depending on the set of products available to consumers results show that animosity toward a foreign nation is related to choices between foreign goods while consumer ethnocentrism is related to choices between domestic and foreign goods further the study finds animosity effects even though anger levels are generally low thus extending the boundaries of the animosity model of foreign purchase the study focuses on u s consumer views of japan and japanese products implications for decisions concerning global versus local branding strategies are discussed

new product pricing in quality sensitive markets this paper considers the problem of pricing a new product in a market having competing products of different qualities and market penetration levels as measured by the cumulative number of units sold each customer type selects his optimal product based on maximizing consumer surplus pricing policies for a new product are determined for the seller based on cumulative profit maximization without discounting an example is solved in detail for two demand function forms

what s in a p reassessing best practices for conducting and reporting hypothesis testing research social science research has recently been subject to considerable criticism regarding the validity and power of empirical tests published in leading journals and business scholarship is no exception transparency and replicability of empirical findings are essential to build a cumulative body of scholarly knowledge yet current practices are under increased scrutiny to achieve these objectives jibs is therefore discussing and revising its editorial practices to enhance the validity of empirical research in this editorial we reflect on best practices with respect to conducting reporting and discussing the results of quantitative hypothesis testing research and we develop guidelines for authors to enhance the rigor of their empirical work this will not only help readers to assess empirical evidence comprehensively but also enable subsequent research to build a cumulative body of empirical knowledge

an integrated product planning model for pricing and bundle selection using markov decision processes and data envelope analysis abstract when bundling products during the product planning stage there are a number of possible combinations that can be offered to customers consider a firm that offers n distinctive products then there are 2 n n 1 possible bundling combinations now if we wish to make pricing and bundle selection decisions keeping in my mind limited inventory and a finite time horizon then the size of the state space could be very large and finding an optimal solution could be impossible to tackle this issue we formulate an integrated model that utilizes a markov decision process and data envelope analysis bundle selections are made using data envelope analysis in each decision epoch once the efficient bundles are selected they are priced by solving a markov decision process using dynamic programming numerical examples are solved to exhibit the model s potential in solving real world problems

research note overselling with opportunistic cancellations in many business sectors such as airlines hotels trucking and media advertising customers arrivals and willingness to pay are uncertain managers must decide whether to quote a price low enough to guarantee early sales or to quote a higher price and risk that some units remain unsold in allocating capacity they face a trade off between two types of potential losses 1 yield loss selling at a low price and losing a better price later and 2 spoilage loss waiting in vain to sell at a high price and losing the opportunity of an earlier low price offer yield loss means that consumers who value the product most do not get to use it and spoilage loss means that valuable products are wasted because no consumers get to use them sellers typically hedge against the risk of spoilage loss by selling some units early at low prices and against the risk of yield loss by blocking some units in hope of selling them later at a high price in this paper we show that the use of overselling with opportunistic cancellations can increase expected profits and improve allocation efficiency under this strategy the seller deliberately oversells capacity if high paying consumers show up even when capacity is already fully booked the seller then cancels the sale to some low paying customers while providing them with appropriate compensation we derive a new rule to optimally allocate capacity to consumers when overselling is used and show that overselling helps limit the potential yield and spoilage losses yield loss is reduced because the seller can capture more high paying customers by compensating low paying customers who give up their right to the product spoilage loss is reduced because the compensation decreases the price spread perceived by the seller and as a result the seller is less anxious to speculate and block units overselling with opportunistic cancellations assures that the product will be sold to consumers who value it most this means that everybody wins and resources are allocated more efficiently than in conventional selling

from the editors student samples in international business research the jibs statement of editorial policy states that empirical submissions utilizing undergraduate student samples are usually discouraged wording is important here usually does not imply always this statement suggests that while student samples are appropriate in principle undergraduate ones are not except in unusual situations the purpose of this from the editors column is to discuss the pros and cons of student samples in international business ib research are student samples appropriate for developing and testing ib theories when are student samples appropriate and when are they not appropriate is there a difference between undergraduate and graduate samples what are the best practices this editorial is intended to provide ib researchers with guidelines as to when student samples and which types of student samples are appropriate in ib research

from the editors experimental designs in international business research the question that motivated this editorial was where are the ib experiments the short answer is that experiments are largely absent from the ib literature and we argue that they shouldn t be experimental methods offer the opportunity to significantly improve the evidence for the causal relationships in international business research in a variety of ways in this article we highlight the value and limitations of experiments in ib research and explain the basic tenets of experimental design and thinking with the goal of encouraging the submission of more papers with an experimental design to jibs

monopolist pricing with dynamic demand and production cost this paper deals with pricing of a new product over time by a monopolist who maximizes the discounted profit stream the interdependency of cost and demand on cumulative production makes the problem inherently dynamic cost is assumed to be declining with cumulative production learning curve effect while demand is a function of price and cumulative sales representing word of mouth and saturation effects the paper addresses this problem in a general framework that includes several previous results as special cases and provides new insights in other situations while the learning curve and word of mouth effect cause prices to be lower than the price that maximizes immediate revenues the saturation factor has the opposite effect the price path over time is affected by these factors and the interest rate we characterize the price path under several different situations and interpret the results for policy guidelines