bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A Model for Relating Advertising Media Exposures to Purchase Incidence Behavior Patterns
Authors: Zufryden Fred S. 
Published: November 2008

A stochastic model is proposed to study the effect of advertising on consumer purchase dynamics by specifically relating the distribution of exposures, from a brand's media schedule, to brand purchase incidence behavior patterns over time. The approach is based on underlying individual consumer behavior assumptions that reflect the dynamics of exposures to advertising and brand purchase behavior, conditional on the level of advertising exposure received. Moreover, a population-based model is derived by aggregating over individual consumers who may be heterogeneous with respect to exposure probability, purchase rate, and sensitivity to advertising. The approach can be implemented with experimentally-based data and estimation procedures that seek to isolate the effect of advertising and also permit the evaluation of advertising influences on purchase behavior patterns. For the purpose of model implementation, parameter estimation procedures are outlined and applied to empirically evaluate three alternative model versions that reflect different advertising exposure behavior assumptions. Both the goodness of fit results presented and prior empirical experience, in connection with past applications to TV media schedule analysis, lend to the model's validity. The paper concludes with an appraisal of the potential strengths and limitations of the proposed model as a tool for advertising media analysis and planning in practice.
The Effect of Business Interdependencies on Product R&D-Intensive Business Performance
Authors: Horwitch Mel , Thietart Raymond A. 
Published: November 2008

One of the major decisions that firms face regarding R&D-intensive businesses is a structural one: establishing the appropriate level of internal strategic interdependency within and among business units. The current discussion over the effectiveness of creating small, independent, and entrepreneurial venture units in multi-business corporations is part of this larger structural concern. The aim of the present research is to study the efficacy of different structural linkages for achieving market share and ROI objectives in product R&D-intensive businesses. The study focuses on interdependencies between business units in product R&D-intensive businesses that produce consumer products or industrial products. A sample of 641 businesses (221 consumer products and 420 industrial goods) is drawn from the PIMS data base. A cluster analysis is run to identify natural groups of homogeneous businesses. For each of the seven identified groups (established suppliers, fast movers, high-tech job shops, stalled giants, established diversifiers, dominant specialists, and laggers) a multi-way analysis of variance is performed to study the influence of various interdependencies measured in term of vertical integration, shared facilities, and shared marketing on two criteria of performance: market share and ROI. The findings indicate, first, that the interdependencies required to achieve high performance are contingent upon the nature of the product R&D-intensive business and its environmental characteristics. Second, for a given business configuration, high performance interdependencies are influenced by the type of performance objectives selected by the business, such as market share or profitability. Finally, the results imply that a multi-business corporation which possesses a portfolio of product R&D-intensive businesses probably requires a more diverse set of interdependencies than, for example, simply mainstream centralized industrial R&D organization, on the one hand, and independent entrepreneurial units on the other hand. Effective competition for a firm with diverse R&D-intensive businesses may often call for a capability to support concurrently multiple levels of internal interdependencies and to reject, create, or modify this set of interdependencies as the situation warrants.
Manufacturing Strategy, Environmental Uncertainty and Performance: A Path Analytic Model
Authors: Swamidass Paul M. , Newell William T. 
Published: November 2008

In recent years, researchers and practitioners are paying increasing attention to the phenomenon of manufacturing strategy. However, there exists no formal theory of manufacturing strategy to explain the phenomenon. There is a real need for empirical studies for the development of such a theory. This study takes a step in that direction by clarifying, organizing and integrating terms and concepts relevant to manufacturing strategy in the process of conducting an empirical investigation of key manufacturing strategy variables. The empirical section of this study based on data gathered from 35 manufacturers found that environmental uncertainty influenced manufacturing strategy variables such as Manufacturing Flexibility, and the Role of Manufacturing Managers in Strategic Decision Making. The manufacturing strategy variables, in turn, influenced business performance.
An Approach for Confirmatory Measurement and Structural Equation Modeling of Organizational Properties
Authors: Anderson James C. 
Published: November 2008

A crucial undertaking in research on organizations is to obtain valid estimates of the organization-level constructs and their relationships to one another. One organizational research methodology has multiple individuals within each firm act as informants and report their perceptions of these constructs. Drawing upon past work, a comprehensive, confirmatory measurement approach is presented that enables delineation of the organizational constructs of interest from potential sources of measurement error in multiple informant reports. A confirmatory composition model first specifies the relationship between measurements taken from multiple informants and organization-level indicators of organizational constructs. This model provides an explicit representation of the informants' perceptual agreement with respect to each measure, the bias in their responses due to their particular perspectives on the firm, and random measurement error. Measures which demonstrate significant perceptual agreement across informants are retained as organization-level indicators. A confirmatory measurement model is then presented that relates the defined indicators to their posited underlying organizational constructs, with the constructs allowed to freely inter-correlate. Finally, a structural model relates the constructs to one another as specified by some theory. The structure model in conjunction with the measurement model permits a comprehensive assessment of the construct validity of the organizational properties. An extension of the approach is also discussed where the assessment of commonalities and differences between different kinds of organizations with respect to some theoretical model is of interest. An illustration of the confirmatory approach is given, drawing upon data from a study of distributor firm and manufacturer firm working relationships.
Entry and Learning
Authors: Devinney Timothy M. 
Published: November 2008

This paper shows the difficulties associated with discerning the impact of learning and pressures of competitive entry on the price and cost of production in commodity markets. It shows that the patterns of price and cost movements over time will be dramatically affected by the entry of new competitors. If firms possess U-shaped average cost curves, entry alone can generate price and cost declines which look like learning induced reductions. Alternatively, cost increases may occur even when learning is quite strong. This research has dramatic managerial and empirical implications. Managers, operating in highly competitive environments subject to rapid entry, must put more emphasis on the role of their own day-to-day decisions in affecting cost. The fact that costs have declined may have nothing to do with learning but may be driven by their reactions to competitive pressures. Investigators empirically estimating learning curves must also be cognizant of the role entry plays in affecting cost. Simple comparisons of cost or price versus accumulated production, so common in applied studies, seriously confounds the role of entry and the consequent managerial decisions in determining accumulated production. It is argued that a more careful examination of entry needs to be taken into account when evaluating the role of learning and the estimating cost curves.
Eliminating Inventory in a Series Facility Production System
Authors: Zangwill Willard I. 
Published: November 2008

Zero inventory (ZI) and the related concepts of Just in Time and Kanban are innovative and powerful means to improve production efficiency. This paper applies these concepts to a series facility production system and, in particular, identifies which facilities will never hold inventory irrespective of product demand. Pinpointing beforehand that certain facilities will have no inventory can simplify such strategic decisions as facility design, site location, and space utilization, plus it eases production scheduling. Next, a procedure is developed which increases the number of facilities that will never hold inventory. This procedure implements the ZI philosophy of cutting set up costs to increase efficiency. The results of this paper impact three major areas of production research: (1) strategy and planning—by detecting beforehand facilities that need never hold inventory irrespective of demand; (2) operations—by simplifying day to day production scheduling; and (3) productivity improvement—by cutting set up costs to enhance efficiency.
One-Switch Utility Functions and a Measure of Risk
Authors: Bell David E. 
Published: November 2008

Consider the relative attractiveness to a decision maker of two financial gambles as the wealth of that individual varies. It may seem reasonable that either one alternative should be preferred for all wealth levels or that there exists a unique critical wealth level at which the decision maker switches from preferring one alternative to the other. Decreasing risk aversion is not sufficient for this property to hold: we identify the small class of utility functions for which it does. We show how the property leads naturally to a measure of risk. The results of this paper apply equally well to discounting functions for cash flows: one-switch discount functions permit at most one change in preference between cash flows as all payoffs are deferred in time.
Decision Analysis: Practice and Promise
Authors: Howard Ronald A. 
Published: November 2008

Decision analysis stands on a foundation of hundreds of years of philosophical and practical thought about uncertainty and decision-making. The accomplishments and promise of the field are impressive, yet it has not become commonplace even in very important decisions. While human nature may pose an ultimate limitation, maintaining clarity of concept and exploiting progress in the realms of scope, skill, and efficiency should lead to more widespread use. A central conceptual distinction is that between normative and descriptive views of decision-making. We discuss the importance of maintaining this distinction in the face of attempts to compromise. The procedures for formulating, eliciting, evaluating, and appraising the decision problem are all experiencing major improvements. The strategy-generation table helps in finding creative alternatives. Decision quality concepts permit us to assure both effectiveness and efficiency in analyzing decision problems. The influence diagram provides new clarity to the conversation between decision-maker and analyst, allowing representations that are both easily understandable and mathematically consistent. The clarity test makes sure we know what we are talking about regardless of what we are saying about it. Direct and indirect values illuminate preferences. Generic risk attitude considerations indicate how to relate corporate risk tolerance to the financial measures of the corporation. Spreadsheet, decision tree, and influence diagram programs speed evaluation. Intelligent decision systems realized in computers offer promise of providing the benefits of decision analysis on a broader scale than ever before. Decision analysis is now poised for a breakthrough in its usefulness to human beings.
Lagrangian Relaxation Methods for Solving the Minimum Fleet Size Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem with Time Windows
Authors: Desrosiers Jacques , Sauvé Michel , Soumis François 
Published: November 2008

We consider the problem of finding the minimum number of vehicles required to visit once a set of nodes subject to time window constraints, for a homogeneous fleet of vehicles located at a common depot. This problem can be formulated as a network flow problem with additional time constraints. The paper presents an optimal solution approach using the augmented Lagrangian method. Two Lagrangian relaxations are studied. In the first one, the time constraints are relaxed producing network subproblems which are easy to solve, but the bound obtained is weak. In the second relaxation, constraints requiring that each node be visited are relaxed producing shortest path subproblems with time window constraints and integrality conditions. The bound produced is always excellent. Numerical results for several actual school busing problems with up to 223 nodes are discussed. Comparisons with a set partitioning formulation solved by column generation are given.
The Effect of Unions on Productivity: U.S. Surface Mining of Coal
Authors: Byrnes Patricia , Färe Rolf , Grosskopf Shawna , Knox Lovell C. A. 
Published: November 2008

The purpose of this paper is to compare the abilities of two competing analytical techniques—mathematical programming and statistical regression—to shed light on the union/nonunion productivity differential in U.S. surface coal mining. The programming approach has the virtues of being nonparametric (and thus extremely flexible) and of being able to provide a decomposition of productivity differentials into three components—differences in technical efficiency, differences in scale efficiency, and differences in congestion. Identification of these three components provides an aid to management in its search for the sources of, and remedies for, productivity gaps. The econometric approach, on the other hand, is neither flexible nor does it provide such a decomposition; its chief virtue lies in the fact that, being stochastic, it allows for the presence of noise and measurement error that plagues most if not all empirical data. Thus, the two approaches have complementary virtues. The two techniques are used to investigate productivity in two samples of U.S. surface coal mines. The programming approach finds a large and significant positive union/nonunion productivity differential. This differential is due primarily to greater congestion occurring in the smaller nonunion mines in one sample, and to scale inefficiency in the smaller nonunion mines in the other sample. The econometric analysis finds nearly the same union/nonunion productivity differential, but sheds no light on the composition of, and thus the cure for, the differential.
Airline Safety: The Last Decade
Authors: Barnett Arnold , Higgins Mary K. 
Published: November 2008

The paper presents safety data for the period 1977–86 from more than 30 U.S. domestic airlines and 80 international flag carriers. These statistics are examined in conjunction with others from an earlier MIT study about the previous two decades. The primary safety measure used is “death risk per flight,” which weights each fatal accident by the proportion of passengers killed and exploits statistical evidence that the risk arising from a nonstop flight is uncorrelated with its route length. The main conclusions of the analysis are: (1) The U.S. domestic trunklines can continue to lay claim to being the safest group of airlines in the world. In 1977–86, the death risk per flight on these carriers was roughly one in eleven million. This represents a factor-of-four improvement since the early 1970's and a factor-of-ten improvement since the early 1960's. (2) But while U.S. jet travel has become safer in recent years, the improvement would probably have been greater still in the absence of airline deregulation. The reason for this assessment relates to the new jet carriers spawned by deregulation. Most such carriers have perfect safety records so far but, collectively, the recent entrants averaged twelve times the death risk per flight in 1979–86 of the established trunklines. This statistically significant excess cut by nearly one-half the recent progress in domestic jet safety. (3) International air travel was also far safer in the last decade than in preceding ones. But the flag carriers of Communist bloc and Third-World nations averaged eight times the death risk per flight as those from industrialized First-World nations. This factor-of-eight discrepancy, which has persisted with little change throughout the last quarter century, cannot be explained by differences in route structure.
Maintaining Project Networks in Automated Artificial Intelligence Planning
Authors: Bell Colin E. 
Published: November 2008

AI automated plan synthesis programs (“planners”) typically represent plans as a partially ordered network whose nodes are instants in time and whose arcs are precedence constraints. Such representations are essentially PERT charts. This paper provides an introduction to AI planners and illustrates the fact that many such PERT chart representations are created by a planner as it attempts to find a suitable plan. A planner's search must be guided if it is to produce suitable plans in realistic problem domains. One form of guidance is the imposition of constraints which must be satisfied by a valid plan. This paper concentrates on representing and reasoning about such constraints. Successful planning in some domains, e.g. job-shop scheduling, requires the recognition and satisfaction of constraints which prevent the simultaneous use of a shared resource by multiple agents. Such requirements can be expressed as disjunctive precedence constraints. In addition, the search for a valid plan is often structured so that rough plans are successively refined into plans with increased detail. In this refinement process, new constraints are often discovered. It should therefore be easy to add such new constraints. Finally, it is helpful to be able to express upper bound constraints on the elapsed time between two nodes in a PERT chart representation of a plan. Thus, this paper reports on knowledge representation and reasoning processes which facilitate: (1) disjunctive constraints, (2) the introduction of new constraints, and (3) upper bound constraints. A planner must backtrack when it is evident that further refinement of its current skeletal plan would be fruitless. Such an inconsistent state can be recognized when a plan's PERT chart representation contains an illegal cycle of positive overall length. When backtracking is required, dependency-directed backtracking is facilitated by recording “Nogood sets” of arcs whose simultaneous presence would result in such an illegal cycle. By using dependency-directed backtracking, chronological backtracking can be avoided.
Analyzing Trade-Offs Between Machine Investment and Utilization
Authors: Vander Veen David J. , Jordan William C. 
Published: November 2008

Analyzing machine investment opportunities from a systems perspective requires an understanding of interdependencies between machine investment and utilization decisions. Machine investment decisions involve determining the number of machines to purchase and their types. Machine utilization decisions involve determining part allocations and production cycles. Interdependencies between these decisions result in trade-offs between investment and operating costs. This paper develops an analytical approach for studying machine investment opportunities in a broad systems context. It begins with a discussion of the interdependencies between investment and utilization decisions. The focus of this research and a review of existing literature related to machine investment decisions are then discussed. Next a mathematical model that quantifies these interdependencies is formulated. The paper ends with a simple example that demonstrates the usefulness of the model and highlights the importance of using a systems approach. The main contribution of this work is the simultaneous consideration of trade-offs between machine investment and utilization decisions.
A Variant of the Conditional Expectation Variance Reduction Technique and Its Application to the Simulation of the GI/G/1 Queues
Authors: Minh Do Le 
Published: November 2008

In this paper, we introduce the Partial Conditional Expectation (PCE) variance reduction technique, derived by modifying the well-known Conditional Expectation (CE) technique to make it more widely applicable. We apply this PCE technique to obtain a consistent estimator for the expected waiting time in queue in a single-server queueing system. We then derive an improved version of this estimator, taking into consideration further properties of the system. Empirical results show that these two estimators always perform better than the classical estimator. When the traffic intensity is low, the variance reductions obtained by these two estimators become very significant.