bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Analysis of Consumer Response to Marketing Strategies
Authors: Hauser John R. , Wisniewski Kenneth J. 
Published: November 2008

This paper develops a methodology for modeling consumer response that integrates previous research in stochastic brand selection, diffusion of innovation, test market analysis, and new product design. The methodology makes it practical to extend brand selection models to include diffusion phenomena such as awareness, trial, and information flow. Purchase timing and brand selection are interdependent and both phenomena depend jointly on managerial controls such as advertising, coupons, price-off promotion, product positioning, and consumer characteristics. Within this general structure, we provide practical estimation procedures (a least squares approximation to the maximum likelihood estimates) to determine the parameters which link managerial controls to consumer response. Closed form solutions are derived for cumulative awareness, cumulative trial, penetration, expected sales, and purchases due to promotion—all as a function of time. We also provide simplified expressions for equilibrium (t → ∞) market share. Tradeoffs among complexity of the diffusion process, number of managerial variables, nonstationarity, complexity of purchase timing, consumer segmentation, and sample size are made explicit so that the marketing scientist can customize his analyses to the managerial problems that he faces. The effects of sample size, data interval frequency, and collinearity in the explanatory variables are investigated with simulations based on a five-state consumer response process which depends on 8–10 marketing variables. The paper closes with a brief description of the application and predictive test of a consumer response model based on the methodology.
Note—Efficient Heuristic Algorithms for Positive 0-1 Polynomial Programming Problems
Authors: Granot Frieda 
Published: November 2008

We develop in this paper two types of heuristic methods for solving the positive 0-1 polynomial programming (PP) problem of finding a 0-1 vector x that maximizes cTx subject to f(x) ≤ b where c, b ≥ 0 and f is an m-vector of polynomials with non-negative coefficients. The various heuristics were first tested on randomly generated sparse problems of up to 50 variables and 50 constraints, and their performance in terms of computational time and effectiveness was investigated. The results were very encouraging. Optimal solutions were consistently obtained by some of the heuristic methods in over 50% of the problems solved. The effectiveness was on the average better than 99% and no less than 96.5%. The computational time using these heuristics is on the average 5% of the time required to solve the PP problems to optimality. Some results for very sparse problems with up to 1,000 variables and 200 constraints are also reported.
A Nonsequential R & D Search Model
Authors: Lee Tom K. 
Published: November 2008

Managers of research and development (R&D) programs are often confronted with questions of what determines R&D spending (i.e. R&D search intensity) and when R&D spending is unprofitable (i.e. Reservation Technology Level). Three determinants of R&D spending are identified: the current technology level, the length of decision horizon, and basic research. Comparative statics of the effects of these determinants of R&D spending are discussed. The higher the current technology level, the less intensive is R&D search because, ceterus paribus, the lower the probability of finding a better technology. The longer the decision horizon, the more intensive is R&D search because fruitful R&D results can be applied to more time periods and generate more present value profits. Finally, technological opportunities can be improved via basic research. The improvement of technological opportunities in turn spurs R&D search. Existence of a Reservation Technology Level (RTL) is established. It constitutes a stopping rule for R&D search. Whenever the current technology level is greater than or equal to RTL, R&D search stops; otherwise R&D search continues. One interesting property of RTL is that it is strictly less than the highest possible technology level. Thus the economic limit of R&D (RTL) differs from the technological limit of R&D. Ex ante, an R&D program manager should not press for the technological limit of R&D once the current technology level exceeds or equals RTL. However, ex post, one may end up with a technology level greater than RTL. Moreover, R&D search may be resumed in an abandoned R&D area if (i) interest rate declines, (ii) R&D quasi-fixed cost reduces, or (iii) basic research provides a favorable shape-preserving shift of the distribution of technological opportunities.
An Econometric Study of Recruitment Marketing in the U.S. Navy
Authors: Hanssens Dominique M. , Levien Henry A. 
Published: November 2008

Since the abolishment of the mandatory draft the U.S. Navy, along with the other services, has engaged in aggressive marketing strategies in order to attract a sufficient number of qualified individuals to volunteer enlistment. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of these efforts, primarily advertising and personal selling, within the general framework of the recruiting environment. The study uses insights into the recruiting process, provided by the Navy Recruiting Command, along with principles of economics and marketing to develop an econometric model of recruiting performance. The parameters of the model are then estimated on a monthly data base for the 43 Navy Recruiting Districts, from January 1976 to December 1978. The objective of the model is descriptive, i.e., it quantifies the effects of various environmental and marketing variables on three measures of recruiting performance: nationally generated leads, contracts for the delayed-entry program and direct-shipment contracts. The enlistment contracts refer to nonprior service males between 17 and 21 years old. The environmental variables in the models include economic factors such as unemployment rate and civilian income, sociodemographic variables such as urbanization, the proportion of blacks and high-school seniors in the target market, and local youth attitudes toward the Navy, and time-related factors such as seasonally and the GI Bill. The marketing efforts are national advertising expenditures in seven media, local advertising expenditures, recruiter strength and recruiter aid expenditures. The econometric models reveal that both environmental and marketing variables had significant impact on variations in recruiting performance over time and across recruiting districts. The specific response effects for leads and contracts are reported in the “discussion of results” section. The “conclusions” section integrates several of these results along three dimensions: the relative influence of environmental versus marketing variables on recruiting performance, differences in the response structures for leads, delayed-entry and direct-shipment contracts, the relative effectiveness of media advertising and personal selling.
Optimal Entering Rules for a Customer with Wait Option at an M/G/1 Queue
Authors: Mandelbaum Avishai , Yechiali Uri 
Published: November 2008

A “smart” customer arrives at an M/G/1 queue. While every other arrival joins the system unconditionally, our customer is allowed to choose among three alternatives: (i) he may Enter the queue and stay there until his service is completed, (ii) he may Leave the system right away, or (iii) he may Wait outside the queue. If he Enters or Leaves the system, his decision is final and no further actions are taken. If he chooses to Wait, he makes a new decision at the next service completion where he may, again, select one of the three options: Enter, Leave, or Wait. For a linear cost structure we show that for any n-period horizon (0 < n < ∞) the individual customer's optimal strategy is a 3-region (possibly degenerate) policy by which he Enters a small queue, Leaves a large one and Waits when the queue is of an intermediate size. We also give a necessary and sufficient condition for the Wait option to exist. The special M/M/1 queue is further analyzed by allowing the Waiting customer to make decisions at instants of customers' arrivals as well as at instants of service completion. In this case, too, the optimality of the 3-region policy is derived and the “smart” customer dichotomy is recognized as the Gambler's Ruin problem. Computational procedures are developed and numerical results are presented for commonly used service time distributions.
Rolling Horizon Procedures for the Facilities in Series Inventory Model with Nested Schedules
Authors: Chand Suresh 
Published: November 2008

This paper develops rolling horizon procedures for solving a multistage inventory problem with facilities-in-series. In such an inventory system, we assume that the raw material is processed successively through several facilities before reaching the customer. The input to a facility comes from one preceding facility (or the raw material) and the output from the facility goes to one succeeding facility (or the customer). The rolling horizon procedures form rolling production schedules by solving a finite horizon multiperiod problem and implementing only the first period's decisions. One period later, the multiperiod problem is updated as better forecasts become available and the process is repeated. The paper considers a simple case when holding costs are linear, production costs on a facility consist of a setup cost and a constant marginal cost of production, and production and holding costs are stationary in time. Demand is allowed to be nonstationary in time. Several rolling horizon procedures are developed for this case and a computational comparison is given.
The Budget-Limit Effect on the Delegation of the Capital Budgeting Authority: The Case of Sequential and Frequent Investment Decisions
Authors: Sharon Ed M. 
Published: November 2008

Publishing houses, Savings & Loans and other business firms make frequent long-term investment decisions, and in sequence. Typically they encounter more short-lived investment opportunities than their budget can accommodate. Some will even go out of their way to broaden their horizon of choices. As a result, one will find some organizations which satisfy their needs by choosing opportunities from a relatively narrow horizon, and others which are engaged in an extensive evaluation process whose objective is to gradually narrow down the options available. The latter effort typically covers various layers in the organizations, both at the division (branch) and headquarters (HQ). Common sense may suggest that the more limited capital resources are, the larger should be the set of explored opportunities, and the more careful (centralized) should the decision making process be. A quantitative approach to the problem is presented here, which captures the relationships between investment-opportunities-horizon “size” and “quality,” the value of funds to be invested, the cost of narrowing the options down, and the limits to centralization/decentralization, all under a limited budget. It demonstrates that under certain conditions the intuitively optimal mode of centralization becomes less than optimal, and decentralization is the rational and consistent mode. Other difficult questions such as “how broad is a broad enough horizon of choices?” are addressed.
A Spatial Model of Effectiveness Criteria: Towards a Competing Values Approach to Organizational Analysis
Authors: Quinn Robert E. , Rohrbaugh John 
Published: November 2008

This paper presents a framework for organizational analysis. The empirically derived approach does not emerge from the observation of actual organizations, but from the ordering, through multivariate techniques, of criteria that organizational theorists and researchers use to evaluate the performance of organizations. In a two-stage study, organizational theorists and researchers were impaneled to make judgments about the similarity of commonly used effectiveness criteria. The model derived from the second group closely replicated the first, and in convergence suggested that three value dimensions (control-flexibility, internal-external, and means-ends) underlie conceptualizations of organizational effectiveness. When these value dimensions are juxtaposed, a spatial model emerges. The model serves a number of important functions. It organizes the organizational effectiveness literature, indicates which concepts are most central to the construct of organizational effectiveness, makes clear the values in which the concepts are embedded, demonstrates that the effectiveness literature and the general literature on organizational analysis are analogues of one another, and provides an overarching framework to guide subsequent efforts at organizational assessment.
On the Diffusion of Computer Terminals in an Established Engineering Environment
Authors: Randles F. 
Published: November 2008

The introduction of new technologies in existing administrative and technical organizations usually represents a significant investment in equipment and training. A prudent manager will attempt to acquire the equipment needed fast enough to encourage its use while avoiding the inefficiencies of under-utilization. This paper presents a method of applying a mathematical model to the specific problem of predicting the approximate rate at which additional computer terminals should be acquired. The model used is in the form of a “logistics” or “diffusion” function. To apply the model to the Aerospace division of a company, a “calibration” of that organization was required. A questionnaire on the use of hand calculators was submitted to a sample group. At the time of the study, hand calculators had virtually displaced slide rules and desk top adding machines, and about 15 percent of the organization was competing for available terminals of the central computer system. Increased use of terminals and on-line computing was anticipated. The response of the organization to the hand calculator innovation was established by determining a “logistics” or “diffusion” function to fit the sample data. The function was modified to accommodate the additional complexity of the more sophisticated computational capability and then used to predict terminal requirements. This study was undertaken to satisfy a management need to plan for its investment in terminals. At the introduction of an interactive computing system, terminals were requested for individuals or projects. As the number of terminals increased, the number of qualifed users increased faster, and requests for terminals became more numerous. Justifications frequently appeared to be overlapping or duplicative. At this point, a better perspective of the money needed was required, and the study was initiated. The results of the study, together with user requirements data, have been used to expedite the acquisition of terminals.
State of the Art—Location on Networks: A Survey. Part I: The p-Center and p-Median Problems
Authors: Tansel Barbaros C. , Francis Richard L. , Lowe Timothy J. 
Published: November 2008

Network location problems occur when new facilities are to be located on a network. The network of interest may be a road network, an air transport network, a river network, or a network of shipping lanes. For a given network location problem, the new facilities are often idealized as points, and may be located anywhere on the network; constraints may be imposed upon the problem so that new facilities are not too far from existing facilities. Usually some objective function is to be minimized. For single objective function problems, typically the objective is to minimize either a sum of transport costs proportional to network travel distances between existing facilities and closest new facilities, or a maximum of “losses” proportional to such travel distances, or the total number of new facilities to be located. There is also a growing interest in multiobjective network location problems. Of the approximately 100 references we list, roughly 60 date from 1978 or later; we focus upon work which deals directly with the network of interest, and which exploits the network structure. The principal structure exploited to date is that of a tree, i.e., a connected network without cycles. Tree-like networks may be encountered when having cycles is very expensive, as with portions of interstate highway systems. Further, simple distribution systems with a single distributor at the “hub” can often be modeled as star-like trees. With trees, “reasonable” functions of distance are often convex, whereas for a cyclic network such functions of distance are usually nonconvex. Convexity explains, to some extent, the tractability of tree network location problems.
Measuring the Effects of a University Planning Decision Aid
Authors: Dickmeyer Nathan 
Published: November 2008

University administrators involved in budget planning must trade off variables such as faculty size, faculty salary increments, tuition increases, and investment in new initiatives. TRADES is a computer-based, interactive financial model designed to assist in making trade-offs and finding preferred feasible solutions. This paper presents the results of an experiment to test the significance of preference changes resulting from the use of the TRADES model. In this experiment, 38 subjects were divided into two groups, one provided with TRADES and the other only with a printed university projected forecast. The subjects were asked to rank-order 27 different five-year financial policies. The two groups were compared using the preference function assessment technique of Srinivasan and Shocker. The policy preference changes by TRADES users were found to be significantly greater than the preference changes by nonusers. That is, the experience of using the TRADES model to assess budget policy altered the choice of preferred policy. The implication of this experiment is that the preference functions evolve as better understanding is reached of trade-offs and constraints. Therefore, simply eliciting preference functions and then running a model is not sufficient in situations in which learning can take place.
A Differential Games Solution to a Model of Competition Between a Thief and the Police
Authors: Feichtinger Gustav 
Published: November 2008

This paper contains an extension of an optimal control model considered by Sethi (Sethi, S. P. 1979. Optimal Pilfenng policies for dynamic continuous thieves. Management Sci. 25 (6, June) 535–542.) to a differential game situation. It is assumed that Sethi's concave thief, i.e., a risk-averter, plays against the police, whose objective function incorporates convex costs of law enforcement, a one-shot utility at the time of arrest and a continuous utility or cost rate after the thief is arrested. The probability that the thief is caught by time t is influenced not only by the pilfering rate (as is the case in Sethi's model) but also by the instrumental variable of the police, namely its rate of law enforcement. Our aim is to analyze noncooperative Nash solutions of the differential game sketched above. Due to the special structure of the Hamiltonians, a system of two nonlinear differential equations for the control variables of both players can be derived. The system is solved explicitly under special assumptions. It is shown that the optimal rate of law enforcement of police increases monotonically whereas for the Nash-optimal pilfering rate three cases may be characterized in which increase, decrease or constancy occur. Thus the Nash-optimal solutions show in each case monotonic behavior, i.e., changes in trend never occur. Moreover, the dependency of the terminal values of control can be described. Finally, an interpretation of the model as market entrance game is sketched.
Improving the Consistency of Conditional Probability Assessments for Forecasting and Decision Making
Authors: Moskowitz Herbert , Sarin Rakesh K. 
Published: November 2008

“Public agencies are very keen on amassing statistics—they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.” (Sir Josiah Stamp) The assessment of the conditional probabilities of events is useful and needed for forecasting, planning, and decision making. In this paper the difficulties associated with the assessment of these conditional probabilities are examined. The necessary and sufficient conditions that the elicited information on conditional probabilities must satisfy are evaluated against actual assessments in several different controlled settings. A high frequency of implicit violations of the probability calculus was observed. The consistency of the assessments is affected by the causal/diagnostic and positive/negative relationships of the events. Use of a judgmental aid in the form of a joint probability table reduces the number of inconsistent responses significantly. Using the probability axioms, it is also shown that only the first order conditional probabilities need be assessed, as higher order probabilities are robust to the unconditional and first order conditional assessments.
Supply, Storage, and Service Reliability Decisions by Gas Distribution Utilities: A Chance-Constrained Approach
Authors: Guldmann Jean-Michel 
Published: November 2008

This paper explores the trade-offs among purchases, storage, and service reliability decisions faced by natural gas distribution utilities. The short-term demand for natural gas fluctuates because of the weather. To encourage load leveling, the pipeline transmission companies that supply the utilities use a demand contract that charges utilities based on their peak day needs and often charge for a minimum daily purchase requirement whether that purchase is made or not. The policy variables available to the utility include increasing its storage capacity and providing interruptible service to some customers thereby lowering reliability of service. There are also technological constraints on the maximum storage gas flows. To explore these trade-offs, a chance-constrained cost minimization problem is formulated. Two decision rules for gas purchases and storage operation are examined. In these rules, an initial decision is made at the beginning of each month about either the level of purchases or the level of storage flow for that month. The two rules differ in that the supplier is assumed either to be able to adjust sales during the month up to the limit set by the demand contract or to be inflexible. In the latter case, storage must provide flexibility for meeting demand. Solutions have been obtained under the conditions that apply to the East Ohio Gas Company. A large number of cases have been considered for several levels of increased storage capacity, decreased reliability of service, and conversion capability from gas to oil for commercial and industrial customers. The results show the breakeven points in storage costs under which various policies become feasible and the savings that can be achieved.
Thoughts on Linear Programming and Automation
Authors: Dantzig George B. 
Published: November 2008

We have all become increasingly aware of the postwar trend towards automation, which is an advanced form of mechanization. Mechanization's purpose is to relieve man of certain duties using human energy for power; automation's purpose is to relieve him of certain mental tasks and the related physical tasks necessary for their expression. Most of us sense that electronic computers, which are themselves examples of automation, will play an important role in the mechanization of control processes of the routine type. We note again that linear programming makes it possible to mechanize part of the higher order controls. It appears likely that as this mechanization becomes more accepted, it will be linked more and more to tighter production control. In a word, automation may become super-automation.