Consumer Behavior

We consider a production/distribution system represented by a general directed acyclic network. Each node is associated with a specific "product" at a given location and/or production stage. An arc (i, j) indicates that item i is used to "produce" item j. External demands may occur at any of the network's nodes. These demands occur continuously at item-specific constant rates. Components may be assembled in any given proportions. The cost structure consists of inventory carrying, viable, and fixed production/distribution costs.

This paper addresses a class of single-machine scheduling problems with a common due-date for all jobs, and general earliness and tardiness costs. We show that a class of simple, polynomial, "greedy-type" heuristics can be used to generate close-to-optimal schedules. An extensive numerical study exhibits small optimality gaps. For convex cost structures, we establish that the worst-case optimality gap is bounded by e−i ≈ 0.36, if the due-date is non-restrictive.

Polling system models are extensively used to model a large variety of computer and communication networks as well as production and service systems in which multiple customer classes or a number of distinct items compete for the capacity of a common server or production facility. In this paper we describe an efficient approximation method for the steady state distributions of the queue sizes and waiting times. This method is highly accurate as demonstrated by an extensive numerical study.

The authors examine how new brand entries affect consumers' consideration sets. A within-subject longitudinal experiment examines several entry positions into existing markets. The results suggest that new brand entries produce changes in consideration sets toward dominating, compromise, and assimilated brands, away from extreme brands in two-brand markets, and toward dominating and away from extreme brands in eight-brand markets. These results are confirmed by a second experiment that utilizes a between-subject design and markets with six existing brands.

This study examines how advertising budget setting, framed as a prisoner's dilemma, is affected by information on the competitive situation and characteristics of the decision maker. Hypotheses are tested using experiments in which subjects set advertising budgets. Results indicate that subjects were generally competitive, but also based their strategy selections on what they expected their opponents to do, what their opponents did last time, whether the competitive relationship was expected to continue, market shares, and whether the subject's profit objectives were short- or long-term.

The nature of competitive equilibrium is investigated for brands competing in a multi-attribute product space when consumer preferences for product attributes follow nonuniform distributions. Subgame-perfect equilibria are established in a 2-stage game, where firms choose positions in the first stage and prices in the 2nd stage. Two types of entry scenarios are investigated. In the first, the number of brands is given exogenously, and all of them choose positions simultaneously.

Affluent investor mutual fund decisions are probed. Several different investor profiles are developed from data on approximately 300 affluent investors. These investor types differ in sources of information regarding mutual fund investments, particularly the use of financial advisers, and in the selection criteria employed for mutual fund purchases. In addition, they have distinguishable mutual fund behavior and demographic characteristics. Specific implications for financial services firms are developed.

Presents data about which dimensions led to greater optimism with more fundamentalism. Three dimensions of explanatory style; Differences among the fundamentalists, moderates and liberals; Factors responsible for greater optimism among fundamentalists.

We show for the general dynamic lot sizing model how minimal forecast horizons may be detected by a slight adaptation of an earlier 0(n log n) or 0(n) forward solution method for the model. A detailed numerical study indicates that minimal forecast horizons tend to be small, that is, include a small number of orders.