Options as a Marketing Tool: Pricing a Promotional Scheme for a Product with a Secondary Market

Adding options to durable products allows new opportunities for manufacturers and retailers in markets with a secondary market to create better segmentation schemes, provide creative means to differentiate their products and services, and increase the value they offer consumers. This raises the need for sellers to properly price such options. This work presents a few examples of incentive programs for the car industry, develops models and calculates their cost to the seller, demonstrating the applicability of the proposed methodology. Our numerical results indicate that such options are surprisingly inexpensive for car manufacturers and dealers. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

营销团队建设“三步曲”

“铁打的保险公司，流水的保险代理人”，保险公司各级主管在这边马不停蹄不遗余力地增员，报纸、网站上的代理人招聘广告铺天盖地满天飞扬，不停地面试，然后不停地办理入职手续。业务员却在那边不间断地流失和“阵亡”，好不容易搭建起来的营销团队，一不留神就没有了，主管们又重新变成“光杆司令”了，只好孤军奋战，还有那些“没走”的，也就是处于名存实亡状态的“睡眠代理人”。新面孔不断出现，“不老的面孔”不断地消失，人员的频繁进出构成保险公司营销部门一道独特的行业风景线。请看——[编者按]     

Congestion in a city with a central bottleneck

We consider dynamic congestion in an urban setting where trip origins are spatially distributed. All travelers must pass through a downtown bottleneck in order to reach their destination in the CBD. Each traveler chooses departure time to maximize general concave scheduling utility. We find that, at equilibrium, travelers sort according to their distance to the destination; the queue is always unimodal regardless of the spatial distribution of trip origins. We construct a welfare maximizing tolling regime, which eliminates congestion. All travelers located beyond a critical distance from the CBD gain from tolling, even when toll revenues are not redistributed, while nearby travelers lose. We discuss our results in the context of acceptability of tolling policies.     

Reevaluating waste as a resource under a circular economy approach from a system perspective: Findings from a case study

The circular economy (CE), definable as a system focused on the reorganization of material, information, and energy flows to achieve greater resource efficiency through the reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling of materials, is a concept widely discussed by practitioners and scientists of many disciplines. Waste recycling is integral to the CE, but there are still few articles focused on waste, and only few studies shed light on CE implementation at the company level. This paper focuses on a particular type of waste, that is, absorbent hygiene products (AHPs), which represents a nonnegligible fraction of municipal solid waste, considered an increasingly serious global challenge. We conducted our analysis on FaterSMART, an Italian firm that developed a unique worldwide technology able to totally convert AHP raw material wastes into recyclable materials, under a CE approach. The case study findings are based upon semi-structured interviews, direct observations, and analysis of FaterSMART's archival documents and are analyzed according to a framework developed for the research and focused on the place of waste from a linear economy, in which waste is considered a burden to CE, in which waste is considered a resource. The latter case is what we found that happens at FaterSMART. FaterSMART's findings could contribute to open up new management scenarios and stimulate further research into how this and similar types of technology will help societies to change from the “use-it-once-and-throw-it away” mentality of linear business models to the sustainable CE model that fully conceptualize waste as a resource for the system.     

Advertising a product to face a competitor entry: a differential game approach

We analyze a market in which advertising is the dominant marketing tool to create market share. We assume that an incumbent firm dominates the market during an initial stage, and that a new competitor is going to enter the market. In particular, we analyze the different advertising policies that the incumbent firm can adopt, before and after the entry of the rival. We explore three possible behaviours. In the first scenario the firm knows that the competitor will arrive at a given instant. In the second one we assume the original firm to be surprised, in the sense that it does not anticipate the entry of the opponent either because it does not expect the competitor to arrive, or it is not prepared to react before the entry takes place. Finally, in the third scenario, the original firm knows that the competitor will enter at a constant rate. We characterize a differential game model and compare the firms’ behaviours in a strategic perspective.     

Between a rock and a hard place: managing diversity in a shareholder society

This study examines whether the appointment of racial/ethnic minorities into top management positions has a different impact on share price than the appointment of Caucasians into equivalent positions. Our dependent variable is the degree of change in share price following the announcement of racial/ethnic minority and Caucasian men into senior management positions. Market reaction to the naming of racial/ethnic minorities into corporate leadership positions is significant and negative, while the market's reaction to the naming of Caucasians is significant and positive. However, the negative market reaction to the appointment of racial/ethnic minorities into top management positions is mitigated in those firms that have explicitly incorporated diversity into their strategic growth plan. Our findings suggest that to successfully introduce diversity into upper management, firm decision makers must first signal the importance of diversity to market actors.     

Simulation of a blood-inventory-bank system in a hospital

A blood-bank inventory system has been analysed viewing it as an inventory-hank system where the demand forecasting forms a part of the inventory model. A simulation model incorporating the “desired-beginning-inventory-level” policy has been used for the analysis of system-performance. Optimal inventory policy-guidelines have been suggested for a hospital blood-bank using blood shortage and blood out-dating as the two important components of the measure of effectiveness. Numerical results have been given.     

一个人和一本杂志的奇迹

曾经接近倒闭的台湾《商业周刊》在俞国定手中奇迹般地成为今天台湾业界发行量、广告额排名第一的杂志。他掌握了媒体成功的秘笈了吗?     

Without a vision, a business may perish

The process described is not only viable for a company, but also can be used by any group that is gathered to perform any task. The process serves to explore strengths and weaknesses so the group can use one and shore up the other. It looks at the outside forces that may affect the work and allows the group to place its effort in the areas it can influence. By looking at what is or about to occur, the process may be able to create synergism or prevent disaster. A vision or direction statement that many if not all had some input into is easier to understand and support. Referral to these benchmarks or compass points makes the journey easier.     

Was George a Dreamer or a Realist?

Abstract . The republication of Steven Cord's Henry George: Dreamer or Realist? makes available once more a work which dealt with insight and depth of analysis with the misconceptions, factual inaccuracies and offhand dismissals of the American economist and social philosopher's theories. Although he alienated many in the academic community, George attracted many leading scholars in it to significant research on basic problems of our times.     

Incorporating a tracking signal into a state space model

It is a common practice to complement a forecasting method such as simple exponential smoothing with a monitoring scheme to detect those situations where forecasts have failed to adapt to structural change. It will be suggested in this paper that the equations for simple exponential smoothing can be augmented by a common monitoring statistic to provide a method that automatically adapts to structural change without human intervention. The resulting method, which turns out to be a restricted form of damped trend corrected exponential smoothing, is compared with related methods on the annual data from the M3 competition. It is shown to be better than simple exponential smoothing and more consistent than traditional damped trend exponential smoothing.     

Is a co-jump in prices a sparse jump?

Systematic co-jumps in asset prices are generally thought to account for only a small proportion of overall jumps. In actual observations, however, jumps in asset prices are often persistent, and the time of persistence varies. In this context, we develop a new rule to identify co-jumps and improve traditional tests by considering different sampling frequencies and different sampling starting points to re-evaluate the occurrence rate of systematic co-jumps in financial assets. We conduct a simulation experiment to show that the current test procedures generally underestimate the number of co-jumps when considering persistence, but that the proposed procedure can identify co-jumps more accurately. We also perform an empirical analysis using price data from the Shanghai 50 Index and its 25 constituent stocks in China’s stock market. The average proportion of systematic co-jumps detected by the improved s-BNS is approximately 30%, which shows that the co-jump and even the systematic co-jump are not sparse jumps. The results also reveal the shortcomings of traditional jump tests in estimating persistent jumps and demonstrate that the proposed method can better detect the possible nondiversifiable risks between market indices and their constituent stocks, thereby contributing to financial risk management.     

为品牌找个好靠山

无论从品牌的创造、投入,还是从选择、消费来看,强劲品牌都不能没有自己的支柱!加入WTO,政府部门的红头文件一张张被取缔,那品牌也要重新找个好靠山了.     

Linkage Measures: a Revisit and a Suggested Alternative

This paper examines major linkage measures in the literature from different perspectives and attempts to clarify some of the controversies over them. The examination and clarification suggest more refined backward and forward linkage measures for linkage indices construction. The measures are then applied to analyse the linkages of Hawaii’s agriculture sectors.     

Developing a Continuous Space Representation of a Simulated Population

Abstract

Spatial microsimulation models typically match census of population data with survey data in order to simulate synthetic populations of individuals and households within small-scale geographic areas. For most spatial microsimulation applications this level of spatial precision is satisfactory. For others, more precise information on the location of simulated units may be required. To this end this paper develops a continuous space representation of a simulated population. It presents a statistical matching approach for assigning simulated households from a spatial microsimulation model to unique spatially-referenced residential locations. The allocation is based on a random assignment after splitting the simulated households into two groups: those predicted to reside in apartments and those predicted to reside in houses. The resulting ‘geohouseholds’ have a range of potential applications in economic and spatial analysis.

Création d'une représentation spatiale continue d'une population stimulée

Résumé Les modèles de microsimulation spatiale assortissent généralement les données de recensement de la population à des données de sondages, afin de simuler des populations synthétiques de particuliers et de foyers au sein de régions géographiques à échelle restreinte. Dans la plupart des applications de microsimulation spatiale, ce niveau de précision spatiale est satisfaisant. Dans d'autres, des informations plus précises sur l'emplacement d'unités simulées pourront s'avérer nécessaires. A cette fin, la présente communication crée une représentation spatiale continue d'une population simulée. Elle présente une méthode de correspondance statistique permettant d'affecter des foyers simulés, issus d'un modèle de microsimulation spatiale à des lieux résidentiels unique à référence spatiale. Cette allocation est basée sur une affectation aléatoire après la subdivision des foyers simulés en deux groupes : ceux dont on prévoit qu'ils résideront en appartement, et ceux dont on prévoit qu'ils résideront dans un maison. Les « géofoyers » résultants présentent toute une série d'applications potentielles pour les analyses économiques et spatiales.

Desarrollo de una representación espacial continua de una población simulada

Extracto Típicamente, los modelos de microsimulación espacial emparejan el censo de datos de la población con datos de encuestas, con objeto de simular poblaciones sintéticas de individuos y hogares dentro de áreas geográficas a pequeña escala. Para la mayoría de las aplicaciones de microsimulación espacial este nivel de precisión espacial es satisfactorio. Para otras, podría requerirse información más precisa sobre la ubicación de unidades simuladas. Con este objetivo, este trabajo desarrolla la representación espacial continua de una población simulada. Presenta un planteamiento de emparejamiento estadístico para asignar hogares simulados procedentes de un modelo de microsimulación espacial a ubicaciones residenciales únicas referenciadas espacialmente. La colocación se basa en una asignación al azar después de dividir los hogares simulados en dos grupos: los que se predice que residirán en apartamentos y los que se predice que residirán en casas. Los ‘geohogares’ resultantes ofrecen una gama de aplicaciones en potencia en el análisis económico y espacial.

     

论创建平安家庭 构建和谐社会

开展"平安家庭"的创建活动,妥善处理各种家庭矛盾,保护家庭的平安稳定是构建和谐社会的内在要求。文章分析创新形势下构建和谐社会的重要意义,探讨了创建平安家庭与和谐社会建设的关系,全面论述了影响家庭平安的因素,提出了创建平安家庭的有效途径。