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]     

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.     

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.     

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?     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Technology valuation of a scanning probe microscope developed at a university in a developing country

Precompetitive technology (PT) refers to devices, equipment, software or processes primarily developed at universities in developing countries for research or teaching as a result of externally financed projects contracted between the university institutes, centers or faculties and industry. PT is generally embodied in the form of laboratory prototypes and is licensed via technology transfer (TT) contracts between the university and external funding agencies or other interested parties. In the process of defining the terms of a TT contract, a fundamental question arises: what is the monetary value of a precompetitive technology? In this paper we present a methodology for PT valuation based on the identification of specific value points (SVP) related to its development. The four-step method includes the definition of a PT value range based on cost and market approaches, expected incomes, present value and scoring in order to determine the relative weights of the primary aspects of the intellectual capital behind the technology. The valuation methodology is applied to the specific example of a scanning probe microscope (SPM) developed at the Centro de Ciencias Aplicadas y Desarrollo Tecnológico of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).     

每年我至少有一天做送货员

每年我也会担当我们的送货员，每年我至少有一天做一个送货员，我也穿上工作服给几百个员工送过货，了解我们京东配送人员的艰辛，同时也能知道配送当中不好解决的问题。举个最简单的例子，客户说京东的服务态度不好，经常打电话，你能不能下楼取？     

李登海：从农民到科学家

2009年9月，李登海被评为“全国道德模范”和“100位新中国成立以来感动中国人物”，10月1日，他还在北京参加了国庆观礼。     

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.     

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.