The role of the list price in housing markets: Theory and an econometric model

Houses are routinely sold at prices below, but rarely sold at prices above, their list prices. List prices appear to be price ceilings that preclude the possibility of sales at higher prices. This paper presents a theory of sellers' behaviour that explains why there are list prices in housing markets and why list prices are distinct from sellers' reservation prices. The theory forms the basis of an econometric model that has been estimated using data from the Baltimore, MD, area. The estimated model predicts sale and reservation prices conditional on list prices. The predictions of sale prices are considerably more accurate than those obtained from a standard hedonic price regression. The estimated model also explains why sellers may not be willing to reduce their list prices even after their houses have remained unsold for long periods of time.     

Examining retail image before and after a repositioning strategy

This research examines changes in management's and consumers' perceptions of retail image during implementation of a major repositioning strategy. A prominent retail chain abandoned an older store in a strip shopping center of a southern SMSA, and built a larger one in a new regional shopping mall. Consumers and store management personnel provided image data for the old and new stores three months before and after the changeover. It was found that while consumers' and management's images significantly changed during the repositioning strategy, the magnitude of management's image change was significantly greater than consumers'. Management perceived greater changes than did consumers in parking, store classification, merchandise quality, style and assortment, return policy, and store layout and decor. Conversely, consumers experiented a greater image change on pricing and credit policy. The major implication for retailers is that problems can arise if management and consumers do not experience commensurate image shifts during repositioning. Fine tuning in advertising, personal selling, product strategy, and the physical environment (e.g., decor, parking) may be necessary to compensate for differential image shifts following a major repositioning strategy. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A00BV035 00002     

Capacitated heuristic program for multiactivity, multi-facility system designs

Multi-activity, multi-facility design systems occur in a wide variety of industrial and service applications: e.g.: regional health care centers with configurations of activities at each center, and multi-echelon inventory distribution systems. The problem in designing such systems is to determine from a candidate set of possible locations what facility locations should be opened and what types of activities should be carried out at each of the open facilities. This article presents an efficient heuristic procedure for such a problem.The heuristic procedure described can be used to solve both the uncapacitated and the capacitated problems where capacity is expressed in terms of the number of activities which can be supported by the facilities.Extensive computational experience with the heuristic is presented. The performance of the heuristic is compared against optimal solutions and the results look very encouraging.     

Sales managers and sales force feedback: Information left in the pipeline

In a study of sales force feedback at management levels, salesmen from two large corporations “planted” competitive new-product information with their sales managers. The object was to monitor the responses of the managers to reports from the field. Only about half of the 35 managers sampled passed the information on to higher levels. The importance of sales force feedback seems to have been lost on these managers, even though the use of such information had been stressed in their management training programs. The study indicates a need to provide motivation to use sales force feedback as a link in management information systems.     

A classification of economic activities based on location patterns

The Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) groups activities without regard to locational behavior. Any SIC group may—and often does—contain two or more activities that have different locational patterns.Starting with data describing the number of people employed in each of 480 activities in each of 311 metropolitan areas of the United States in 1965, we have devised a new classification based on similarity of locational behavior. The results are presented in the form of a 5-digit classification of these 480 SIC activities. Some of the more interesting clustering patterns are discussed and some patterns that might have been expected but did not appear are mentioned.This paper builds upon earlier research reported in “The Agglomeration Process in Urban Growth,” by Joel Bergsman, Peter Greenston and Robert Healy (Urban Studies, October 1972) and is part of a continuing inquiry into the economic development of cities.     

Towards a new way to measure power: Applying conjoint analysis to group decisions

This paper presents some preliminary development towards a methodology for measuring power in a group purchase decision. We define power as the capacity of an individual to change the probability of an alternative being chosen by expressing an opinion about that alternative. We present a linear model that relates the group members' preferences to the probability that a given alternative will be chosen. The model parameters reflect specific measures of power and can be estimated by conjoint analysis. We present the results of a pilot field study, conducted on a sample of purchasing managers, which favorably assesses certain psychometric properties of the resulting measures for dyads.     

与客户情投意合

有少数公司正在证明:网络上的服务可以变得个性化。这个结果从他们的收入中显现了出来。也许他们自己都没有意识到,自己正在建立一些新的客户关系管理规则     

First Degree Price Discrimination Goes to School

Personalized pricing is widely discussed but seldom observed, making studies of its efficacy rare. Yet, first degree price discrimination is common in the pricing of higher education, and I use data on prices and the characteristics of students admitted to a professional graduate program at a public university to estimate a matriculation demand function. I then derive linear pricing functions that maximize revenue for a target number of students. By allowing these functions to depend on progressively richer sets of observables, I explore the effect of personalization of pricing on profit. Tailoring prices to a one‐dimensional measure of student quality would raise revenue by 2.2 per cent above the revenue with uniform pricing. Pricing based on both student quality and state residency raises revenue by 8.4 per cent, and further tailoring based on available observables raises prices 9.0 per cent above the maximum revenue under uniform pricing. Pricing that obeys current statutory tuition limits raises revenue less but still by just over half as much. I also infer the welfare weights that the pricing process implicitly attaches to student characteristics.