Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? The effect of changes in product features over time

This article examines how feature additions and removals affect consumers' preferences and the attributions they make regarding why these changes occurred. In two experiments, using a range of hypothetical and real products, we find that consumers' preferences for current product formulations are influenced by prior formulations and that changes in consumer preference are more extreme for feature removals than for feature additions. We further find that consumers attribute feature additions to causes that are more external to the firm and more stable over time than those for feature removals. Consumers' product evaluations are more negative when the cause of a feature removal is attributed more internally to the firm. However, consumers' product evaluations are not significantly affected by their attributions for feature additions. Finally, the degree to which the changing feature is linked to a brands' equity moderates these findings.     

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Location and service mix decisions for a managed health care network

For managers of managed health care organizations, the problem of designing a competitive multiple facility network cannot be solved by existing mathematical models. This paper thus presents a nonlinear integer model for determining a facilities design strategy that embodies the economic tradeoffs encompassed in a competitive strategy: minimizing cost and maximizing market share. The integrated location and service mix model determines the number, location and service offerings of facilities that maximize profitability in a two-level hierarchical referral delivery network where an organization's market share is represented by a multiplicative competitive interaction model. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed integrated model, a series of problems is solved by an interchange heuristic and compared to the solutions derived by a simpler approach that ignores market competition.     

Research note and communication mergers that last: A predictable pattern?

This paper examines the current ownership of 434 large acquisitions made by publicly traded U.S. firms between 1967 and 1969. It is found that the majority of these acquisitions are still held by the acquiring firms. Unrelated acquisitions were resold at a moderately higher, though not significantly different, rate than related acquisitions. These results are discussed in the context of the commonly held view that unrelated acquisitions of that period were poorly conceived additions.     

Are special items informative about future profit margins?

Most proponents of using profit margins in forecasting models suggest that unusual items be removed from income to create a core profit margin. We investigate the appropriateness of this assumption over short and long horizons. Specifically, we explore the association between profit margins and special items over windows of increasing length, from one to five years. We find that the association between past special items and future profit margins differs markedly between firms with low and high core profitability. For low profitability firms, past special items have no association with future profit margins, even over windows of five years. In sharp contrast, for high profitability firms, negative special items are associated with lower future profit margins. This suggests that some firms maintain high core profitability by becoming serial chargers and special items differ from core earnings only to the extent that the allocation process induces timing errors in reported earnings.