Consumer Heterogeneity, Uncertainty, and Product Policies

Consumer Heterogeneity, Uncertainty, and Product Policies
Author: Song Lin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2015
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation consists of three essays on the implications of consumer heterogeneity and uncertainty for firms' strategies. The first essay analyzes how firms should develop add-on policies when consumers have heterogeneous tastes and firms are vertically differentiated. The theory provides an explanation for the seemingly counter-intuitive phenomenon that higher-end hotels are more likely than lower-end hotels to charge for Internet service, and predicts that selling an add-on as optional intensifies competition, in sharp contrast to standard conclusions found in the literature. The second essay examines how firms should develop product and pricing policies when customer reviews provide informative feedback about improving product or service quality. The analysis provides an alternative view of customer reviews such that they not only can help consumers learn about product quality, but also can help firms learn about problems with their products or services. The third essay studies the implications of cognitive simplicity for consumer learning problems. We explore one viable decision heuristic - index strategies, and demonstrate that they are intuitive, tractable, and plausible. Index strategies are much simpler for consumers to use but provide close-to-optimal utility. They also avoid exponential growth in computational complexity, enabling researchers to study learning models in more-complex situations.

Stochastic Models in Reliability, Network Security and System Safety

Stochastic Models in Reliability, Network Security and System Safety
Author: Quan-Lin Li
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2019-10-21
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 981150864X

This book is dedicated to Jinhua Cao on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Jinhua Cao is one of the most famous reliability theorists. His main contributions include: published over 100 influential scientific papers; published an interesting reliability book in Chinese in 1986, which has greatly influenced the reliability of education, academic research and engineering applications in China; initiated and organized Reliability Professional Society of China (the first part of Operations Research Society of China) since 1981. The high admiration that Professor Cao enjoys in the reliability community all over the world was witnessed by the enthusiastic response of each contributor in this book. The contributors are leading researchers with diverse research perspectives. The research areas of the book iclude a broad range of topics related to reliability models, queueing theory, manufacturing systems, supply chain finance, risk management, Markov decision processes, blockchain and so forth. The book consists of a brief Preface describing the main achievements of Professor Cao; followed by congratulations from Professors Way Kuo and Wei Wayne Li, and by Operations Research Society of China, and Reliability Professional Society of China; and further followed by 25 articles roughly grouped together. Most of the articles are written in a style understandable to a wide audience. This book is useful to anyone interested in recent developments in reliability, network security, system safety, and their stochastic modeling and analysis.

Demand Fulfillment in Multi-Stage Customer Hierarchies

Demand Fulfillment in Multi-Stage Customer Hierarchies
Author: Sebastian Vogel
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2013-08-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3658028645

​This book extends the existing demand fulfillment research by considering multi-stage customer hierarchies. Basis is a two-step allocation and consumption planning procedure. In the existing literature, it is assumed that the customer segments are ‘flat’. This means they can be sorted easily during the allocation planning step by a single central planner in decreasing order of profitability. In the subsequent consumption planning phase, if order requests differ in terms of profit margins, companies can render prioritized service in real time to their most profitable customers by consuming the reserved quotas.

From Little's Law to Marketing Science

From Little's Law to Marketing Science
Author: John R. Hauser
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2016-01-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 026202991X

The legacy of a pioneer in operations research and marketing science.

Distributed Computer and Communication Networks

Distributed Computer and Communication Networks
Author: Vladimir M. Vishnevskiy
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 747
Release: 2021-01-01
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3030664716

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Distributed and Computer and Communication Networks, DCCN 2020, held in Moscow, Russia, in September 2020. The 54 revised full papers and 1 revised short paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 167 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: computer and communication networks; analytical modeling of distributed systems; and distributed systems applications.