This paper suggests a procedure which analytically ties a model to predict users' predispositions to purchase different "brands" in a product-market together with a search process to identify optimal new product ideas. Brands, conceptualized as attribute bundles, are located in a prespecified...

Previous studies dealing with product growth have dealt only with substitution effects among successive generations of one product category and not with complementarity and competition provided by related product categories. Based on a broadened concept of the competitive information technology...

Erratum to the authors' paper "A Note on Sharpe's Algorithm for Minimizing the Sum of Absolute Deviations in a Simple Regression Problem", Vol. 19, No. 2 (October 1972), pp. 222-225.

The agency theory approach to understanding salesforce compensation plans is modified to incorporate the intratemporal nature of the salesperson's effort-rate decision, i.e., the decision about the effort-rate at any given point in time potentially depends upon the sales performance up to that...

This paper considers the problem of determining optimal sample sizes in advertising pretests, where two or more copies are compared for their relative advertising effectiveness measured on a dichotomous (0 or 1) scale. As the sample size is increased, sampling variations decrease so that the...

This paper develops a method for choosing advertising media plans for the next T-periods in order to maximize net discounted profits. Using the discrete maximum principle of Optimal Control Theory, it is shown that under certain conditions a T-period media model can be decomposed into a sequence...

The authors propose a new approach for measuring, analyzing, and predicting a brand's equity in a product market. Brand equity is defined as the incremental contribution ($) per year obtained by the brand in comparison to the underlying product (or service) with no brand-building efforts. The...

This paper analyzes the role played by brand loyalty in determining optimal price promotional strategies used by firms in a competitive setting. (Loyalty is operationalized as the minimum price differential needed before consumers who prefer one brand switch to another brand.) Our objective is...

A decision support system to evaluate and formulate business portfolio strategies is proposed. Strategies are expressed in terms of market share objectives to be achieved in each of the N business units in the portfolio. STRATPORT evaluates a strategy in terms of the net present value of its...

A recent article in this Journal provides an efficient computational scheme for obtaining a regression line that minimizes the sum of absolute deviations of a set of two-dimensional points. The present note interprets that procedure as the solution of the parametric dual to the linear...