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...

In an earlier issue of this journal, Charnes, Cooper, Niehaus and Stedry provided different problem formulations to take into account the multiple attributes that organizations may consider in assigning men to jobs. The present paper shows that their formulations for static multi-attribute...

For a multi-product sales force, the policy of paying commissions as an equal percentage of realized gross margins is shown to be in general, nonoptimal from the firm's profit maximization point of view. For a homogeneous salesforce, the nonoptimality results from the fact that earlier research...

This paper attempts to coordinate at the macro level the research potential and the development capability of an organization in a competitive environment. New product ideas generate from various sources of research which are then processed (preliminary screening, market appraisal, technical...

We compare quota-based salesforce compensation plans with the BLSS plan, i.e., the optimal curvilinear agency-theory-based compensation plans proposed in Basu, Lal, Srinivasan and Staelin (Basu, A. K., R. Lal, V. Srinivasan, R. Staelin. 1985. Salesforce compensation plans: An agency theoretic...