The launch of a new product or service via direct marketing is nearly always preceded by a test of that offering. Such a "live" test, conducted with a subset of the entire list of customer prospects, can sometimes be useful in a "go/no-go" decision regarding a full-scale launch of the offering....

Product design decisions substantially affect the cost and revenue drivers. A design configuration with commonality can lower manufacturing cost. However, such a design may hinder the ability to extract price premiums through product differentiation. We explicitly investigate the...

We introduce the concept of marketing avoidance--consumer efforts to conceal themselves and to deflect marketing. The setting is one in which sellers market some item through solicitations to potential consumers, who differ in their benefit from the item and suffer harm from receiving...

We consider a general model of monopoly price discrimination and characterize the conditions under which price discrimination is and is not profitable. We show that an important condition for profitable price discrimination is that the percentage change in surplus (i.e., consumers' total...

This paper examines the profit maximizing behavior of a vertically integrated firm that operates in "n" geographically distinct regions. A pair of alternative managerial decision scenarios are considered. In one scenario, all marketing mix variables are manipulated at the regional level, so that...

Conjoint analysis is a statistical technique used to elicit partworth utilities for product attributes from consumers to aid in the evaluation of market potential for new products. The objective of the share-of-choice problem (a common approach to new product design) is to find the design that...

Multiissue negotiations present opportunities for tradeoffs that create gains for one or more parties without causing any party to be worse off. The literature suggests that parties are often unable to identify and capitalize on such trades. We present a Negotiation Support System, called...

Many practical product line design problems have large numbers of attributes and levels. In this case, if most attribute level combinations define feasible products, constructing product lines directly from part-worths data is necessary. For three typical formulations of this important problem,...

Recently proposed methods for product-line selection use the total utilities of candidate items to construct product lines maximizing seller's return or buyers' welfare. For conjoint (hybrid conjoint) data, enumerating the utilities of candidate items can be computationally infeasible if the...

Increasingly, conjoint analysts are being asked to design and analyze studies involving large numbers of attributes and/or attribute levels. Various types of approaches, including attribute bridging, Adaptive Conjoint Analysis, and hybrid models have been proposed to deal with the problem. This...