De Fleur (1956) provides the earliest evidence of diminishing returns. He finds a common logarithmic pattern for leaflets dropped and message recalled in field experiment. Since then, many researchers have applied logarithmic or square root patterns to capture the effect of diminishing returns...

We examine pricing policy for a monopolist facing uncertain demand in a market characterized by dynamics on the demand side (such as diffusion or saturation effects) and/or on the cost side (experience curve effects). Our model explicitly incorporates the impact of demand uncertainty, and thus...

The concept of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) emphasizes the role of synergy, which arises when the combined effect of multiple activities exceeds the sum of their individual effects. In this paper, we investigate the effects of synergy on the profitability of IMC programs in...

A probabilistic model is proposed to assess the value of replications. The corroboration of a theory is shown to be a function of the number of replications, the number of successful outcomes, and our initial beliefs. An adaptive control model provides the optimal policy for continuing...

Companies spend millions of dollars on advertising to boost a brand's image and simultaneously spend millions of dollars on promotion that many believe calls attention to price and erodes brand equity. We believe this paradoxical situation exists because both advertising and promotion are...

A key task of advertising media planners is to determine the best media schedule of advertising exposures for a certain budget. Conceptually, the planner could choose to do continuous advertising (i.e., schedule ad exposures evenly over all weeks) or follow a strategy of pulsing (i.e., advertise...

This paper presents an agency theoretic model-based approach that assists sales managers in determining the profit-maximizing structure of a common multiproduct sales quota-bonus plan for a geographically specialized heterogeneous sales force operating in a repetitive buying environment. This...

The following sections are included:Introduction and overviewSales force resource allocation and sizing modelsModels for sales territory alignmentIntegrated deployment models (sizing, resource allocation, territory alignment, selection)Sales force compensation and incentivesConclusion and...

Repeated search and decision making is a common consumer activity that should benefit from advanced planning. In three simulated shopping experiments, we find that people often fail to plan spontaneously or, when they do plan, do not use an appropriate mental model of the search problem. We also...