Design for manufacturing (DFM) has been promoted as a way to enhance product development and production system performance. Current DFM practices encourage the minimization of the number of parts in a design through the physical integration of several geometric features in the same part. While...

Using data from the U.S. bicycle industry, we examine the relation among product variety, supply chain structure, and firm performance. Variety imposes two types of costs on a supply chain: production costs and market mediation costs. Production costs include, among other costs, the incremental...

Product variety in many industries has increased steadily throughout this century. Component sharing---using the same version of a component across multiple products---is increasingly viewed by companies as a way to offer high variety in the marketplace while retaining low variety in their...

Component sharingÔusing the same version of a component across multiple productsÔis an approach adopted by many assembled-product manufacturers to achieve high final product variety with lower component variety and cost. This paper presents a methodology for determining which versions of a set...

This paper addresses the question of how the vertical structure of a product line relates to brand equity. Does the presence of “premium” or high-quality products in a product line enhance brand equity? Conversely, does the presence of “economy” or low-quality products in a product line...

Water users along the Murray River, Australia, have traditionally used climatology forecasts of river flows for intra-annual planning of water use and trading. In this paper, we develop and assess the performance of statistical models for forecasting three-month inflow totals for the Murray...

The IMF, the World Bank and GATT/WTO have had to adapt to changing circumstances in the past 60 years as they guided the world economy to growing interdependence and prosperity. Now they face several simultaneous challenges. In this book, David Robertson discusses the rise of new economic...