In the past several decades, new-product diffusion models has been an active area of research in marketing (see, e.g., Mahajan, Muller, and Wind 2000, and Mahajan and Wind 1986). Such models are useful because they can provide important insights into the timing of initial purchase of new...

Sarkar and Zangwill (1991) showed by numerical examples that reduction in setup times can, surprisingly, actually increase work in process in some cyclic production systems (that is, reduction in switchover times can increase waiting times in some polling models). We present, for polling models...