Search

In today's highly dynamic and competitive environment, companies are under the pressure to improve their supply chain strategy in order to be more responsive to customer demand. However, supply chains are susceptible to unanticipated events that make responsive supply chain management a challenging task. One such disruption event is a product stockout at the retailer. In this paper, we investigate retail stockouts through the development of an agent-based simulation model in order to develop a better understanding of the effect of different stockout lengths for different products (with different consumer response profiles to stockouts) on both the retailer and the manufacturer of the product. We consider the change of market share as a measure of resilience for both the manufacturer and the retailer to examine the impact of the stockout. Insights are developed for manufacturers and retailers in responding to the stockout disruption. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Product design starts with the analysis of customer needs to result in a design specification that includes such information as: 1) customer needs, 2) metrics, 3) targets, 4) importance of each metric, and 5) dependence relations between any two metrics. We call the metrics design attributes. In generating a design specification, one important issue is how the design specification meets customer needs. Another important issue is the procedure for generating the targets that conform to the design attributes and optimizing them to achieve the maximum customer satisfaction. This issue requires us to represent the aggregation of a set of utilities of design attributes. Existing approaches in the literature generally do not consider the situation where design attributes may be dependent on each other. In this paper, we present an approach to address the dependent attribute problem leading to a function form with design attributes as independent variables. With this function form, we show the potential to optimize the design specification. We present an example to illustrate our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Link structures among items within an E-commerce Web site can be regarded as a potential recommendation that helps new consumers quickly locate relevant products. In this paper, combining a modified version of Google's PageRank method with economic analysis of word of mouth, we investigate whether a product's position within a network composed of recommendation links is incrementally informative about its future sales. Based on data from Amazon.com, we document that with consumer word of mouth and other product characteristics controlled, the position of a product within a recommendation network does influence consumers’ purchase decisions, and models incorporating link structure have a higher incremental predictive power of future sales than models without. In addition, as time elapses, the relative weights consumers placed on recommendations with price discount and those without are different. Last, we develop a learning mechanism through which we find the optimal damping value of the PageRank IR model in the Amazon context. Our results show that compared to general Internet surfing behavior, consumer consumption on Amazon is less random. We conclude that even though the product position within a recommendation network does influence customers’ purchase behaviors, product sales are still mainly driven by their own product characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper deals with the evaluation of Japanese traditional crafts, in which product items are assessed according to the so-called “Kansei” features by means of the semantic differential method. For traditional crafts, decisions on which items to buy or use are usually influenced by personal feelings/characteristics; therefore, we shall propose a consumer-oriented evaluation model targeting these specific requests by consumers. Particularly, given a consumer's request, the proposed model aims to define an evaluation function that quantifies how well a product item meets the consumer's feeling preferences. An application to evaluating patterns of Kutani porcelain is conducted to illustrate how the proposed evaluation model works, in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a decision analytic model to determine the optimal bidding sequence in a repeat-bid name-your-own-price (NYOP) channel. The model takes into account the impatience of the bidders, and determines the optimal bidding strategies when time intervals are enforced between successive offers. We also use the model to measure the impatience and the frictional costs exhibited by bidders in an experimental setting. We report the results of an empirical study that is conducted with faculty, staff, and students at the University of Illinois. We discuss the levels of impatience they exhibited when time intervals were enforced between each successive offer. We, then, assess the predictive power of the model and compare the theoretical and the actual bids in a variety of different scenarios. We examine the effects of repeat bidding, and the duration between successive offers on the bidder's impatience level. Then, we discuss the repeat bidding NYOP setting from the perspective of an auction firm. We observed that firms do not always suffer from allowing multiple bids. They can in fact benefit from repeat bidding, if they set the threshold price appropriately. We analyze how the firm's profit changes with 1) the threshold price; 2) the number of repeat bids; and 3) the bidder characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Motivated by the rising environmental protection awareness and the importance of green product design, in this article we develop two models to investigate the quality and greenness decisions and product line choices of a green manufacturer as well as the corresponding impact of product line length on environmental performance. In our models, both the manufacturer and consumers show environmental responsibility behaviors. We find that the manufacturer extends the product line when the unit fit cost, the green cost, the quality cost, the market scale of low-segment consumers, and the environmental responsibility level (or unit environmental cost) are low. In the presence of two products with different market positioning, our analysis reveals that: first, owing to the consumer's self-selection behavior, product quality and greenness may be distorted from the efficient quality and greenness; second, product line extension may improve both the environmental performance and the manufacturer's utility, i.e., achieving a win–win outcome; and third, a higher unit environmental cost (environmental responsibility level or a longer product line) will improve the environmental performance if the unit environmental cost is high. In the continuous green valuation setting, interestingly, we find different results that the manufacturer with a high environmental responsibility level may extend its product line, and the environmental performance increases with the unit environmental cost in the single-product case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have explored consumers’ environmentally responsible intentions regarding many industries and products; however, research on the sustainability of smartphones is limited. This article develops an integrated cross-level model to assess the factors that foster environmentally responsible consumer behavior, which is demonstrated by the willingness to recycle smartphones. Data from 358 consumers were collected and analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling and the decomposed theory of planned behavior, which take into account antecedent factors. The outcomes of this article may provide a better understanding of consumer attitudes on smartphone recycling, such that expedient engineering and public policies can be put in place to facilitate it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social commerce, a powerful combination of customer-oriented social computing technologies and new commercial features, is having an increasing impact on e-commerce, potentially generating substantial economic benefits. Drawing on socio-technical theory, this study establishes a research framework to help understand the social and technical factors affecting consumers’ intention to purchase on social commerce sites. Our results demonstrate that familiarity, user experience, learning and training, and social commerce constructs all have a positive effect on consumers’ perceptions of ease of use and usefulness, thereby enhancing their trust and intention to purchase. For systems designers and engineers, our results highlight the importance of social commerce features for building consumers’ trust of social commerce sites and supporting their intention to purchase. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Given Hong Kong's special circumstances of small physical size, advanced infrastructure, and low shopping cost, a survey is designed under which supply-side problems in Internet business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce are indirectly revealed by responses on the demand side. Difficulties arising from the reluctance to answer questionnaires on the part of e-firms wary about trade and innovation secrets and their small number at the outset are thereby overcome. Survey data on demand-side obstacle factors in the form of perceived low e-shopping comparability, e-shopping inconvenience, e-transaction insecurity, and poor Internet privacy, together with orientation toward social interaction and low awareness on the part of consumers, translate into information on notionally matching supply-side hurdles. Regression analysis and hypothesis testing indicate statistical significance for the above hurdle factors in terms of impact on individual unwillingness to shop online. These results add to the inductive basis for future research into a general demand-supply theory of Internet B2C e-commerce and offer an empirically-grounded position against which the effects of later supply-side changes can be evaluated. Useful information also follows for engineer-managers seeking to compare marginal improvements in supply-side problems, particularly in the form of estimated substitution ratios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]