Consumer Behavior

In The Art of Choosing, Columbia Business School professor Sheena Iyengar, a leading expert on choice, sets herself the Herculean task of helping us become better choosers. She asks fascinating questions: Is the desire for choice innate or created by culture? Why do we sometimes choose against our best interests? How much control do we really have over what we choose? Ultimately, she offers unexpected and profound answers, drawn from her award-winning, discipline-spanning research.

We study a family of stylized assortment planning problems, where arriving customers make purchase decisions among offered products based on maximizing their utility. Given limited display capacity and no a priori information on consumers' utility, the retailer must select which subset of products to offer. By offering different assortments and observing the resulting purchase behavior, the retailer learns about consumer preferences, but this experimentation should be balanced with the goal of maximizing revenues.

In this paper, we postulate a general class of price competition models with Mixed Multi Nomial Logit demand functions under affine cost functions. We characterize the equilibrium behavior of this class of models starting with the case where each product in the market is sold by a separate, independent firm. Here we identify a natural upper bound for the price levels.

Organized groups face a fundamental problem of how to distribute resources fairly. We found people view it as less fair to distribute resources equally when the allocated resource invokes the market by being a medium of exchange than when the allocated resource is a good that holds value in use. These differences in fairness can be attributed to being a medium of exchange, and not to other essential properties of money (i.e., being a unit of account or a store of value).

Timely access to care is a key component of high quality health care. Yet, patient delays are prevalent throughout the health-care system resulting in dissatisfaction and adverse clinical consequences for patients as well as potentially higher costs and wasted capacity for providers. For this reason, the Institute of Medicine has identified "timeliness" as one of the six keys in "aims for improvement" in its health-care quality initiative.

This article explains how the metric, Customer Value Added (CVA), can be applied to develop effective marketing and branding strategies. Strategies that are successful against competitors should focus on creating CVA that is greater than those produced by competitors. To do so, one must first regularly measure and monitor CVA by examining its components, perceived value and variable costs per unit. Next, one must develop strategies and tactics to increase CVA effectively and efficiently. In the long run, the organization that succeeds in achieving and maintaining the highest CVA wins.