Consumer Behavior

We define sources of heterogeneity in consumer utility functions related to individual differences in response tendencies, drivers of utility, form of the consumer utility function, perceptions of attributes, state dependencies, and stochasticity. A variety of alternative modeling approaches are reviewed that accommodate subsets of these various sources including clusterwise regression, latent structure models, compound distributions, random coefficients models, etc. We conclude by defining a number of promising research areas in this field.

A study examines the long-term effects of promotion and advertising on consumers' brand choice behavior. Some 8 1/4 years of panel data for frequently purchased packaged goods are used to address 2 questions: 1. Do consumers' responses to marketing mix variables, such as price, change over a long period of time? 2. If yes, are these changes associated with changes in manufacturers' advertising and retailers' promotional policies? Using these results, implications for manufactures' pricing, advertising and promotion policies are drawn.

In the chapter, we review existing literature and offer some new empirical evidence concerning developmental trends in intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. We then examine several possible explanations for these developmental findings and consider their implications for social and educational policy.

A report examines whether gender differences in cognition during the depressed mood exist even when males and females are not depressed. Results reveal that females' thoughts are more internally focused than males'.

We give a unified probabilistic analysis for a general class of bin packing problems by directly analyzing corresponding mathematical programs. In this general class of packing problems, objects are described by a given number of attribute values. (Some attributes may be discrete; others may be continuous.) Bins are sets of objects, and the collection of feasible bins is merely required to satisfy some general consistency properties.

We propose and analyze a heuristic that uses region partitioning and an aggregation scheme for customer attributes (load size, time windows, etc.) to create a finite number of customer types. A math program is solved based on these aggregated customer types to generate a feasible solution to the original problem. The problem class we address is quite general and defined by a number of general consistency properties.

We consider a single-item, periodic-review inventory model with uncertain demands in which each period's production volume is limited by a capacity level. The demand distributions, capacity levels, and cost parameters vary according to a periodic pattern. We prove that modified base-stock policies are optimal for the finite-horizon planning model and for both the infinite-horizon discounted and undiscounted cost criterion. We further show that the optimal base-stock levels can be calculated via a simple but efficient value-iteration method.

In this paper we consider single machine scheduling problems with a common due-date for all jobs, arbitrary monotone earliness and tardiness costs and arbitrary breakdown and repair processes. We show that the problem is equivalent to a deterministic one without breakdowns and repairs and with an equivalent cost function of a job's completion time. A V-shaped schedule without idle times is shown to be optimal, if this equivalent cost function is quasi-convex.

We consider the problem of scheduling N jobs on M parallel machines so as to minimize the maximum earliness or tardiness cost incurred for each of the jobs. Earliness and tardiness costs are given by general (but job-independent) functions of the amount of time a job is completed prior to or after a common due date. We show that in problems with a nonrestrictive due date, the problem decomposes into two parts. Each of the M longest jobs is assigned to a different machine, and all other jobs are assigned to the machines so as to minimize their makespan.