Strategy

A commentary on Barbara E. Kahn's article, Dynamic Relationships with Customers: High-Variety Strategies, published in the winter 1998 issue of Journal of the Academy of Marketing Sciences is provided. The purpose is to question Kahn's assumptions and hence to suggest some implications for research.

In this article, we argue that the time has come to begin to integrate the Coasian view of the firm--which is concerned with the interactions between ownermanagers--and the Bede and Means perspective--which emphasizes the separation of ownership and control in most corporations.

In this paper we address periodic base-stock policies for stochastic economic lot scheduling problems. These represent manufacturing settings in which multiple items compete for the availability of a common capacity source, in the presence of setup times and/or costs, incurred when switching between items, and in the presence of uncertainty regarding demand patterns, production, and setup times. Under periodic base-stock policies, items are produced according to a given periodic item-sequence.

We consider a distribution system consisting of a single warehouse and many geographically dispersed retailers. Each retailer faces demands for a single item which arise a deterministic, retailer specific rate. The retailers' stock is replenished by a fleet of vehicles of limited capacity, departing and returning to the warehouse and combining deliveries into efficient routes. The cost of any given route consists of a fixed component and a component which is proportional with the total distance driven. Inventory costs are proportional with the stock levels.

This paper studies the trade-off between inventory levels and the delivery leadtime offered to customers in achieving a target level of service. It addresses the question of how much a delivery leadtime can be reduced, per unit increase of inventory, at a fixed fill rate. We show that for a class of assemble-to-order models with stochastic demands and production intervals there is a simple linear trade-off between inventory and delivery leadtime, in a limiting sense, at high fill rates.

Effective communication requires that consumers attribute the message content to its intended source. The proposed framework distinguishes four types of source identification processes-cued retrieval, memory-trace refreshment, schematic inferencing, and pure guessing-and delineates their contingencies. Two experiments examine portions of the framework, and experiment 2 introduces a new methodology for decomposing multiple processes. Findings suggest that when cued retrieval fails, consumers try to refresh the original memory trace for the learning episode-a process that is effortful.

Marketers are making increasing use of very brief messages that mention just a brand name or a brand name with a short headline, as in event sponsorship and program endorsements. There has been debate over the effectiveness of these "advertising fragments." This paper introduces an approach for controlled testing of the effects of advertising fragments. Using a reaction-time based procedure, we show that a key effect of advertising fragments is to revive established brand associations, even though these associations are not explicitly communicated.

US cities capture public benefits from private developers under several bargaining frameworks: exactions, incentive zoning and public-private developments. These frameworks exist along a continuum of policy-intervention strategies, from passive regulation to active development, from a quid pro quo to incentive to investment policy posture. Each strategy defines a public position, structure and process for negotiation and parameters for the bargaining process.