Multi-Product Firms and Product Switching

This paper examines the frequency, pervasiveness and determinants of product switching among U.S. manufacturing firms. We find that two-thirds of firms alter their mix of five-digit SIC products every five years, that one-third of the increase in real U.S. manufacturing shipments between 1972 and 1997 is due to the net adding and dropping of products by survivors, and that firms are more likely to drop products which are younger and have smaller production volumes relative to other firms producing the same product. The product-switching behavior we observe is consistent with an extended model of industry dynamics emphasizing firm heterogeneity and self-selection into individual product markets. Our findings suggest that product switching contributes towards a reallocation of economic activity within firms towards more productive uses.

Multi-Product Firms and Product Switching

This paper examines the frequency, pervasiveness and determinants of product switching among U.S. manufacturing firms. We find that two-thirds of firms alter their mix of five-digit SIC products every five years, that one-third of the increase in real U.S. manufacturing shipments between 1972 and 1997 is due to the net adding and dropping of products by survivors, and that firms are more likely to drop products which are younger and have smaller production volumes relative to other firms producing the same product. The product-switching behavior we observe is consistent with an extended model of industry dynamics emphasizing firm heterogeneity and self-selection into individual product markets. Our findings suggest that product switching contributes towards a reallocation of economic activity within firms towards more productive uses.Heterogeneous firms, Product differentiation, Product market entry and exit

Multi-modal joint embedding for fashion product retrieval

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Finding a product in the fashion world can be a daunting task. Everyday, e-commerce sites are updating with thousands of images and their associated metadata (textual information), deepening the problem, akin to finding a needle in a haystack. In this paper, we leverage both the images and textual meta-data and propose a joint multi-modal embedding that maps both the text and images into a common latent space. Distances in the latent space correspond to similarity between products, allowing us to effectively perform retrieval in this latent space, which is both efficient and accurate. We train this embedding using large-scale real world e-commerce data by both minimizing the similarity between related products and using auxiliary classification networks to that encourage the embedding to have semantic meaning. We compare against existing approaches and show significant improvements in retrieval tasks on a large-scale e-commerce dataset. We also provide an analysis of the different metadata.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Organizational design of multi-product multi-market firms

In this paper, we seek to understand how a multi-product multi-market firm (for example, a multinational firm) designs its organizational structure and compensation scheme when its profitability is conditioned by how market information flows within the company. By modifying its organizational structure–centralizing or decentralizing decision making–and changing the weights of its compensation scheme, the firm can shape how information flows and is represented, changing the firm’s profitability. We find that, when being multi-product (having to allocate a scarce resource between markets), the headquarters links the organizational design of decision rights between different product markets. The headquarters decentralizes decision rights in products with higher returns to product differentiation while it centralizes decision rights in products with lower returns to product differentiation. As centralization is complementary with product standardization and decentralization is complementary with product differentiation, the organizational design conditions the firm’s market policy. The relation among product’s decision rights remains even when the headquarters cannot control how local managers allocate resources in their own local divisions. Our results are robust to different generalizations. Our paper therefore, contributes to the literature on organizational design by analyzing the case of multi-product multi-market firms.: Multinational, Multi-product, Organization Design, Resource Scarcity, Cheap Talk

Stochastic multi-period multi-product multi-objective Aggregate Production Planning model in multi-echelon supply chain

In this paper a multi-period multi-product multi-objective aggregate production planning (APP) model is proposed for an uncertain multi-echelon supply chain considering financial risk, customer satisfaction, and human resource training. Three conflictive objective functions and several sets of real constraints are considered concurrently in the proposed APP model. Some parameters of the proposed model are assumed to be uncertain and handled through a two-stage stochastic programming (TSSP) approach. The proposed TSSP is solved using three multi-objective solution procedures, i.e., the goal attainment technique, the modified ε-constraint method, and STEM method. The whole procedure is applied in an automotive resin and oil supply chain as a real case study wherein the efficacy and applicability of the proposed approaches are illustrated in comparison with existing experimental production planning method

Heterogeneous Preferences and Location Choice with Multi-Product Firms

This paper investigates whether the principle of minimum differentiation extends to the location choices of multi-product firms of different sizes supplying differentiated goods to consumers with heterogeneous tastes. Our analysis explicitly allows for the possibility that the resulting location equilibria will be asymmetric, and we compare the multiproduct equilibria with the location configurations that would arise if each outlet were operated by a single-product firm. We show that multi-product firms disperse their products if consumer heterogeneity is low or distance between markets is high. They adopt more dispersed locations than single product firms to limit business stealing from their own outlets. Asymmetry is shown to characterize location configurations of both multi-product and single-product firms.multi-product firms, location, heterogeneous tastes

Multi-Product Firms and Trade Liberalization

This paper develops a general equilibrium model of multi-product firms and analyzes their behavior during trade liberalization. Firm productivity in a given product is modeled as a combination of firm-level "ability" and firm-product-level "expertise", both of which are stochastic and unknown prior to the firm's payment of a sunk cost of entry. Higher firm-level ability raises a firm's productivity across all products, which induces a positive correlation between a firm's intensive (output per product) and extensive (number of products) margins. Trade liberalization fosters productivity growth within and across firms and in aggregate by inducing firms to shed marginally productive products and forcing the lowest-productivity firms to exit. Though exporters produce a smaller range of products after liberalization, they increase the share of products sold abroad as well as exports per product. All of these adjustments are shown to be relatively more pronounced in countries' comparative advantage industries.

On Time-Bandwidth Product of Multi-Soliton Pulses

Multi-soliton pulses are potential candidates for fiber optical transmission where the information is modulated and recovered in the so-called nonlinear Fourier domain. While this is an elegant technique to account for the channel nonlinearity, the obtained spectral efficiency, so far, is not competitive with the classic Nyquist-based schemes. In this paper, we study the evolution of the time-bandwidth product of multi-solitons as they propagate along the optical fiber. For second and third order soliton pulses, we numerically optimize the pulse shapes to achieve the smallest time-bandwidth product when the phase of the spectral amplitudes is used for modulation. Moreover, we analytically estimate the pulse-duration and bandwidth of multi-solitons in some practically important cases. Those estimations enable us to approximate the time-bandwidth product for higher order solitons.Comment: Accepted for ISIT 201

Multi-Product Firms and Trade Liberalization

This paper develops a general equilibrium model of multi-product firms and analyzes their behavior during trade liberalization. Firm productivity in a given product is modeled as a combination of firm-level "ability" and firmproduct- level "expertise", both of which are stochastic and unknown prior to the firm's payment of a sunk cost of entry. Higher firm-level ability raises a firm's productivity across all products, which induces a positive correlation between a firm's intensive (output per product) and extensive (number of products) margins. Trade liberalization fosters productivity growth within and across firms and in aggregate by inducing firms to shed marginally productive products and forcing the lowest-productivity firms to exit. Though exporters produce a smaller range of products after liberalization, they increase the share of products sold abroad as well as exports per product. All of these adjustments are shown to be relatively more pronounced in countries' comparative advantage industries.heterogeneous firms, endogenous product scope, love of variety, core competency