What Turkey expects from logistics outsourcing ?

Copyright @ 2011 Yasar UniversityThe economies of the world have become increasingly interdependent, and organizations have come under tremendous pressure to maximize productivity and profitability. Creating value through outsourcing has emerged as a popular competitive strategy for firms of all sizes in all types of industries. The aim of this research is to investigate the use of third party logistics in Turkish companies from the users’ perspective to identify the types of logistics services outsourced, problems encountered in outsourcing these services, logistics costs, decision makers in outsourcing logistics activities, and information sources used in the decision-making process. A structured survey was selected as the tool for data collection. The field study involved face-to-face interviews with 204 companies out of top 500 companies ranked in terms of turnover that are registered with industrial associations and chambers of commerce in Turkey. Moreover, a decision support system based on Bayesian Causal Map is proposed for 3PLs in order to assist them in their service proposals for different sectors. This study is a first attempt to reveal and compare the outsourcing perception of the companies in different sectors, to expose the firms’ underlying motives as well as the respective importance of these motives for outsourcing logistics activities in Turkey. The use of Bayesian Causal Map based on the survey results provides an important guide to the 3PL providers to pick a suitable strategy and to prioritize their operational activities in different sectors in such a way to achieve a competitive advantage

Modeling toothpaste brand choice: An empirical comparison of artificial neural networks and multinomial probit model

Copyright @ 2010 Atlantis PressThe purpose of this study is to compare the performances of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Multinomial Probit (MNP) approaches in modeling the choice decision within fast moving consumer goods sector. To do this, based on 2597 toothpaste purchases of a panel sample of 404 households, choice models are built and their performances are compared on the 861 purchases of a test sample of 135 households. Results show that ANN's predictions are better while MNP is useful in providing marketing insight

Spatial Interrelationships of Quality of Life with Land Use/Land Cover, Demography and Urbanization

The quality of life (QOL) is a measure of social wellbeing and life satisfaction of individuals in an area. Measuring its spatial dynamics is of great significance as it can assist the policy makers and practitioners in improving the balance between urbanization and living environment. This study proposes an approach to spatially map and examine the relationships between QOL, land use/land cover (LULC) and population density in an urban environment. The city of Lahore, Pakistan was selected as the case study area. The QOL was evaluated through the data related to physical health, psychological, social relationships, environment (natural and built), economic condition and development, and access to facilities and services. The weights/relative importance of each QOL domain was determined through the analytic hierarchy process by processing the data collected from local field experts. Overall QOL was computed by applying the domain weights to the data; spatial mapping of QOL domains and overall QOL was conducted afterwards. The spatial dynamics of QOL were examined, and its interrelationships with LULC and population density were analyzed. The relationship between these three variables turned out to be spatially dynamic. The proposed approach assists the spatial mapping and analyses of QOL, LULC and population, and by examining the spatial dynamics of these variables, contributes to devising appropriate land management and QOL improvement strategies and policies in the metropolitan regions.</p

Analysis of customer lifetime value and marketing expenditure decisions through a Markovian-Based model

The general aim of this study is to provide a guide to the future marketing decisions of a firm, using a model to predict customer lifetime values. The proposed framework aims to eliminate the limitations and drawbacks of the majority of models encountered in the literature through a simple and industry-specific model with easily measurable and objective indicators. In addition, this model predicts the potential value of the current customers rather than measuring the current value, which has generally been used in the majority of previous studies. This study contributes to the literature by helping to make future marketing decisions via Markov decision processes for a company that offers several types of products. Another contribution is that the states for Markov decision processes are also generated using the predicted customer lifetime values where the prediction is realized by a regression-based model. Finally, a real world application of the proposed model is provided in the banking sector to show the empirical validity of the model. Therefore, we believe that the proposed framework and the developed model can guide both practitioners and researchers. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey; Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Industry and Trade [00432.STZ.2009-2]; ITU, Institute of Science and Technology [34228]This paper is a part of the PhD thesis of Yeliz Ekinci which was held at Istanbul Technical University (ITU) and she was awarded by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey 2211 scholarship. This research was also supported by Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Industry and Trade (Project No: 00432.STZ.2009-2) and ITU, Institute of Science and Technology (Project No: 34228). The interpretation and conclusions revealed in this study do not represent the official perspectives of the institutes stated above. The authors would like to express their deep gratitude to the anonymous referees for their invaluable comments and to the anonymous financial services company that supplied the data

Relative evaluation of Turkey's development level among 32 countries A multidimensional approach

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:9350.934(97-9) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

The dynamic effect of devaluation on the trade balance, inflation and output of the Turkish economy

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:9350.934(98/1) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Urban Quality of Life: A Case Study of Guwahati

Subjective QOL, Objective QOL, Environment,