Co-evolution of demand and supply under competition

In this paper, we derive strategies to enforce dominance in a business-to-consumer market with heterogeneous, competing products, while the market segmentation evolves through interaction of demand and supply. By using evolutionary economic notions, we extend operations management studies on manufacturing facing demand diffusion. We arrive at a synthesis of a Forrester delay manufacturing model and a technology substitution-diffusion model and show that the actual operationalization of product attractiveness, reflecting what consumers deem important, as well as the responsiveness of production capacity scaling greatly determine the market dynamics and asymptotic outcome. We obtain analytic results on absolute dominance in case of the constant inherent attractiveness of products, say technical performance, and numerical results on instability and quasi-stability in case of more encompassing definitions of attractiveness involving price and service level. We conclude, in general, that in establishing market dominance, firms should focus on timely entry to capture first-buyers, high responsiveness and predatory pricing. Scale advantages and resilience through responsiveness are essential in obtaining and subsequently retaining the market share when other firms already provide or are about to enter with technically superior products. We also hint on how to extend our model to study several other issues on industry dynamics

Making research ethics work for global health:towards a more agile and collaborative approach

In this reflective essay, we seek to engage in a constructive dialogue with scholars across medicine, public health and anthropology on research ethics practices. Drawing on anthropological research and ethical dilemmas that our colleagues and we encountered as medical anthropologists, we reflect on presumed and institutionalised 'best' practices such as mandatory written informed consent, and problematise how they are implemented in interdisciplinary global health research projects. We demonstrate that mandatory, individualised, written, informed consent may be unsuitable in many contexts and also identify reasons why tensions between professionals in interdisciplinary teams may arise when decisions about ethics procedures are taken. We propose alternatives to written informed consent that acknowledge research governance requirements and contextual realities and leave more room for ethnographic approaches. Beyond informed consent, we also explore the situatedness of ethical practices when working in contexts where decision-making around health is clearly a shared concern. We use vignettes based on our own and colleagues' experiences to illustrate our arguments, using the collective 'we' instead of 'I' in our vignettes to protect our research participants, partners and interlocutors. We propose a decolonial, plural and vernacular approach to informed consent specifically, and research ethics more broadly. We contend that ethics procedures and frameworks need to become more agile, decolonial, pluralised and vernacularised to enable achieving congruence between communities' ideas of social justice and institutional ethics. We argue that global health research can benefit from anthropology's engagement with situated ethics and consent that is relational, negotiated and processual; and accountability that is not only bureaucratic but also constructive. In doing so, we hope to broaden ethical praxis so that the best outcomes that are also just, fair and equitable can be achieved for all stakeholders.</p

Toward meso-level product-market network indices for strategic product selection and (re)design guidelines over the product life-cycle

Many methods to arrive at a product-market choice through selection and (re)design assume stationary demand and a stable range of products to pick and maximize profit trading off operational performance in manufacturing versus (under)servicing certain market segments. The determination and decisiveness in the product-market choice and marketing and manufacturing strategies are likely to be different when anticipating technological change and (ensuing) shifts in demand and competition of which the timing and direction is often uncertain. As the product life-cycle pattern describes such changes in market, technology and competition over time, we can use the stylization thereof to derive strategic and forward-looking product selection and (re)design decisions. We introduce the notion of a meso-level product-market network and two indices to quantify features of that network. We then relate index values over time to phases in the meso-level product life-cycle to derive micro-level, forward-looking product selection and (re)design guidelines that anticipate developments in the industry.We also uncover the different roles of the marketing and engineering departments in the various product life-cycle phases. Keywords: Product-Market Network; Product Selection and Design; Network Index; Marketing-Manufacturing Interface; Technological Change; Product Life-Cycl

A value network development model and implications for innovation and production network management

In managing their value network, firms have to balance current and future value concerns and own and network partners’ concerns. Firms generate immediate value through manufacturing and selling the current generation of products together with other firms in its production network and generate future value by developing a new generation of products with other firms and research institutes in its innovation network. Product innovation and production often take place simultaneously and recurrently. We take the discernible production and innovation activities to occur in co-evolving network layers. We formulate a biplex value network development model that lays out the temporal pattern of production and innovation activities in the value network. We introduce terminology to pinpoint temporal interactions between the innovation and production activities. We study several exemplary complications in the cross-table of inter- and intragenerational interactions versus interactions within and across network layers

Dynamics and equilibria under incremental horizontal differentiation on the Salop circle

We study product differentiation on a Salop circle when firms relocate incrementally due to bounded rationality. We prove that, under common assumptions on demand, firms relocate only when two or more firms target the same niche. In any other case, there is no incentive for any firm to relocate incrementally. We prove that all distributions in which firms are sufficiently far apart in product space are unstable Nash equilibria. We prove, in particular, that the classical equidistant distribution is an unstable Nash equilibrium that cannot emerge from another distribution. However, we show that if each firm is engaged in head-on rivalry with one other competitor, the industry converges to a ’equidistantesque’ equilibrium of clusters of rivals

Titan's atmosphere as observed by Cassini/VIMS solar occultations: CH4_4, CO and evidence for C2_2H6_6 absorption

We present an analysis of the VIMS solar occultations dataset, which allows us to extract vertically resolved information on the characteristics of Titan's atmosphere between 100-700 km with a characteristic vertical resolution of 10 km. After a series of data treatment procedures, 4 occultations out of 10 are retained. This sample covers different seasons and latitudes of Titan. The transmittances show clearly the evolution of the haze and detect the detached layer at 310 km in Sept. 2011 at mid-northern latitudes. Through the inversion of the transmission spectra with a line-by-line radiative transfer code we retrieve the vertical distribution of CH$_4$ and CO mixing ratio. The two methane bands at 1.4 and 1.7 {\mu}m are always in good agreement and yield an average stratospheric abundance of $1.28\pm0.08$%. This is significantly less than the value of 1.48% obtained by the GCMS/Huygens instrument. The analysis of the residual spectra after the inversion shows that there are additional absorptions which affect a great part of the VIMS wavelength range. We attribute many of these additional bands to gaseous ethane, whose near-infrared spectrum is not well modeled yet. Ethane contributes significantly to the strong absorption between 3.2-3.5 {\mu}m that was previously attributed only to C-H stretching bands from aerosols. Ethane bands may affect the surface windows too, especially at 2.7 {\mu}m. Other residual bands are generated by stretching modes of C-H, C-C and C-N bonds. In addition to the C-H stretch from aliphatic hydrocarbons at 3.4 {\mu}m, we detect a strong and narrow absorption at 3.28 {\mu}m which we tentatively attribute to the presence of PAHs in the stratosphere. C-C and C-N stretching bands are possibly present between 4.3-4.5 {\mu}m. Finally, we obtain the CO mixing ratio between 70-170 km. The average result of $46\pm16$ ppm is in good agreement with previous studies.Comment: 51 pages, 28 figure