Wieviel Deckungsbeitrag verschenkt man durch eine gleichartige Einteilung der Verkaufsgebiete?

Die Verkaufsgebietseinteilung behandelt das Problem, wie kleinste geographische Einheiten (kurz KGE, manchmal auch Basisbezirke genannt) nach räumlichen Kriterien zu Verkaufsgebieten zusammengefaßt und dann üblicherweise jeweils einem Außendienstmitarbeiter (kurz ADM) exklusiv zugeordnet werden. Weil damit die Einsatzmöglichkeiten der einzelnen ADM festgelegt werden, stellt diese Einteilung der Verkaufsgebiete zweifelsohne eine der wichtigsten Aufgaben des Verkaufsmanagements dar. Dabei können die Auswirkungen der Verkaufsgebietseinteilung auf den Deckungsbeitrag eines Unternehmens beträchtlich sein...The common approach for aligning territories is the balancing approach which establishes territories that are almost balanced relative to one or more territory attributes like potential or workload. Although this approach has been extremely populär for at least the last 25 years, it has been criticized recently by Skiera/Albers (1994) because it does not guarantee a territory alignment which maximizes profits. As Skiera/Albers (1994) have based their critic of the balancing approach only upon formal reasoning, this paper examines the relevance of their critic by systematically analyzing under which conditions the balancing approach yields re-sults that differ significantly from probt maximization results. Results show that the balancing approach provides on average territory alignments with 9,1% lower probt contribution than the probt maximization alignments. Therefore, this paper supports the relevance of the critic of Skiera/Albers (1994) and underlines the need for companies to search for the probt contribution maximizing territory alignment

TACO: eine neue Möglichkeit zum Vergleich von Mobilfunktarifen

Die gegenwärtige Vorgehensweise beim Vergleich von Mobilfunktarifen sieht so aus» daß zunächst ein Nutzungsprofil vorgegeben wird, dann die dazugehörigen Rechnungsbeträge der einzelnen Tarife ermittelt werden und schließlich eine Beurteilung der Tarife durch den Vergleich der Rechnungsbeträge vorgenommen wird. Kritisch an dieser Vorgehensweise ist jedoch, daß einerseits keine Einigkeit über das vorzugebende Nutzungsprofil besteht, andererseits aber gerade dieses vorgegebene Nutzungsprofil das Ergebnis des Tarifvergleichs maßgeblich beeinflussen kann. Um diese Schwäche zu vermeiden, wird das Modell TACO (TArif COmparison) vorgeschlagen. Die Grundidee von TACO besteht darin, daß zunächst für jeden Tarif das Nutzungsprofil ermittelt wird, das im Vergleich zu den Wettbewerbstarifen den günstigsten Rechnungsbetrag ergibt. Auf Basis dieser Nutzungsprofile kann dann sowohl eine Charakterisierung als auch eine Beurteilung der Tarife vorgenommen werden.Currently, mobile cellular phone tariffs are compared by, first, selecting a user profile, then calculating the prices for all tariffs and this user profile, and flnally ordering all tariffs according to their prices. This type of comparison suffers from the shortcoming that there is no agreement on the typical user profile, although the selected user profile might heavily influence the results of the tariff comparison. To avoid this shortcoming, we propose a model called TACO (TAriff COmparison). The basic idea of TACO is to determine individually for each tariff the best user profile, that is that the one that provides customers for the considered tariff with the highest price advantage compared to the other tariffs. These determined user profiles allow then to compare as well as to characterize all tariffs

COSTA: ein Entscheidungs-Unterstützungs-System zur deckungsbeitragsmaximalen Einteilung von Verkaufsgebieten

Wir greifen die in der Literatur seit längerer Zeit nicht mehr betrachtete Frage der Verkaufsgebietseinteilung auf und zeigen, daß die bisherigen Vorgehensweisen zur Einteilung von Verkaufsgebieten ökonomisch wenig fundiert sind, da sie nicht notwendigerweise zu Verkaufsgebieten führen, die den Deckungsbeitrag maximieren. Weiterhin weisen die bisherigen Vorgehensweisen den Nachteil auf, daß sie keinerlei Informationen darüber geben, welche Deckungsbeitragssteigerungen durch die Umgestaltung von Verkaufsgebieten erreicht werden können. Wir haben deshalb das Entscheidungs-Unterstützungs-System COSTA entwickelt, mit dem zum einen Auswirkungen von Verkaufsgebietsänderungen auf den Deckungsbeitrag aufgezeigt und zum anderen deckungsbeitragsmaximale Verkaufsgebietseinteilungen erstellt werden können. Das Entscheidungs-Unterstützungs-System COSTA bietet weiterhin die Möglichkeit, Auswirkungen von Änderungen der Größe des Außendienstes und der Reisendenstandorte zu beurteilen. Anhand eines fiktiven Anwendungsbeispieles wird eine Anwendung des Entscheidungs-Unterstützungs-Systems demonstriert

A new model for the alignment of almost balanced sales territories

The sales territory alignment problem deals with the question of how to align a number of sales coverage units (usually zip-codes or political districts) to sales territories. These sales territories are usually aligned in a way that they are almost balanced relative to one or several attributes like, e.g. potential or work-load. To support this task of the sales manager, a number of models have been proposed. Nevertheless, all of these models suffer from one of the following shortcomings: either, they do not guarantee the values of the chosen balancing attributes to be within certain lower and upper bounds, or the specification of these lower and upper bounds is left to the sales manager. Therefore, we propose a model called EQUALIZER that avoids these shortcomings by determining almost balanced territories without requiring lower and upper bounds from the sales manager and furthermore ensuring contiguous sales territories. In order to motivate EQUALIZER, we compare different models on a small set of instances

Measuring Fair Competition on Digital Platforms

Digital platforms use recommendations to facilitate the exchange between platform actors, such as trade between buyers and sellers. Platform actors expect, and legislators increasingly require that competition, including recommendations, are fair - especially for a market-dominating platform on which self-preferencing could occur. However, testing for fairness on platforms is challenging because offers from competing platform actors usually differ in their attributes, and many distinct fairness definitions exist. This article considers these challenges, develops a five-step approach to measure fair competition through recommendations on digital platforms, and illustrates this approach by conducting two empirical studies. These studies examine Amazon's search engine recommendations on the Amazon marketplace for more than a million daily observations from three countries. They find no consistent evidence for unfair competition through search engine recommendations. The article also discusses applying the five-step approach in other settings to ensure compliance with new regulations governing fair competition on digital platforms, such as the Digital Markets Act in the European Union or the proposed American Innovation and Choice Online Act in the United States

COSTA: Contribution optimizing sales territory alignment

The alignment of sales territories represents a major problem in salesforce management with considerable impact on profit. The common approach to this alignment is the balancing approach, which establishes territories balanced as well as possible with respect to one or more attributes such as potential or work-load. Unfortunately, this approach does not necessarily guarantee an alignment that maximizes profit. As a consequence, it does not allow evaluation of the profit implications of any alignment proposal in comparison with the existing one. Because of this, several authors have already proposed nonlinear integer optimization models that attempt to directly maximize profit by simultaneously considering the problems of selling time allocation across accounts as well as the assignment of accounts to territories. However, these models proved to be too large to be mathematically solvable, such that the authors have either simplified the problem or proposed application of heuristic solution procedures. The latter is based on the principle of equating the marginal profit of time for each salesperson. We show here that an optimal solution does not possess the property of equal marginal profits of time. We thus propose a new approach, COSTA, for the derivation of contribution optimizing sales territory alignments. COSTA is based on sales response functions at the level of sales coverage units incorporating selling time as independent variable and using a new concept designed to take travel times into account. This makes it possible to simultaneously solve the allocation and assignment problem. Furthermore, COSTA provides the structure for evaluating the effects on profit of different salesforce sizes and different locations of the salespersons. The suitability of COSTA for practical problems is supported by a real-world application in which COSTA improved an existing territory alignment by 5.8% in terms of profit contribution

Economic Consequences of Online Tracking Restrictions: Evidence from Cookies

In recent years, European regulators have debated restricting the time an online tracker can track a user to protect consumer privacy better. Despite the significance of these debates, there has been a noticeable absence of any comprehensive cost-benefit analysis. This article fills this gap on the cost side by suggesting an approach to estimate the economic consequences of lifetime restrictions on cookies for publishers. The empirical study on cookies of 54,127 users who received 128 million ad impressions over 2.5 years yields an average cookie lifetime of 279 days, with an average value of EUR 2.52 per cookie. Only 13% of all cookies increase their daily value over time, but their average value is about four times larger than the average value of all cookies. Restricting cookies lifetime to one year (two years) decreases their lifetime value by 25% (19%), which represents a decrease in the value of all cookies of 9% (5%). In light of the EUR 10.60 billion cookie-based display ad revenue in Europe, such restrictions would endanger EUR 904 million (EUR 576 million) annually, equivalent to EUR 2.08 (EUR 1.33) per EU internet user. The article discusses these results' marketing strategy challenges and opportunities for advertisers and publishers

Return on IT Investments in Two-Sided Markets

In two-sided markets an intermediary brings together two distinct customer populations, such as buyers and sellers on an e-commerce platform. In these markets the growth process of customer populations depends on network effects both within and between buyers and sellers. Thus, assigning IT investments to customer populations and quantifying the monetary value of these investments is complex. We show that measuring the intermediary’ s platform value may provide a remedy, and make IT investments in two-sided markets accountable. Thereby, we develop a model for the platform value and the growth process of customer populations accounting for network effects in two-sided market. We apply our model to an e-commerce platform. Our results highlight a significant contribution of buyers to the platform value. Analysing former IT investments we find further evidence to rather invest in buyers than sellers, and to promote investments that increase buyers’ trust in products, intermediary and trading partners (sellers)