How to make a greedy heuristic for the asymmetric traveling salesman problem competitive

It is widely confirmed by many computational experiments that a greedy type heuristics for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) produces rather poor solutions except for the Euclidean TSP. The selection of arcs to be included by a greedy heuristic is usually done on the base of cost values. We propose to use upper tolerances of an optimal solution to one of the relaxed Asymmetric TSP (ATSP) to guide the selection of an arc to be included in the final greedy solution. Even though it needs time to calculate tolerances, our computational experiments for the wide range of ATSP instances show that tolerance based greedy heuristics is much more accurate an faster than previously reported greedy type algorithms

Some basics on tolerances

In this note we deal with sensitivity analysis of combinatorial optimization problems and its fundamental term, the tolerance. For three classes of objective functions (?, ?, MAX) we prove some basic properties on upper and lower tolerances. We show that the upper tolerance of an element is well defined, how to compute the upper tolerance of an element, and give equivalent formulations when the upper tolerance is +? or > 0. Analogous results are proven for the lower tolerance and some results on the relationship between lower and upper tolerances are given.

An Emotional Economy of Mundane Objects

Cataloged from PDF version of article.This article illuminates the affective potentialities of objects. We examine the circulation of Kurdish music cassettes in Turkey during the restrictive and strife-laden period of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. We find that the practices comprising circulation - recording, hiding, playing, and exchanging cassettes - constituted tactical resistance and generated communal imaginaries. We illuminate the "emotional economy" that is animated by a mundane object: the cassette, through its circulation, becomes saturated with emotions, establishes shared emotional repertoires, and habituates individuals and collectives into common emotional dispositions. Cassettes thus play a part in shaping and reinforcing an emotional habitus that accompanies the emergence of a sense of "us," the delineation of the "other," and the relationship between the two. We thus demonstrate the entwinement of materiality and emotions, and examine how this entwinement generates emotional structures that shape and perpetuate the imagining of community as well as the enactment of resistance

Cross cultural differences in materialism

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Materialism was explored in twelve countries using qualitative data, measures of consumer desires, measures of perceived necessities, and adapted versions of the Belk (1985) materialism scales with student samples. The use of student samples and provisionary evidence for cross-cultural reliability and validity for the scales, make the quantitative results tentative, but they produced some interesting patterns that were also supported by the qualitative data. Romanians were found to be the most materialistic, followed by the U.S.A., New Zealand, Ukraine, Germany, and Turkey. These results suggest that materialism is neither unique to the West nor directly related to affluence, contrary to what has been assumed in prior treatments of the development of consumer culture

The positive and negative effects of marketing on socioeconomic development: The Turkish case

Some observations and thoughts about domestic and international interactions between marketing and economic, sociopolitical, and cultural factors are presented using Turkish examples. These interactions are discussed in terms of satisfaction of the needs (having, actualization, and social) of the three parties that seem to be differentially influenced by marketing: over- and underprivileged individuals, the society, and the businesses. In particular, the attention is drown to the fact that whereas marketing has had mainly positive effects on the country's privileged consumers, the poor consumers have seldom benefitted. The author suggests a number of actions, to be taken by business and non-business organizations, that could increase the need satisfaction of each of the parties. © 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers

Human development and humane consumption: Well-being beyond the "good life"

In pursuit of the "good life," less affluent societies focus on the material - that is, consumption and economic development. The author discusses human and environmental consequences of this focus. She suggests alternative emergent ideologies, structures and processes, and practices to enable the enhancing potential of goods and thus move toward well-being, which she proposes to entail humane consumption embedded in human development

Continuity through change: Navigating temporalities through heirloom rejuvenation

This study explores how heirlooms, usually regarded as objects of family identity and stability, can also become objects of evolving personal identities and change. Our approach is based on the role of materiality (as well as meanings) and multitemporality in heirloom consumption. The data generated through interviews, visual sources, and media documents reveal three rejuvenation processes that, given particular boundary conditions, renew heirlooms: uncovering, refreshing, and reconciliation. Our study also distinguishes three types of heirloom essence that can survive the heirloom's material and compositional transformations. Rejuvenation reintegrates the heirloom into the heir's life trajectory by imbuing it with a zeitgeist value and the heir's presence, helping the heir to better navigate her imaginaries of the past, present, and future. Beyond the ritualistic consumption or curation of heirlooms, our findings reveal a creative, playful, and proactive relation with heirlooms, evocative of craftwork. Moreover, the market, within particular boundaries, can help authenticate heirloom objects and facilitate their inalienability rather than necessarily destroying their authenticity. Our study has implications for the role of heirloom consumption in consumers' negotiations of continuity and change, the interaction of the symbolic and the material in heirlooms, and the inalienability-market relation. © The Author 2016

Special Issue on Turkey and Turkish Communities: Journal of Macromarketing, 2015

[No abstract available

Constructing and representing the Islamic consumer in Turkey

This study looks at how marketers in Turkey construct and represent tesettürlü consumers (women wearing Islamically inspired forms of covered dress) in advertising and other commercial imagery, and how these representations are shaped and transformed by the local and global dynamics of consumerism, capitalism, and politics. We believe that the emergence of tesettürlü women as a distinct consumer segment and their evolving representation in the marketing imagery are revealing of the processes of identity formation and negotiation as well as the social changes that have been occurring in Turkey since the 1980s. By attending to the discourses and practices of market actors, namely companies and designers that manufacture and sell clothing and related products to tesettürlü women in Turkey, we show how the Islamic fashion industry operates through a play on cultural difference and similarity, and fabricate the ideal of a "modern" tesettürlü woman which is attainable through consumption. © 2007 Berg