Use of heterogeneous data sources : three case studies

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1989.Title as it appears in the M.I.T. Graduate List, June 1989: Integration of heterogeneous data sources--three case studies.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 159).by David Bradley Godes.M.S

Análisis Pestel y su incidencia sobre la planeación estratégica: una aproximación en tiempos de COVID-19

El objetivo del artículo se enfoca en destacar los procesos llevados a cabo al momento de realizar un análisis de entornos externos Pestel desde la planeación estratégica, ysu importancia en las organizaciones que buscan contrarrestar impactos negativos presentados por el COVID-19. La recopilación de información se hace a través de diversos documentos académicos y científicos. La metodología utilizada es de tipo descriptivo con enfoque cualitativo, para visualizar y enfocar el proceso analítico de los entornos externos. Los resultados están basados en los procesos de los análisis de entornos Pestel, tomándose criterios y definiciones, para generar proyecciones y bosquejos de los escritos para definir los procesos empleados

Flying to Quality: Cultural Influences on Online Reviews

Customers increasingly consult opinions expressed online before making their final decisions. However, inherent factors such as culture may moderate the criteria and the weights individuals use to form their expectations and evaluations. Therefore, not all opinions expressed online match customers’ personal preferences, neither can firms use this information to deduce general conclusions. Our study explores this issue in the context of airline services using Hofstede’s framework as a theoretical anchor. We gauge the effect of each dimension as well as that of cultural distance between the passenger and the airline on the overall satisfaction with the flight as well as specific service factors. Using topic modeling, we also capture the effect of culture on review text and identify factors that are not captured by conventional rating scales. Our results provide significant insights for airline managers about service factors that affect more passengers from specific cultures leading to higher satisfaction/dissatisfaction

The Strategic Impact of References in Business Markets

We investigate a business-to-business context and ask when and why a firm should announce a “reference program” that commits the firm to facilitating the flow of information about the efficacy of its products from early adopters to potential late adopters. We model a monopolist manufacturer with a new innovation that can be sold to two potential customers. We demonstrate here two benefits of a reference program that relate not to an increase in later adopters' willingness to pay but to an increase in the willingness to pay of the early adopters themselves. The impact on the early adopters' willingness to pay arises in two ways as a result of their observation of the firm's commitment to information transmission. First, in a model of symmetric uncertainty, we show that the announcement of a reference program facilitates dynamic pricing by the manufacturer in the sense that it allows the firm to provide temporary exclusive use of the technology to one of the customers. This creates more value, which the manufacturer can extract via a higher price. In this way, a reference program can serve as a partial substitute for an exclusive-use contract. In a model with asymmetric information, we demonstrate that under certain conditions, the firm is able to use the reference program as a signal—again, to the early adopting customer—that its technology is of high quality. However, such a signal requires significant discounts to early adopters to ensure separation. As a result, a pooling equilibrium dominates in which the manufacturer fosters references regardless of its quality. Finally, by allowing the firms' private information to be stochastic, we show that separation may be a dominant outcome. </jats:p

Product Policy in Markets with Word-of-Mouth Communication

We investigate the equilibrium relationship between product quality and word-of-mouth (WOM) communication. Specifically, we ask whether firms should optimally produce “better” products when consumers are more likely to exchange information. The critical moderating factor in our model is the nature of the communication and what its primary impact is. We first look at WOM that expands awareness of a product. We show that quality may either increase or decrease as WOM expands. The answer depends, in part, on the extent to which the expansion of WOM is one of scale alone or whether it also fundamentally changes the structure of communications. Next, we examine a model in which the primary impact of WOM is to help people to evaluate the utility provided by products with which they are already familiar. Our model suggests that more WOM in this context should always lead to higher-quality products. We demonstrate that the underlying driver of this result is that the elasticity of demand with respect to quality is increasing in the proportion of consumers who are informed about the product’s quality. Taken together, the two models therefore suggest that the firm’s optimal product-policy response to the growth in social interactions depends on both the content and the structure of the underlying conversations. Finally, we compare both WOM models to analogous models of advertising and demonstrate that the firm’s optimal response to a decrease in advertising costs is quite different from that to an increase in WOM. The reason for these differences can be traced back to a fundamental distinction between advertising and WOM: although the former is optimized, the latter is far more random. This paper was accepted by J. Miguel Villas-Boas, marketing. </jats:p