When Do Higher Prices Increase Demand? The Dual Role of Price in Consumers\u27 Value Judgments

Drawing on literature on judgment and decision-making, we examine the proposition that price serves two distinct roles in consumers\u27 value judgments. First, as a product attribtute, price affects the perceived similarity of the target product to the mental prototype of a higher or lower quality product. However, price is not the only attribute used to make similarity based quality judgments. Other relevant and available product attributes moderate the effect of price on quality judgments. Second, as a measure of sacrifice, price serves as the benchmark for comparing utility gains from superior product quality. However, this comparison process is dynamic because the relative importance of money and product quality changes across consumption occasions. We present a signal detection model of consumer\u27s price-value judgment to explain how high prices simultaneously increase as well as decrease purchase intentions. We describe how managers can use this model of value judgment to identify situations when higher price may increase demand

Drug discovery for Diamond-Blackfan anemia using reprogrammed hematopoietic progenitors

Diamond-Blackfan anemia (DBA) is a congenital disorder characterized by the failure of erythroid progenitor differentiation, severely curtailing red blood cell production. Because many DBA patients fail to respond to corticosteroid therapy, there is considerable need for therapeutics for this disorder. Identifying therapeutics for DBA requires circumventing the paucity of primary patient blood stem and progenitor cells. To this end, we adopted a reprogramming strategy to generate expandable hematopoietic progenitor cells from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from DBA patients. Reprogrammed DBA progenitors recapitulate defects in erythroid differentiation, which were rescued by gene complementation. Unbiased chemical screens identified SMER28, a small-molecule inducer of autophagy, which enhanced erythropoiesis in a range of in vitro and in vivo models of DBA. SMER28 acted through autophagy factor ATG5 to stimulate erythropoiesis and up-regulate expression of globin genes. These findings present an unbiased drug screen for hematological disease using iPSCs and identify autophagy as a therapeutic pathway in DBA.National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (U.S.) (Grant R24-DK092760)National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (U.S.) (Grant R24-DK49216)National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (U.S.) (Grant U54DK110805)National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (Grant UO1-HL100001)National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (Grant U01HL134812)National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (Grant R01HL04880)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R24OD017870-01

Callplan: An Interactive Salesman's Call Planning System

CALLPLAN is an interactive computer system designed to aid salesmen or sales management in allocating sales call time more efficiently. The system increases their capacity to consider the allocation in a logical and consistent manner. CALLPLAN uses as input the salesman's own best estimates of expected contribution of all possible call policies for each account and prospect. The computer can help the estimating procedure by fitting curves through estimated points on a response function or by obtaining expected values from probability estimates. The system solves a mathematical program which determines the best time allocation to maximize contribution according to these estimates. Factors considered by the system include travel time and costs to get to geographical areas within the territory, amount of time required per call on an account within an area, account profitability, and minimum and maximum account call frequency limitations. An efficient incremental analysis routine is discussed as a solution procedure for the mathematical program. CALLPLAN seems best suited to repetitive selling situations where the amount of time the salesman spends with an account is an important factor in the magnitude of sales generated. Preliminary applications have been made by fourteen salesmen in six sales situations. A transcript of a session at the computer terminal of one application is presented. Anticipated sales increases, based on the salesman's judgmental inputs, for the call policy generated by CALLPLAN were between five and twenty-five per cent in the majority of applications.

Considering Competition in Media Planning

A normative mathematical procedure for the media planning problem is proposed which explicitly considers the effect of competitors' media schedules. A predictive model is developed to evaluate expected market response due to an advertising media schedule considering the anticipated schedules of competitors as well as other major advertising phenomena. Heuristic search routines are used to select and schedule media with the objective of maximizing market response subject to budget limitations. The procedure has been applied on real problems. The market response model first divides people into market segments which are characterized by product class sales potential. Ads placed by the competing firms cause people in segments to be exposed to this advertising and thereby create a level of exposure value which decays over time in the absence of new exposures. The individual's response during a time period is a function of his retained exposure value for each competing firm and his market segment. Summing over individuals and over time to obtain total market response is approximated analytically using media coverage and overlap data that is relatively easy to gather and store.

A Marketing Decision Support System for Retailers

A decision support system for planning marketing strategies and allocating resources for a multi-store retailer is described. This decision support system combines well-known model building and analysis methodology, sophisticated computer software, and attention to management's implementation needs in order to apply management science thinking to messy, high level strategy and forecasting problems. The system consists of a planning model, national campaign evaluation system, experimental analysis system, and an ongoing interactive data base and reporting system. The planning model was first implemented with subjective judgment as input. The rest of the system was then refined to aid management in improving their subjective judgments, and for tracking and control. The marketing mix for total and business entity (groups of departments) sales is presently being planned with the support of this system. Profit improvements have been identified and implemented.decision support systems, retailing, marketing planning