Designing a Profit-Maximizing Product Line for Heterogeneous Market

Designing product line is important marketing decision that affects the firm\u27s overall performances and profitability. This is particularly important due to the fact that the contemporary markets are characterized by sophisticated and diverse preferences of consumers as well as strong competition. Therefore, to meet market demand, firms prefer to offer a product line instead of a single product. In order to decide both on the number and position of products in its product line, the company should understand the way in which consumers value and choose products. For that purpose, a multi-attribute research technique known as conjoint analysis can be used. At the same time, the company should take into account product and pricing strategy of competitors and the possible competitors’ reactions on its own strategy. For modelling market competition, the concept of the Nash equilibrium appears as an appropriate tool. This paper proposes a model for designing a competitive profit-maximizing product line for a heterogeneous market. Preferences were modelled by a model of partial utilities associated with the corresponding attribute levels, while the logit model is used to transform respondents’ preferences into a potential market share. The problem of optimizing the product line was formulated as a nonlinear binary programming model. Proposed model was tested on the previously published conjoint data set, thus confirming its efficiency and applicability

A New Approach to Evaluation of University Teaching Considering Heterogeneity of Students’ Preferences

AbstractStudents’ evaluations of teaching are increasingly used by universities to evaluate teaching performance. However, these evaluations are controversial mainly due to fact that students value various aspects of excellent teaching differently. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new approach to student evaluation of university teaching based on data from conjoint analysis. Conjoint analysis is a multivariate technique used to analyze the structure of individuals’ preference. In particular, our approach accounts for different importance students attach to various aspects of teaching. Moreover, it accounts explicitly for heterogeneity arising from student preferences, and incorporates it to form comprehensive teaching evaluation score. We have conducted survey and confirmed applicability and efficiency of the proposed approach

Ranking institutions within a university based on their scientific performance: A percentile-based approach

Over the recent years, the subject of university rankings has attracted a significant amount of attention and sparked a scientific debate. However, few studies on this topic focus on elaborating the scientific performance of universities’ institutions, such as institutes, schools, and faculties. For this reason, the aim of this study is to design an appropriate framework for evaluating and ranking institutions within a university. The devised methodology ranks institutions based on the number of published papers, mean normalized citation score (MNCS), and four percentile-based indicators using the I-distance method. We applied the proposed framework and scrutinized the University of Belgrade (UB) as the biggest and the best-ranked university in Serbia. Thus, 31 faculties and 11 institutes were compared. Namely, an in-depth percentile-based analysis of the UB papers indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIe) and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) for the period 2008-2011 is provided. The results clearly show considerable discrepancies in two occasions: first, when it comes to the question of leading author, and second, when it comes to analyzing the percentile rank classes (PRs) of groups of faculties

Ranking institutions within a university based on their scientific performance: A percentile-based approach

Over the recent years, the subject of university rankings has attracted a significant amount of attention and sparked a scientific debate. However, few studies on this topic focus on elaborating the scientific performance of universities’ institutions, such as institutes, schools, and faculties. For this reason, the aim of this study is to design an appropriate framework for evaluating and ranking institutions within a university. The devised methodology ranks institutions based on the number of published papers, mean normalized citation score (MNCS), and four percentile-based indicators using the I-distance method. We applied the proposed framework and scrutinized the University of Belgrade (UB) as the biggest and the best-ranked university in Serbia. Thus, 31 faculties and 11 institutes were compared. Namely, an in-depth percentile-based analysis of the UB papers indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIe) and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) for the period 2008-2011 is provided. The results clearly show considerable discrepancies in two occasions: first, when it comes to the question of leading author, and second, when it comes to analyzing the percentile rank classes (PRs) of groups of faculties

Sorption characteristics of paper produced from sepiolite

Paper laboratory-produced from sepiolite, Goles-Serbia was studied to determine its sorption characteristics for nitric oxides, water vapor, and ammonia. The paper adsorbed high percentages of nitric oxides and ammonia was stoichiometrically chemisorbed on paper saturated with NO2 and H2O. Infrared spectroscopy showed that the sorption of nitric oxides and ammonia does not destroy the crystal lattice of sepiolite, which was confirmed by XRD-analysis. Sorption of both nitric oxides and ammonia occurred by zeolitic water inside the structural channels of sepiolite. Pressure swing adsorption (PSA) or temperature swing adsorption (TSA) cycles can be repeated many times, in the case of NOx and NH3