Modelling quality as a cooperative advertising coordination mechanism in a decentralised channel using game theory

Considering the scarcity of cooperative advertising models on the interaction between product quality and market variables such as price, advertising effort and subsidy, this paper considers the effect of quality in cooperative advertising in a manufacturer-retailer supply channel in which the channel members engage in a Stackelberg game. The manufacturer is the channel leader, while the retailer is the follower. The research adopts the incorporation of product quality into the traditional cooperative advertising model setting through the multiplicative impact of price, advertising and product quality on demand. It considers two channel structures: an unsubsidised channel structure in which the manufacturer does not provide advertising subsidy to the retailer, and a subsidised channel structure in which the manufacturer provides advertising subsidy for retail advertising. It obtains the prices, the advertising effort, the retailer’s payoff and the manufacturer’s payoff for both channel structures. The results reveal that for both subsidised and unsubsidised advertising, increase in retail advertising and retailer’s payoff resulting from quality improvement is limited due to diminishing marginal returns. Also, quality improvement negatively affects the manufacturer’s payoff after a certain quality level. Further, it shows that quality can be substituted for subsidy, and can be used to coordinate the channel

Computational Analysis of Average Waiting and Arrival Times

Over the years, the drift from public to private schools has overwhelmed parents' and guardians' imagination due to teachers' and pupils' waiting times and the influence of parents in private and public schools. The government has also slowed parental emotions to send their children to public schools due to the lack of basic teaching tools, well-trained teachers, and vital infrastructure in many states in Nigeria. As a result, private individuals with inadequate educational management backgrounds started establishing schools as a business concern without proper regulations on teachers' recruitment, vital and basic school facilities. The proliferation of substandard private and public schools has led to waiting time problems. This article describes novel computational procedures to compute the average waiting and arrival time. The procedures investigate teachers and pupils' average arrival and waiting times for public and private primary schools in each class in a local government area in Delta State, Nigeria. A simple random sampling procedure was applied. The study intends to determine whether the mean waiting or arrival time of teachers and pupils for each class for the period under review is equal. The data set was subjected to further mean analysis and analysis of variance. The F statistic was obtained and compared with the F critical value, which resulted in the rejection of the null hypothesis at a 5% level of significance. The analysis indicated that the average waiting time for teachers' arrival in each class is not equal and the average waiting time for pupils' arrival is not equal, hence the null hypothesis's rejection. The study revealed that the average waiting time for public and private school pupils in the schools investigated is 17 minutes. In comparison, the average waiting time of teachers for both public and private schools is approximately 6 minutes. This study affirmed that waiting time problems exist in public and private school

Comparative Performance Evaluation of Efficiency for High Dimensional Classification Methods

This paper aimed to determine the efficiency of classifiers for high-dimensional classification methods. It also investigated whether an extreme minimum misclassification rate translates into robust efficiency. To ensure an acceptable procedure, a benchmark evaluation threshold (BETH) was proposed as a metric to analyze the comparative performance for high-dimensional classification methods. A simplified performance metric was derived to show the efficiency of different classification methods. To achieve the objectives, the existing probability of correct classification (PCC) or classification accuracy reported in five different articles was used to generate the BETH value. Then, a comparative analysis was performed between the application of BETH value and the well-established PCC value ,derived from the confusion matrix. The analysis indicated that the BETH procedure had a minimum misclassification rate, unlike the Optimal method. The results also revealed that as the PCC inclined toward unity value, the misclassification rate between the two methods (BETH and PCC) became extremely irrelevant. The study revealed that the BETH method was invariant to the performance established by the classifiers using the PCC criterion but demonstrated more relevant aspects of robustness and minimum misclassification rate as compared to the PCC method. In addition, the comparative analysis affirmed that the BETH method exhibited more robust efficiency than the Optimal method. The study concluded that a minimum misclassification rate yields robust performance efficiency