Demand for Customized Products, Production Flexibility, and Price Competition

We examine markets where, in addition to production of standard (core) products, mass customization is technologically feasible. We compare a setting where a monopolist provides both standard and custom goods to a setting where an entrant joins the custom market, and find customers' tastes affect the social desirability of entry. The entrant is unconcerned about the impact of his custom production on the incumbent's core product market and in some cases may supply more custom products than is socially desirable. In contrast to previous literature, we show that increased variability of demand may lead to a reduction in investment in flexible production technologies. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG - (Nachfrage nach Spezialprodukten, Fertigungsflexibilität und Preiswettbewerb) In diesem Beitrag werden Märkte untersucht, auf denen zusätzlich zur Produktion von Standardprodukten die Herstellung von Spezialprodukten in großen Stückzahlen ("mass customization") technologisch möglich ist. Es wird eine Situation verglichen, in der ein Monopolist sowohl Standard- als auch Spezialprodukte anbietet mit einer Situation, in der der eintretende Konkurrent den Markt für Spezialprodukte bedient. Der Vergleich zeigt, daß der Kundengeschmack die soziale Wünschbarkeit des Eintritts beeinflußt. Für den Eintretenden ist es unerheblich wie sich seine Spezialprodukte auf den Hauptproduktmarkt des eingesessenen Unternehmens auswirken und in manchen Fällen kann es dazu kommen, daß er mehr Spezialprodukte anbietet als gesellschaftlich wünschbar. Im Gegensatz zur bisherigen Literatur wird gezeigt, daß zunehmende Variabilität der Nachfrage zu einer Verringerung von Investitionen in flexible Fertigungstechnologien führen kann.

Capacity Choice and Duopoly Incentives for Information Sharing

We examine a three-stage game in which duopolists face a random demand intercept. The firms first choose capacities, then decide whether to commit to share the private information they will receive about the intercept. After the private information is observed, firms choose output levels. Comparing the results to an alternative model without capacity choice or capacity constraints, we show the existence of a capacity choice stage may reverse the incentives to share information, and lead to equilibria in which information sharing occurs. We use binary uncertainty since the common linearnormal model cannot handle capacity constraints. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG - (Kapazitätsentscheidungen und Duopolanreize bei Informationsaustausch) In dem Beitrag wird ein dreistufiges Spiel vorgestellt, in dem sich Duopolisten einer Nachfrage gegenübersehen, die eine Zufallsgröße ist. Die Unternehmen entscheiden auf der ersten Stufe über Kapazitäten, dann können sie sich freiwillig verpflichten, ihre privaten Information auszutauschen, die sie über das Marktvolumen erhalten werden. Nach der Beobachtung der privaten Information entscheiden die Unternehmen über die Angebotsmenge. Ein Vergleich der Ergebnisse dieses Spiels mit einem alternativen Modell ohne Kapazitätsentscheidung oder Kapazitätsbeschränkungen zeigt, daß die Existenz einer Kapazitätsentscheidungsstufe die Anreize zum Austausch von Informationen umkehren und zu Gleichgewichten führen kann, in denen Informationsaustausch stattfindet. In dem Spiel wird Unsicherheit binär modelliert, da das übliche linear-normalverteilte Modell keine Kapazitätsbeschränkungen erfassen kann.oligopoly and other forms of market imperfection; asymmetric and private information

Understanding Business Education: Examining the Effect of the Application of Strategic Learning Among Diverse Business Disciplines

Strategic learning is an educational construct that evaluates the skill, will, and self-regulation of students across ten learning attributes to determine interventions that can improve overall academic achievement. If precisely implemented to a targeted grouping of students, these interventions can be generalized to achieve broader successful results in learning. Determining these groupings, therefore, is a necessary first step in applying this construct. Business discipline was identified as a possible method of categorizing business students in higher education for the purposes of more precisely applying the strategic learning construct. The purpose of this dissertation was to determine if the delineation of undergraduate business students based upon their selected business discipline is an appropriate target for the precise application of strategic learning. Through the use of the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI), a research sample from a U.S. university was surveyed to determine both the subjects’ business disciplines and their learning attributes with regard to the strategic learning construct. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) of the resultant data indicated if this method of delineation was suitable for categorizing business students with respect to the application of the strategic learning concept. The findings of this analysis indicated that no statistically significant differences among the discipline groupings were determined with respect to the any of the scales assessed by the LASSI, demonstrating that business discipline is likely not a worthwhile method for delineating business students with respect to their learning attributes

Inferences on the parameters of the Weibull distribution

For the most part, solutions to the problems of making inferences about the parameters in the Weibull distribution have been limited to providing simple estimators of the parameters. Little has been known about the properties of the estimators. In this paper the small and moderate sample size properties of the maximum likelihood estimators are studied and their superiority is established. The problem of making further inferences which are based on the maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters is then considered. The inferences that are presented can be divided into those based on a single sample and those based on two independent samples from Weibull distributions and include solutions to the standard problems of interval estimation and hypothesis testing. In addition tolerance limits and confidence limits on the reliability are given. these procedures are accomplished by the discovery of certain pivotal functions whose distributions can be obtained by Monte Carlo methods. Although the distributions are only tabulated for complete samples the procedures which are presented can be extended to the case of censored sampling since for this type of sampling the basic functions remain pivotal --Abstract, page ii