Game theoretic pricing models in hotel revenue management: an equilibrium choice-based conjoint analysis approach

This paper explores a game-theoretically founded approach to conjoint analysis that determines equilibrium room rates under differentiated price competition in an oligopolistic hotel market. Competition between hotels is specified in terms of market share functions that can be estimated using multinomial logit models of consumer choice. The approach is based on choice-based conjoint analysis that permits the estimation of attributes weights (“part-worths”) for an additive utility formulation of the utility function. From this, room rates that equilibrate the market, conditioned on the differences in services and facilities offered by competing hotels, can be determined. The approach is illustrated by an example

The Story Behind Bankruptcy: When Business Gets Personal

The number of bankruptcies in a specific period, and levels of debt, are well documented but little is known about the consequences of bankruptcies beyond the numbers. In this study, Dutch entrepreneurs who went through debt rescheduling after personal bankruptcy, were interviewed in order to gain an understanding of the private, personal and social implications of bankruptcy. Recently, systematic investigations of the implications of bankruptcy have been published. However, research has not yet taken the phenomenological experience of the bankrupt entrepreneur into account. Insights into these experiences are of critical importance for obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the impact of the bankruptcy process, and for engaging in a meaningful reform of bankruptcy law. During the interviews in this study, the entrepreneurs reflected on the early days of their business venture, the moment of first detecting the prospect of business failure, their personal experiences during business failure, and the aftermath of bankruptcy and debt rescheduling. The findings indicate that a bankruptcy experience can be compared to losing a loved one: a psychological process similar to mourning. The findings show that a lack of empathy, respect and transparency by formal institutional representatives such as judges, trustees and administrators is seen by the entrepreneurs as ‘emotional punishment’, and can be considered as a major source of their grief. Because of this grief, the bankruptcy and debt rescheduling experience can be extremely stressful causing severe psychological and physical distress. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. Coherent privaatrech

Analysis of Diffusion of Ras2 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae Using Fluorescence Recovery after Photobleaching

Binding, lateral diffusion and exchange are fundamental dynamic processes involved in protein association with cellular membranes. In this study, we developed numerical simulations of lateral diffusion and exchange of fluorophores in membranes with arbitrary bleach geometry and exchange of the membrane localized fluorophore with the cytosol during Fluorescence Recovery after Photobleaching (FRAP) experiments. The model simulations were used to design FRAP experiments with varying bleach region sizes on plasma-membrane localized wild type GFP-Ras2 with a dual lipid anchor and mutant GFP-Ras2C318S with a single lipid anchor in live yeast cells to investigate diffusional mobility and the presence of any exchange processes operating in the time scale of our experiments. Model parameters estimated using data from FRAP experiments with a 1 micron x 1 micron bleach region-of-interest (ROI) and a 0.5 micron x 0.5 micron bleach ROI showed that GFP-Ras2, single or dual lipid modified, diffuses as single species with no evidence of exchange with a cytoplasmic pool. This is the first report of Ras2 mobility in yeast plasma membrane. The methods developed in this study are generally applicable for studying diffusion and exchange of membrane associated fluorophores using FRAP on commercial confocal laser scanning microscopes.Comment: Accepted for publication in Physical Biology (2010). 28 pages, 7 figures, 3 table

Correlation of structural and spectroscopic properties of a photosynthetic reaction center

Polarized spectra of absorption and light-induced absorbance changes are presented for the crystallized reaction centers of Rhodopseudomonas viridis. We find that a model based on extended dipole interaction between all six pigments is capable of interpreting detailed features such as the contributions from the individual pigments to the various absorption peaks. Even though the pigments are arranged in approximate C2 symmetry, the optical spectra together with the calculations reflect deviations from this symmetry, which may be important in understanding the electron pathway