Market Orientation, Customer Selectivity and Firm Performance

Market orientation is a well-known construct in the marketing literature. One reason for the extensive research on market orientation is that it is seen as the operationalization of the marketing concept itself. Extant literature provides evidence supporting the link between market orientation and firm performance. However, most of the evidence which links market orientation with firm performance comes from studies carried out in the goods context. The few studies that have been done in the services context show either a weak link with firm performance or no link at all. Further, the studies that have been carried out in the services context have generally been limited to a single industry. In this thesis, I explore the reasons as to why market orientation might be more strongly associated with firm performance in the goods context than in the services context. I suggest that one reason could be that services are by their very nature non-standardized, and that market orientation is aimed at satisfying all the customers. Therefore, market orientation may not be the dominant driver of firm performance in the services context, where it becomes very difficult to satisfy every single customer. In the goods context, however, market orientation will be a dominant driver of firm performance. I also suggest another construct, namely customer selectivity, as a driver of firm performance in the services context. Customer selectivity, it is argued, is anchored in the customer relationship management (CRM) literature. Since services are by their nature heterogeneous, i.e. non-standardized, firms which are customer selective will do well in the services context. However, one cannot exclude the possibility that, while market orientation might not be a good driver of firm performance in the services context, it might be an antecedent of customer selectivity. Therefore I develop an alternative model in which market orientation is conceptualized as a cultural orientation, and thus acts as antecedent to customer selectivity, which then leads to firm performance. To test the hypotheses which are developed in the study, I use a pre-existing scale for market orientation, and operationalize customer selectivity using existing items. All the hypotheses are tested on a multi-industry dataset. The first set of hypotheses, relating to the first model, is tested using regression analysis. The second set, relating to the alternative model, is tested using structural equation modelling. The results are, broadly speaking, consistent with the hypotheses. It is seen that market orientation is a direct driver of firm performance in the goods context, while customer selectivity is a direct driver of firm performance in the services context. Similarly, it is also seen that market orientation is an antecedent to customer selectivity. This is consistent with the results obtained in the first model. However, it is also seen that in both models, while the first dimension of market orientation (customer orientation) is associated with firm performance according to the hypotheses derived in the thesis, the second dimension of market orientation (interfunctional coordination) is not associated with firm performance. The study clarifies and delimits the role of market orientation as a direct driver of firm performance in all contexts, and suggests it leads to firm performance primarily in the goods context. Similarly, customer selectivity leads to firm performance primarily in the services context. However, the study also suggests that market orientation is an antecedent to customer selectivity in both contexts. In other worlds, market orientation plays a role in both the goods and services context, but differentially. Managerially, market orientation and customer selectivity are proposed as a pair of strategies that marketers can help their CEOs choose between or possibly combine depending on the goods-service mix that the firm offers

A Portable Active Binocular Robot Vision Architecture for Scene Exploration

We present a portable active binocular robot vision archi- tecture that integrates a number of visual behaviours. This vision archi- tecture inherits the abilities of vergence, localisation, recognition and si- multaneous identification of multiple target object instances. To demon- strate the portability of our vision architecture, we carry out qualitative and comparative analysis under two different hardware robotic settings, feature extraction techniques and viewpoints. Our portable active binoc- ular robot vision architecture achieved average recognition rates of 93.5% for fronto-parallel viewpoints and, 83% percentage for anthropomorphic viewpoints, respectively

Developing an energy efficient real-time system

Increasing number of battery operated devices creates a need for energy-efficient real-time operating system for such devices. Designing a truly energy-efficient system is a multi-staged effort; this thesis consists of three main tasks that address different aspects of energy efficiency of a real-time system (RTS). The first chapter introduces an energy-efficient algorithm that alternates processor frequency using DVFS to schedule tasks on cores. Speed profiles is calculated for every task that gives information about how long a task would run for and at what processor speed. We pair tasks with similar speed profiles to give us a resultant merged speed profile that can be efficient scheduled on a cluster. Experiments carried out on ODROID-XU3 are compared with a reference approach that provides energy saving of up to 20%. The second chapter proposes power-aware techniques to segregate a task set over a heterogeneous platform such that the overall energy consumption is minimized. With the help of calculated speed profiles, second contribution of this work feasibly partitions a given task set into individual sets for a cluster based homogeneous platform. Various heuristics are proposed that are compared against a baseline approach with simulation results. The final chapter of this thesis focuses on the importance of having an underlying energy-efficient operating system. We discuss an energy-efficient way of porting a real-time operating system (RTOS), QP, over TMS320F28377S along with modifications to make the Operating System (OS) consume minimal energy for its operation --Abstract, page iii

Interactive Perception based on Gaussian Process Classification Applied to Household Object Recognition & Sorting

No abstract available

Production Possibilities in Catchment Areas Under Dharabi Dam in Chakwal

Thesis, Master of Science (Hons.) Agriculture in Agriculture Economics, Department of Economics and Agricultural Economics, Faculty of Sciences, Pir Mehr Ali Shah, Arid Agriculture University, Rawalpindi, PakistanFarm Management, Land Economics/Use,

Production Possibilities in Catchment Areas Under Dharabi Dam in Chakwal

Water is a limiting factor for sustainable agriculture in Barani (Arid). However, rainfall is the only source of water the spatial and temporal variation of which is very high. Therefore conservation and management of this source is vital for agriculture development and socio-economic uplift of the area. This study was, mainly, also devised to address land distribution problems and consequent farm productivity in the study area. Furthermore, level of land distribution disparities was focused on to observe its relationship with different on-farm and socio-economic indicators including gross margins, cropping intensity, crop intensity and crop diversity, income distribution disparities and institutional credit availability etc. All of the aforesaid indicators were also assessed for small, medium and large farm size categories. The farmers were divided into two main categories irrigated and rainfed farmers. Land was observed evenly distributed in irrigated area while land distribution was found most skewed in rainfed area. The performance of most of the indicators i.e. yield, gross margins, farm income, labour productivity, income distribution, cropping intensity and crop diversity was found better in irrigated as compared to rainfed. While marginal factor productivity, irrigation productivity and rate of institutional credit availability was higher in irrigated area. However, rainfed area was always least efficient with respect to all of the quantified indicators. The findings of the research are helpful for the farmers of the study area in decision making among different farm enterprises. Hence it can alleviate poverty and help to bring food security in the deprived regions.Production Possibilities in Catchment Areas Under Dharabi Dam in Chakwal

Interactive Perception Based on Gaussian Process Classification for House-Hold Objects Recognition and Sorting

We present an interactive perception model for object sorting based on Gaussian Process (GP) classification that is capable of recognizing objects categories from point cloud data. In our approach, FPFH features are extracted from point clouds to describe the local 3D shape of objects and a Bag-of-Words coding method is used to obtain an object-level vocabulary representation. Multi-class Gaussian Process classification is employed to provide and probable estimation of the identity of the object and serves a key role in the interactive perception cycle – modelling perception confidence. We show results from simulated input data on both SVM and GP based multi-class classifiers to validate the recognition accuracy of our proposed perception model. Our results demonstrate that by using a GP-based classifier, we obtain true positive classification rates of up to 80%. Our semi-autonomous object sorting experiments show that the proposed GP based interactive sorting approach outperforms random sorting by up to 30% when applied to scenes comprising configurations of household objects

On the Calibration of Active Binocular and RGBD Vision Systems for Dual-Arm Robots

This paper describes a camera and hand-eye calibration methodology for integrating an active binocular robot head within a dual-arm robot. For this purpose, we derive the forward kinematic model of our active robot head and describe our methodology for calibrating and integrating our robot head. This rigid calibration provides a closedform hand-to-eye solution. We then present an approach for updating dynamically camera external parameters for optimal 3D reconstruction that are the foundation for robotic tasks such as grasping and manipulating rigid and deformable objects. We show from experimental results that our robot head achieves an overall sub millimetre accuracy of less than 0.3 millimetres while recovering the 3D structure of a scene. In addition, we report a comparative study between current RGBD cameras and our active stereo head within two dual-arm robotic testbeds that demonstrates the accuracy and portability of our proposed methodology

Cultural impact on trust-building process between Norwegian and Pakistani importers/exporters (traders)

Masteroppgave i bedriftsøkonomi - Universitetet i Nordland, 201