251 research outputs found
The impact of business-cycle fluctuations on private-label share.
This study investigates the cyclical dependence of private-label success in four countries. The results show that private-label share behaves countercyclically. Moreover, asymmetries are present in both the extent and speed of up- and down-ward movements in private-label share over the business cycle. Finally, part of private-labels' share gain during contractions is found to be permanent.Business; Country; Dependence; Studies; Success;
Weathering Tight Economic Times: The Sales Evolution Of Consumer Durables Over The Business Cycle
Despite its obvious importance, not much marketing research focuses on how business-cycle fluctuations affect individual companies and/or industries. Often, one only has aggregate information on the state of the national economy, even though cyclical contractions and expansions need not have an equal impact on every industry, nor on all firms in that industry. Using recent time-series developments, we introduce various measures to quantify the extent and nature of business-cycle fluctuations in sales. Specifically, we discuss the notions of cyclical volatility and cyclical comovement, and consider two types of cyclical asymmetry related, respectively, to the relative size of the peaks and troughs and the rate of change in upward versus downward parts of the cycle. In so doing, we examine how consumers adjust their purchasing behavior across different phases of the business cycle. We apply these concepts to a broad set (24) of consumer durables, for which we analyze the cyclical sensitivity in their sales evolution. In that way, we (i) derive a novel set of empirical generalizations, and (ii) test different marketing theory-based hypotheses on the underlying drivers of cyclical sensitivity.
Consumer durables are found to be more sensitive to business-cycle fluctuations than the general economic activity, as expressed in an average cyclical volatility of more than four times the one in GNP, and an average comovement elasticity in excess of 2. This observation calls for an explicit consideration of cyclical variation in durable sales. Moreover, even though no evidence is found for depth asymmetry, the combined evidence across all durables suggests that asymmetry is present in the speed of up- and downward movements, as durable sales fall much quicker during contractions than they recover during economic expansions. Finally, key variables related to the industry's pricing activities, the nature of the durable (convenience vs. leisure), and the stage in a product's life cycle tend to moderate the extent of cyclical sensitivity in durable sales patterns
How cannibalistic is the internet channel? A study of the newspaper industry in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands
Winner fo the 2002 IJRM Best Paper Awar
Determining the optimal focusing parameter in sparse promoting inversions of EMI surveys
If the magnetic field caused by a magnetic dipole is measured, the electrical
conductivity of the subsurface can be determined by solving the inverse
problem. For this problem a form of regularisation is required as the forward
model is badly conditioned. Commonly, Tikhonov regularisation is used which
adds the -norm of the model parameters to the objective function. As a
result, a smooth conductivity profile is preferred and these types of
inversions are very stable. However, it can cause problems when the true
profile has discontinuities causing oscillations in the obtained model
parameters. To circumvent this problem, -approximating norms can be
used to allow discontinuous model parameters. Two of these norms are considered
in this paper, the Minimum Gradient Support and the Cauchy norm. However, both
norms contain a parameter which transforms the function from the - to
the -norm. To find the optimal value of this parameter, a new method is
suggested. It is based on the -curve method and finds a good balance between
a continuous and discontinuous profile. The method is tested on synthetic data
and is able to produce a conductivity profile similar to the true profile.
Furthermore, the strategy is applied to newly acquired real-life measurements
and the obtained profiles are in agreement with the results of other surveys at
the same location. Finally, despite the fact that the Cauchy norm is only
occasionally used to the best of our knowledge, we find that it performs at
least as good as the Minimum Gradient Support norm
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