Discute-se a necessidade de entendimento dos anseios e expectativas do consumidor, lembrando que é importante para a empresa a compreensão desses anseios. A cadeia de fornecimento é analisada e como todos os seus participantes devem colaborar para a satisfação do consumidor final É analisado o comportamento do consumidor, sua percepção da qualidade de produtos e serviços, além de algumas características da motivação que leva à compra e os ganhos que a empresa tem com a fidelização do consumidor. O trabalho destaca algumas ferramentas da qualidade para compreender as necessidades do consumidor, como o uso do PDPC e de uma tabela proposta para análise de riscos dos pontos colocados, mas principalmente utilizando-se o QFD - quality function deployment, e então se procura compreender e traduzir esses anseios em especificações técnicas ou características da qualidade, que servirão para elaboração dos documentos de processo e produção, ou então de execução de serviços. É estudado se as empresas utilizam estratégias claras para a compreender o consumidor e quais seriam algumas delas. Conhecida a importância do melhor entendimento e tradução dos anseios e expectativas do consumidor, são abordadas algumas metodologias de questionários de pesquisa da voz do consumidor e dos cuidados a serem tomados quando destas pesquisas. / The paper discusses how to understand customer hopes and needs, reminding their importance to the company. The supply chain is discussed and how their partners should cooperate to ensure the end customer pleasure. It is also studied the consumer behavior, their products and services quality perception, besides some purchase motivation that brings earns for the company whenever the customer loyalty comes up. It is also discussed some tools to understand the customer needs, as PDPC - Process decision program chart - and a proposed risk table analysis, with a focus on QFD - Quality function deployment. We try to understand and translate such needs into technical specifications or technical responses. Such responses will be the support to all production and process procedures, as well as services operation methods. Consumer perception companies strategies are also focused as well as which could be used. As soon as it is understood the consumer hopes and needs importance and translation to technical specifications, some customer surveys methodologies are discussed as well as concerns about their results.

This thesis is divided into two parts. Part I deals with demand management. For goods with no substitutes, under supply constraints, fairness considerations introduce negative externalities and lead to a market failure. One example of such a good with no substitutes is water. In case of a market failure, it is necessary to design coordination mechanisms called contracts which provide the right incentives for coordination. As “repetition can yield coordination”, the aim in this part is to design price based dynamic demand management contracts which, under supply constraints, mitigate the market failure. In these contracts, we consider complete information settings; and use the status quo proposition as a fairness criterion for designing them. The contracts are designed as almost noncooperative dynamic games, within the agency theory framework, where the agent (the consumer) is induced to consume at a specified consumption level based on the incentive mechanism offered by the principal (the producer). These contracts use the solution concept of sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium (SPNE) to compute the price (mal-incentive) that acts as a credible threat for deviation from the specified consumption level. In these contracts, unlike the dynamic contracts with asymmetric information, the penalty for deviation is proportional to the amount of deviation. First, we consider a two-period demand management contract for a single consumer satisfying the status quo proposition. Under the assumption that the gain to the consumer and the loss to the producer by deviation is small, the contract is shown to be economically efficient. It is shown that, in the finite horizon, a fair demand management contract cannot be efficient. The demand management contract is homeomorphic to finite horizon alternating bargaining model. In the finite horizon alternating bargaining model, there is a unique SPNE, in which the player who offers last is always at an advantageous position. In the two-period contract, the assumption considered attenuates the last mover advantage and leads to the efficiency. We have shown that one possible way to achieve efficiency, without the assumption, is to make the agents uncertain about the period of interaction. This possibility can be included in an infinite horizon contract. Hence, next, we design an infinite horizon contract for a single consumer. It is proved that this contract is economically efficient and provides revenue sufficiency. The sensitivity analysis of the contract shows that the discounting rate measures the aversion to conservation characteristics of the consumer. The analysis of the contract shows that a sufficiently time-patient consumer is not penalized for the deviation, as the consumer himself is aware of conservation requirements. This result is similar to the results for the present-biased preferences in behavioral economics. Lastly, the infinite horizon contract is extended to two consumers case which internalizes the externality a consumer causes to another. In the two consumer case, consumers are strategically noninteracting; and it is shown that the producer acts as a budget balancer. These contracts are also shown to be economically efficient. The demand management contracts achieve both the procedural and end-state fairness. Also, the infinite horizon contracts are homeomorphic to infinite horizon alternating bargaining model. The efficiency of infinite horizon contracts is due to their homeomorphism with the alternating bargaining process as they exhaust all possible mutual gains from exchange. In the two-period model, the bargaining process is constrained and hence all possible mutual gains are not eliminated, leading to the inefficiency. In part II of the thesis, we discuss the notions of exchangeability in the Shapley value. The Shapley value is a probabilistic value for the transferable utility (TU) cooperative games, in which each player subjectively assigns probabilities to the events which define their positions in the game. In this part, the objective have been to explore the aspect of subjective probability which leads to the uniqueness of the Shapley value. This aspect of subjective probability is known as exchangeability. We derive the Shapley value using de Finetti’s theorem. We also show that, in the Shapley value, each player’s prospects of joining a t-player game as the last member of the game is a moment sequence of the uniquely determined uniform distribution. We stress on finite exchangeability; and deduce that, with finite exchangeability, the Shapley value is the only value in which the probability assignment is a unique mixture of independent and identical distributions. It is concluded that, in both the finite and infinite exchangeable cases, the uniqueness of probability assignment in the Shapley value is due to exchangeability and the mixing with the uniform distribution.

Revenue Management (RM) has become one of the most successful application areas of Operation Research. What started off as an obscure practice among few airlines in U.S in early seventies, has attained the status of mainstream business practice, thanks to the major success enjoyed by companies applying RM. Over the same period, academic and industrial research on the methodology of RM has also grown rapidly. Despite the vast technical literature on the subject of revenue management, relatively few papers explicitly model the customer’s choice behavior. Such a behavior of customers could have major impact on revenue realized by an organization. Motivated by this, we focus on addressing the problem faced by a seller who serves customers exhibiting buy-down behavior. We address two important problems faced by a seller with few perishable goods. His objective is to obtain maximum revenue possible by sales of his perishable goods. The seller now potentially faces the problem of fixing the price of the products and then control the availability of products so as to maximize his revenue by minimizing the number of customers who buy-down. The first problem is the multi-product pricing problem where we consider a monop- olistic market situation in which a seller has some quantities of perishable goods under his disposal. The seller has the option of adding few additional features to the base product(perishable good) and thereby differentiating the products to cater to different market segments. Adding each additional feature involves certain cost and there are no restrictions on the availability of the features except that a feature can be added to the base product atmost once . The customers are price-sensitive and the seller is aware of the price-demand relationship of the various customer segments. A customer looking for a product buys the product if and only if the price is less than his reservation price. The sellers’ problem is to identify the price and bundling of features for the various customer segments so as to generate maximum possible revenue. We develop a Mixed integer non-linear mathematical programming model for the problem. We then split the problem into pricing problem and bundling problem and solve them sequentially. We finally provide a numeric example to illustrate the solution procedure. Once the prices are fixed, the next problem is to control the availability of products so as to prevent the buy-down behavior of the customers. We deal with the situation of a seller with two substitutable products. The price of both products are fixed over entire selling period. In a traditional control mechanism structure if the sequence of arrival of customers are known, then it becomes trivial to solve the problem of setting control limits which would prevent buy-down behavior. But in reality it never happens that the seller knows the arrival sequence. Hence in this study to isolate the effect of arrival sequence from other complexities like demand variability, we assume a deterministic demand for both the products but the arrival sequence is randomized. We initially analyze the above described problem and develop a static control mech- anism. We show that the static control mechanism is asymptotically equivalent to the traditional selling mechanism. Then we move on to make modification in the static con- trol mechanism and make it a dynamic control mechanism such that it will respond to the buy-down customers. In order to analyze the performance of dynamic control mechanism, we build a simulation model that would compare traditional selling mechanism and dynamic control mechanism. Statistical analysis is then done on the simulation results. It is shown that for all values of buy-down proportion, on an average the dynamic control mechanism outperforms the traditional control mechanism. Further there is a trend in revenues generated depending upon the buy-down proportion which is also explained. The chapter concludes with operating guidelines for better revenue realization. The organization of the thesis is as follows. In chapter 2, we present the literature survey. We start off with the history of RM and proceed to discuss the inventory control problems in RM in detail. Then we discuss literatures dealing with customer choice behavior. In chapter 3, we define and model the multi - product pricing problem. We present a mixed integer non-linear mathematical program to model the pricing problem. The solution to this problem is divided into two sub problems - the pricing problem and the bundling problem. Solution methodologies for both sub - problem are given and the chapter concludes with a numerical illustration for a 3 - product pricing problem. In chapter 4, we define and address the inventory control problem for a two product case when customers exhibit buy-down nature. We develop a static control mechanism and study its properties. Then we move on to the dynamic control mechanism which would suit real - world conditions. Finally we study the quality of developed methodology using statistical testing methods.

The master thesis is focusing on development in consumer and buying behaviour in on-line grocery shopping. The first part characterizes the key concepts of this topic i.e. consumer, consumer behaviour, consumer behaviour´ models, buying behaviour, purchase decision process, e-business, e-commerce. The practical part of the thesis covers the analysis of quantitative marketing research results. The end is dedicated to suggestions and recommendations for services´ improvement of on-line grocery stores in the Czech Republic.

Submitted by Daniele Santos (danielesantos.htl@gmail.com) on 2017-09-27T18:10:31Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Seju Mike - Revised Thesis Submission 27.09.17.pdf: 1322299 bytes, checksum: 5a95866783e524e5006dc5481fc7a968 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Janete de Oliveira Feitosa (janete.feitosa@fgv.br) on 2017-09-27T19:00:58Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Seju Mike - Revised Thesis Submission 27.09.17.pdf: 1322299 bytes, checksum: 5a95866783e524e5006dc5481fc7a968 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-09-29T19:49:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Seju Mike - Revised Thesis Submission 27.09.17.pdf: 1322299 bytes, checksum: 5a95866783e524e5006dc5481fc7a968 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-05-31 / This study explores the U.S. (United States) market for clothing and apparel of African origin and design; primarily focusing on the consumer of these fashion items. It delves into the field of Marketing study with an exploratory research approach to developing a consumer profile. By reviewing current market trends and analyzing results of survey data collected for the purpose of this study, it attempts to create an initial consumer profile using demographic and behavioral characteristics. Attaining an understanding of the target consumer is a crucial factor in determining a market entry strategy for new businesses and can also provide already existing businesses with a road map to achieving their full potential. Knowing who is most likely to buy your product aids the business in crafting the most appealing brand story for their target demographic. It also provides an understanding of where they frequent and what sales channels might be most attractive. As such, the relevance of this study lies in its ability to provide a starting point of reference for African brands, designers and retailers looking to expand their reach in the U.S. market place. Results of the study revealed a predominance of female buyers between the age of 30 to 35 years of age, living within the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. with buying patterns which indicated a preference for in-person shopping experiences versus online, and a tendency to purchase bargain items while seeking authenticity in the designs purchased, with a keenness towards supporting artisans on the continent. Further research into the subject matter is recommended, and should be aimed at achieving a more robust review of quantitative data as well as an expanded scope of qualitative research.

I determined the preferences of mobile phone attributes on the basis of an on-line consumer research, which I conducted with a questionaire created in the Google Docs application. Thanks to the questionaire, I was able to gain information about the evaluation of the importance of 19 functional parametres made by the queired respondents. Through the use of this evaluation I counted the strength for particular parametres and various segments of customers. Differences in the importance of atributes for selected segments were found especially among the categories of age and sex. The teenage generation prefers Bluetooth or a high capacity of the mobile phone memory also in means of memory stics. Enquired young men attach the highest importance to the same attributes as teenagers, but for women in the same category is crucial particularly the visual image of the mobile phone, such as the size of the display, its proportions and weight. What did not have any success among the particular parametres, was the function of TV, which was put on the last place on the imaginary ladder of importance. I stated the recommended telephones on the basis of calculated stregths of the attributes, point evaluation of the experts and price of the selected mobile phones. Among the five recommended products I would like to mention telephone brands {\clq}qNOKIA 6300``, {\clq}qSONY ERICSSON W910i``, {\clq}qNOKIA 3110``, {\clq}qSONY ERICSSON W760i`` a {\clq}qSAMSUNG SGH i8510``.

The subject of my assignment is the direct sale of bio production. The main subject of my assignment was to find out consumer interest in selling bio products, respectively, for direct sales of bio production. Another objective was to analyze the current status of direct sales of bio production in South Bohemia region. The first point of assignment I have met on the base of consumer research using a questionnaire created in the application Google docs. My research showed that the use of direct purchase is used more women. The most common reason why women don{\crq}t like the direct purchase is little information. Most of the men don{\crq}t use direct purchase, because of lack of time and little information. The interests about direct sale have more woman than men. The main reason of woman why to use direct purchase is that they think that bio products from producer are fresher and trust that bio product is really bio. The most of the men will be interest it in direct sale because of freshness of bio products. The convenience of men is the main reason why they don{\crq}t use direct purchase. Women as a reason for disinterest reported lack of time The second research was focused on South Bohemia ECO farms. In total were asked 64 ECO farms, only 50 take part in. For bio farms engaged in cattle breeding is 32% of sales secured by sales of meat, live animals on the farms or own in shop. In other commodities grown on ECO farms in South Bohemia region have direct sale of their production only two milk companies. In commodities of fruit, cereals, forage legume and potatoes, none of the companies don{\crq}t have direct sale of own production.

I used questionnaire investigation to reach the goal of my thesis. I wanted to ascertain the behaviour of users in the market when using the relevant product and to establish the importance of the attributes of digital camera for the user on the base of the research. Further my task was to set the weights of the individual attributes for multi-criteria decision-making. To compare the offered products with the help of the selected technique of multi-criteria decision-making and to suggest suitable products for the users on the base of the weights found out. The ascertained data and results will be further utilizable for consumer organizations, specifically for the Spotřebitelský institut SOS, o.p.s. (SOS Consumer institute, quasi-public company). I came to the following results after having evaluated my research. Most respondents own digital cameras, most frequently brand PANASONIC, CANON and OLYMPUS. The highest percentage of respondents use their cameras to record the personally significant moments, identically most frequently several times a week or several times a month. The main reason to choose a new camera is its function and price and the users are most frequently ready to spend between 3 001,- and 9 000,- CZK. Respondents prefer black and silver digital camera. As I supposed that there would be certain differences among the parameter preferences between genders and experiences of the users, I divided the respondents into individual segments in which I performed my further research. If I should assess the parameters most preferred by the respondents, there are certain differences between genders and experiences of the users. It is possible to say generally, on the base of the ascertained highest values of weights, that all user segments prefer the following parameters: noise (sensitivity), camera speed, battery durability, megapixel resolution and optic zoom. The clearly unimportant parameter is the possibility of printing directly from the camera that is on the last place of importance in all segments. I compared 25 digital cameras on the base of multi-criteria decision-making and the ascertained weights. I can recommend more or less the following 7 suitable products to the individual segments: Canon PowerShot SX1 IS, Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX500, Canon EOS 40D, Canon Ixus 870 IS, Casio EX-V7, Canon EOS 50D, Nikon D300.

The outcome of this thesis are the weights of each parameter of payment methods that are used to interpret consumer recommendations and conclusions. The research revealed that consumers mostly used payment method for purchases from online stores is delivery, although it does not seem like a good choice. Instead of delivery, I may recommend credit card payment, which has only one weakness and that is security. This weakness can be put down by purchasing only at trusted sellers. It is also meant to be the fastest way of payment. Also payment through a text message is convenient and easy. The results of my thesis can be used by consumers to help orient themeselves between the payment systems used for online store purchases, as well as the operators themselves.

Discute-se a necessidade de entendimento dos anseios e expectativas do consumidor, lembrando que é importante para a empresa a compreensão desses anseios. A cadeia de fornecimento é analisada e como todos os seus participantes devem colaborar para a satisfação do consumidor final É analisado o comportamento do consumidor, sua percepção da qualidade de produtos e serviços, além de algumas características da motivação que leva à compra e os ganhos que a empresa tem com a fidelização do consumidor. O trabalho destaca algumas ferramentas da qualidade para compreender as necessidades do consumidor, como o uso do PDPC e de uma tabela proposta para análise de riscos dos pontos colocados, mas principalmente utilizando-se o QFD - quality function deployment, e então se procura compreender e traduzir esses anseios em especificações técnicas ou características da qualidade, que servirão para elaboração dos documentos de processo e produção, ou então de execução de serviços. É estudado se as empresas utilizam estratégias claras para a compreender o consumidor e quais seriam algumas delas. Conhecida a importância do melhor entendimento e tradução dos anseios e expectativas do consumidor, são abordadas algumas metodologias de questionários de pesquisa da voz do consumidor e dos cuidados a serem tomados quando destas pesquisas. / The paper discusses how to understand customer hopes and needs, reminding their importance to the company. The supply chain is discussed and how their partners should cooperate to ensure the end customer pleasure. It is also studied the consumer behavior, their products and services quality perception, besides some purchase motivation that brings earns for the company whenever the customer loyalty comes up. It is also discussed some tools to understand the customer needs, as PDPC - Process decision program chart - and a proposed risk table analysis, with a focus on QFD - Quality function deployment. We try to understand and translate such needs into technical specifications or technical responses. Such responses will be the support to all production and process procedures, as well as services operation methods. Consumer perception companies strategies are also focused as well as which could be used. As soon as it is understood the consumer hopes and needs importance and translation to technical specifications, some customer surveys methodologies are discussed as well as concerns about their results.