The study aims at investigating how revenue management techniques can be applied in industries which offer multiple products. Most of the companies nowadays trend to produce multiperoducts and they try to find the best method of selling. Therefore, revenue management can be considered as a new direction which should be developed for these firms. In this study, multi-product firms are mainly referred as firms offering a bundle of products or substitute products. In this regard, models and techniques applied in multiproduct firms are discussed and it is tried to provide basic models to better understand the problems, variables, customer choice models and constraints. The main methodology in this study is literature review. In order to carry out the research first revenue management applications and techniques are discussed to find a fit to this kind of industries. The main findings of this study are (1) identifying and analyzing the most important factors affecting decision making regarding managing of bundling and substitute products and ultimately total revenue of multiproduct firms. (2) Summarizing the results and knowledge obtained from various studies within fields of bundling and substitute products. (3) Discussing the possibility of applying different revenue management techniques to these fields. (4) Identifying potentials and new directions for future study with respect to both revenue management techniques and multiproduct firms.

Bakgrund: Den logistiska kedjan från producent till konsument blir alltmer komplex på grund av att ett ständigt ökande antal artiklar tillverkas utifrån kundens behov och önskemål. För att kunna tillgodose dessa behov och önskemål har företag historiskt sett haft stora lager. VMI tar problemet med att hantera och utveckla effektiva lager till en ny nivå. Att arbeta med VMI innebär stora fördelar för många olika företag när det gäller informationsspridning, partnerskap och lagerföring. Trots de omfattande fördelar som beskrivs i de flesta teorier om VMI finns det en del framförd kritik. I och med detta ligger det i vårt intresse att undersöka huruvida företag som arbetar med ett VMI-system upplever de teoretiska effekterna och om det finns effekter av VMI-samarbeten som teorin inte beskriver. Problemformulering: Vilka effekter, angående de logistiska aktiviteterna, innebär ett VMI-samarbete i en dyad inom tillverkningsindustrin och hur stämmer de överens med de effekter teorin beskriver? Metod: Genom att använda fallstudien som forskningsmetod, har vi undersökt vårt problem. Vidare har vi använt oss av ett kvalitativt tillvägagångssätt vid datainsamlingen. De undersökta företagen har valts ut genom ett icke-sannolikhetsurval och när vi har dragit våra slutsatser har vi utgått från en deduktiv ansats. Teori: Vi har byggt vår teori på fyra huvudområden/logistiska aktiviteter, leveransservice, logistikkostnader, produktion och lagerhållning. Vidare har vi beskrivit hur områdena påverkas positivt såväl som negativt av VMI. Empiri: Vår empiriska undersökning har genomförts i två dyader, inom tillverkningsindustrin, som använder eller har använt sig av VMI. Vi har undersökt hur företagen har upplevt/upplever samarbetet och vilka effekter de har erfarit/erfar inom de fyra logistiska aktiviteterna. Resultat: Resultatet har vi grundat på en jämförelse mellan vår teoretiska och empiriska undersökning. Vi har här kommit fram till att de positiva effekterna, som teorin beskriver, i större utsträckning stämmer överens med vad företag inom tillverkningsindustrin upplever än de negativa effekterna. Hur väl effekterna överensstämmer skiljer sig åt mellan de olika logistiska aktiviteterna.

Sammanfattning Kandidatuppsats i företagsekonomi, Ekonomihögskolan vid Växjö universitet, EKL 361, VT 2007. Författare: David Brandt, Tina Rubin och Joel Valberg. Handledare: Roger Stokkedal Examinator: Petra Andersson Titel: Vendor Managed Inventory – vad får det för effekter? En jämförelsestudie mellan teorins beskrivna effekter och upplevda effekter inom tillverkningsindustrin. Bakgrund: Den logistiska kedjan från producent till konsument blir alltmer komplex på grund av att ett ständigt ökande antal artiklar tillverkas utifrån kundens behov och önskemål. För att kunna tillgodose dessa behov och önskemål har företag historiskt sett haft stora lager. VMI tar problemet med att hantera och utveckla effektiva lager till en ny nivå. Att arbeta med VMI innebär stora fördelar för många olika företag när det gäller informationsspridning, partnerskap och lagerföring. Trots de omfattande fördelar som beskrivs i de flesta teorier om VMI finns det en del framförd kritik. I och med detta ligger det i vårt intresse att undersöka huruvida företag som arbetar med ett VMI-system upplever de teoretiska effekterna och om det finns effekter av VMIsamarbeten som teorin inte beskriver. Problemformulering: Vilka effekter, angående de logistiska aktiviteterna, innebär ett VMI-samarbete i en dyad inom tillverkningsindustrin och hur stämmer de överens med de effekter teorin beskriver? Metod: Genom att använda fallstudien som forskningsmetod, har vi undersökt vårt problem. Vidare har vi använt oss av ett kvalitativt tillvägagångssätt vid datainsamlingen. De undersökta företagen har valts ut genom ett ickesannolikhetsurval och när vi har dragit våra slutsatser har vi utgått från en deduktiv ansats. Teori: Vi har byggt vår teori på fyra huvudområden/logistiska aktiviteter, leveransservice, logistikkostnader, produktion och lagerhållning. Vidare har vi beskrivit hur områdena påverkas positivt såväl som negativt av VMI. Empiri: Vår empiriska undersökning har genomförts i två dyader, inom tillverkningsindustrin, som använder eller har använt sig av VMI. Vi har undersökt hur företagen har upplevt/upplever samarbetet och vilka effekter de har erfarit/erfar inom de fyra logistiska aktiviteterna. Resultat: Resultatet har vi grundat på en jämförelse mellan vår teoretiska och empiriska undersökning. Vi har här kommit fram till att de positiva effekterna, som teorin beskriver, i större utsträckning stämmer överens med vad företag inom tillverkningsindustrin upplever än de negativa effekterna. Hur väl effekterna överensstämmer skiljer sig åt mellan de olika logistiska aktiviteterna.

I och med informationsteknologins snabba framväxt i samhället ställs vi också inför problem som hur vi ska handskas med denna utveckling. Forskning visar att fenomenet datorrädsla kan bero på faktorer som exempelvis erfarenhet, personlighet, attityd eller kön. Syftet med denna studie är dock att undersöka eventuella samband mellan datorrädsla, personlighet samt datorerfarenhet. Nittio studenter vid Högskolan Dalarna agerade undersökningsdeltagare (UD) genom att svara på en enkät bestående av tre delar; bakgrundsfrågor, ett personlighetstest sammansatt av Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI) samt åtta scenarier, där UD fick skatta sin självupplevda stressnivå i olika situationer. Studien visar att såväl neuroticism som datorerfarenhet skulle kunna predicera datorrädsla. Starkast effekt på den självskattade stressnivån hade dock variabeln kön. Man kan även dra slutsatsen att fenomenet datorrädsla inte är en specifik slags rädsla, utan till viss del hänger samman med andra fobier.

Över 6000 personer söker till de 900 lediga studieplatserna vid polishögskolan vid varje ansökningstillfälle. Urvalet för att tillsätta dessa platser är således stort. Kritik har dock riktats mot polisens urvalsprocess som har utpekats för inte tillräckligt kunna identifiera och gallra ut olämpliga individer med låg och bristfällig respekt och inställning till andra människor och olikheter. Syftet med föreliggande studie var att undersöka skillnader i fördomar mellan två grupper; sökande till, och studerande vid polishögskolan (N=84) och jämföra dessa med en ickepolisiär kontrollgrupp. Fördomarna mättes med tre moderna fördomsfullhetsskalor; rasism, sexism och fördomar mot homosexuella. Studien undersökte även undersökningsdeltagarnas personlighetstyper med Big-Five Inventory (BFI), Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) och Social Dominance Orientation (SDO). Inga skillnader mellan grupperna i fördomsfullhet hittades, dock visade sig kombinationen av BFI, RWA och SDO vara bra på att predicera fördomsfullhet. Resultaten diskuterades och polisutbildningens urvalsprocess uppmanas reflektera över införande av motsvarande personlighetstest.

<p>Amazonia contains the largest remaining tracts of undisturbed tropical forest on earth, and is thus critical to international nature conservation and carbon sequestration efforts. Amazonian forests are notoriously difficult to study, however, due to their species richness and inaccessibility. This has limited efforts to produce the accurate, high-resolution biodiversity maps needed for conservation and development. The aims of the research described here were to identify efficient solutions to the problems of tropical forest inventory; to use these methods to identify floristic patterns and their causes in western Amazonia; and propose new means to map floristic patterns in these forests.</p><p> Using tree inventories in the vicinity of Iquitos, Peru, I and a colleague systematically evaluated methods for rapid tropical forest inventory. Of these, inventory of particular taxonomic groups, or taxonomic scope inventory, was the most efficient, and was able to capture a majority of the pattern observed by traditional inventory techniques with one-fifth to one-twentieth the number of stems and species. Based on the success of this approach, I and colleagues specifically evaluated two plant groups, the Pteridophytes (ferns and fern allies) and the Melastomataceae (a family of shrubs and small trees), for use in rapid inventory. Floristic patterns based on inventories from either group were significantly associated with those based on the tree flora, and inventories of Pteridophytes in particular were in most cases able to capture the majority of floristic patterns identified by tree inventories. These findings indicate that Pteridophyte and Melastomataceae inventories are useful tools for rapid tropical forest inventory.</p><p> Using Pteridophyte and Melastomataceae inventories from 138 sites in northwestern Amazonia, combined with satellite data and soil sampling, I and colleagues studied the causes of vegetation patterns in western Amazonian forests. On the basis of these data, we identified a floristic discontinuity of at least 300km in northern Peru, corresponding to a 15-fold difference in soil cation concentrations and an erosion-generated geological boundary. On the basis of this finding, we assembled continent-scale satellite image mosaics, and used these to search for additional discontinuities in western Amazonia. These mosaics indicate a floristic and geological discontinuity of at least 1500km western Brasil, driven by similar erosional processes identified in our study area. We suggest that this represents a chemical and ecological boundary between western and central Amazonia.</p><p> Using a second network of 52 pteridophyte and soil inventories in northwestern Amazonia, we further studied the role of geology in generating floristic pattern. Consistent with earlier findings, we found that two widespread geological formations in western Amazonia differ eight-fold difference in soil cation concentrations and in a majority of their species. Difference in elevation, used as a surrogate for geological formation, furthermore explained up to one-third of the variation in plant species composition between these formations. Significant correlations between elevation, and cation concentrations and soil texture, confirmed that differences in species composition between these formations are driven by differences in soil properties. On the basis of these findings, we were able to use SRTM elevation data to accurately model species composition throughout our study area.</p><p> I argue that Amazonian forests are partitioned into large-area units on the basis of geological formations and their edaphic properties. This finding has implications for both the ecology and evolution of these forests, and suggests that conservation strategies be implemented on a region-by-region basis. Fortunately, the methods described here provide a means for generating accurate and detailed maps of floristic patterns in these vast and remote forests.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation investigates the non-market value of environmental quality in several contexts with attention paid to equilibrium effects. Chapter One contributes to the ongoing debate concerning the effect of various actions taken by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under CERCLA, commonly known as the Superfund Program, on housing prices. The study differs from national sample analyses and site-specific analyses by providing policy-relevant estimates of the hedonic price function in a particular region for the average site. Further, an estimate of the effect on housing prices is given for each of the major events that occur under a typical Superfund remediation. Using house and time-varying census tract fixed effects, I find a 7.3% increase in sales price for houses within 3 km of a site that moves through the complete Superfund program. The analysis gives evidence of positive price appreciation for housing markets and serves as a lower bound for measuring remediation benefits. Chapter Two proposes a new dynamic general equilibrium model of residential location choice with social spillovers and uses it to evaluate the equilibrium consequences of changes in pollution exposure. In particular, I investigate the hypothesis of ``minority move-in,'' which postulates that disproportionate exposure to pollution results from minorities and low-income households trading off such exposure for lower housing costs. Second, I address the question of whether economic incentives caused by differences in willingness to pay across socioeconomic status can explain why polluters disproportionately locate near disadvantaged populations in order to minimize expenses from collective action bargaining over the negative externality. Simulations indicate ``minority move-in'' likely does account for some of the imbalance in exposure to pollution across socioeconomic status. Further, general equilibrium estimates reveal that equilibrium sorting behavior widens the gap in willingness to pay for environmental quality between minority and white households, and between high and low-income households. The disparity in general equilibrium willingness to pay to avoid toxic emissions provides economic incentives for polluters to target disadvantaged populations. Chapter Three investigates how information contained in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Toxic Release Inventory program affects prices in the housing market. First, I use a reduction in the reporting requirement threshold in 2001 as a quasi-experiment to determine whether prices change for existing firms who, as a result of the change, must report. Second, the existence of a reporting threshold creates a discontinuity in treatment than can be exploited. I estimate a regression discontinuity model that assumes that site unobservables are balanced in a neighborhood of the discontinuity. Using a difference-in-differences estimator for the first specification, I find that listing a site in the Toxic Release Inventory lowers prices by 3.1% within a three kilometer radius of the site, and that the effect is stronger at shorter distances. The regression discontinuity model produces qualitatively similar results that are smaller in magnitude but still significant. The results suggest that households to capitalize the information contained in the Toxic Release Inventory. However, since the treatment sites under consideration have virtually no emissions, these results do not contradict previous findings in the literature that toxic air emissions are unrelated to prices. Rather, they suggest that households might be concerned about the dangers of toxic chemicals that might result from an emergency or catastrophic accident.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis studies inventory control with risk of major supply chain disruptions, specifically border closures and congestion. We first investigate an inventory system in which the probability distributions of order leadtimes are dependent on the state of an exogenous Markov process; we will model border disruptions via this exogenous process. We consider stationary, state-dependent basestock policies, which are known to be optimal for the system under study, and develop an expression for the long-run average cost of an arbitrary policy of this form. Restricting our attention to state-invariant basestock policies, we show how to calculate the optimal basestock (or order-up-to) level and long-run average cost. We provide a sufficient condition for the optimality of a state-invariant basestock policy and monotonicity results for the optimal state-invariant order-up-to level. We finally give the optimal state-invariant order-up-to level for a special class of supply states. Motivated by the possibility of port of entry closures in the event of a security incident, we specialize the previous model to a two-stage international supply chain. A domestic manufacturer orders a single product from a foreign supplier and the orders must cross an international border that is subject to closure. We first assume that border congestion is negligible. The manufacturer's optimal inventory policy and long-run average cost are analyzed. We present structural policy results and the results of a comprehensive numerical study that have important implications for business and for the cooperation between business and government in disruption management and contingency planning. Finally we extend the border closure model to include both border closures and the resulting congestion. We model the border processing system as a discrete-time, single-server queue with constant arrival rate and Markov-modulated service rate. A key task is the development of the leadtime distribution, which is more complex than in the previous model. We present the results of a comprehensive numerical study and provide managerial insights.

Studies in newsvendor decision-making have shown that human decisions systematically deviate from analytical solutions found in many utility models of the single period problem (SPP). Yet for the most part the impacts of this human decision bias in systems of newsvendor type products have not been investigated. We study bias in human decision-making to determine how different factors affect the performance of systems of newsvendor type products. We extended the state of the arts utility models of SPP to analyze the effects of individuals wealth on individual decision-making. Our theoretical and empirical results proved that individuals wealth significantly affected individual decision-making. Specifically, our analysis concluded that wealthier individual ordered more than poorer individual did when presented with the same investment opportunity. We created a human decision bias (HDB) model to include different newsvendor ordering policies that individuals could use to determine their order quantities. This model is set up to investigate individuals reliance on different ordering policies under different experimental conditions. We designed multi period newsvendor experiments to study effects of factors such as item profit margin, wealth, value of learning, and salvage value on decision-maker's order quantity. We found that wealth and profit margin factors significantly affected individual newsvendor decision-making. Learning, gender, and salvage value factor did not exhibit significant effects in our empirical studies. We designed multi period multi echelon newsvendor experiments to study effects of factors such as the relationship between newsvendors, item profit margin, and newsvendors' wealth on the performance of two-echelon newsvendors system. We found item profit margin, wealth, and relationship between supplier and retailer to significantly affect newsvendor decision-making. Finally, we present a case study of US fresh produce industry to illustrate the impacts of human decision bias on the performance of a supply chain system.

In response to recent economic downturn and its turmoil impact, semiconductor distributors begin to take on a customer relationship management approaches in hoping to find critical success factors. Additionally, they hope to actively strengthen internal competitiveness so that market advantage can be gained, and therefore leading to a better industry position. therefore, it is very different to establish noticeable product differentiation within this limited environment, as well as maximizing any profit gain. By emphasizing Customer Relationship development, semiconductor distributors can maintain a more long-term relationship and stay competitive. The purpose of this study is therefore listed as follows: 1.To explore the effect of industrial environment on customer relationship and the associating key factors. 2.To explore the attributes of successful business strategy, its critical factors and their effects on successful customer relationship management. 3.To evaluate on financial capability and its influence on the success of Customer Relationship Management. 4.To explore the relationship between supplier relationship management on customer relation and other critical factors. In this study, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) will be used to divide the topic into two levels. First thru the use of general discussion and review on focus group, a structuralized second level, including the associating four dimensions, along with each dimension¡¦s relevance towards the success factors will be drafted. By synchronizing both AHP qualitative and quantitative data, it is then possible to establish an in-depth understanding on Customer Relationship Management in semiconductor distributors. Through this example, it is then possible to understand the critical importance behind these key factors: customization on product capabilities, ability to improve inventory turnover, and lastly, financial control capabilities.