Over the past decade, new approaches to innovation management have become prime drivers of various industries. Considering product quality, product innovation and service innovation in the automotive industry, this study tries to adopt game theory and real option models to analyze competing and consuming behavior among high- quality firms, low-quality firms and rational consumers. With an argument that firms will undertake innovation activities if they produce high-quality products, this study wishes to demonstrate that high quality products will induce both product and service innovations simultaneously. To achieve the research objective, this study divides innovation into product and service innovations, and then, discusses quality¡¦s impacts on product and service innovations separately. Game theory models concerning quality and product innovation indicate that the fixed cost of innovation, the barrier to a firm¡¦s engaging in innovative activities, is overcome only if a firm produces high-quality products. Moreover, another dynamic game also shows the strong relationship between product quality and service innovation. Applying real options models to evaluate service innovations in the automotive industry, including half-price purchase warranty and extended test drive service, also verify that effective service innovations might increase consumer willing-to-buy and enlarge the sales and profits for the innovative firms. Besides quality, this study also reveals that consumer preference to new product or service is another key successful factor for business innovation management. Successful innovation management depends on continuously improving product and service, concerning the status of expected market, and understanding the needs of potential consumers. Even though a general consensus on product and service innovations among different industries remains lacking, this study strongly supports the argument that firms producing high-quality products will be active in innovations. From the broader perspective of process management, total quality management, which increases product quality, undoubtedly supports innovation management.

Customer is one of the most important profit resources for a firm. It is increasingly apparent that management will make a decision by customer value. This research focuses on the most critical aspect of a firm: customer lifetime value. It is used to valuing customer lifetime value by discount cash flow approach. This research uses the real option approach (ROA) and connects the concept of customer lifetime value in marketing to build a new valuation model. Real option approach is a new method for estimating the value. It resolves some disadvantage which traditional financial models such as discount cash flow approach can not value the managerial flexibility. In practice, management has many options. These options provide flexibility that adds to the value of customers. The customer investment (e.g., service and advertising) can be deferred at the design phase and under uncertainty, it can be expanded or extended if it does better than expected, or abandoned if it gets worse. There are various types of options that are related to valuing customers, such as deferral, abandonment, expansion, and contraction of investment. This research provides good solution to value customer lifetime value by using real option approach and uses bank wealth management programs as practice evidence. This research builds a fitness model to value managerial flexibility. This research finds out that the domestic banks original set up the VIP migration boundary according to American experience are unreasonable and should be adjusted. Besides, when domestic banks set up the VIP migration boundary, the most important factor they should consider is deposit growth rate instead American experience. Finally, the practice evidence of the influence the expected factors on VIP migration boundary confirms with this research¡¦s expectation.

ABSTRACT Postponement strategies offer opportunities for firms to achieve effective supply chain management. Postponement strategies could be classified into manufacturing postponement which delays the product differentiation and logistics postponement which delays the distributing process to the confirmed customer orders. In practice, the way to implement manufacturing postponement is more complicated than logistics postponement¡¦s. By employing the logistics postponement strategy, all the firms have to consider is the distribution of finalized products from a centralized inventory to final retailers. Comparing with integrating all the manufacturing activities, logistics postponement strategy could be an effective one for firms to handle the demand uncertainty over the regional markets. By employing the logistics postponement strategy, firms could decrease the cost of inventory and backorder through delaying products distribution to the confirmed customer orders. The connection between real options and postponement is also showed on this point. By employing the real options, decisions could be made when the firms wait and get more information about the market. The value the firms wait to get is also the benefits that logistics postponement strategy could reach by logistics postponement. Thus, the flexibility to decrease the inventory and backorder cost is considered as the management flexibility that real options could evaluate. On the other way, it¡¦s not always free for firms to get such a flexible management ability. The capital that firms have to invest for any change of the supply chain becoming the flexible one could be equal to buying the exercise right in real options. We therefore could construct a model to evaluate the value of logistics postponement strategy via real options and help the firms to judge what would be the proper occasions for logistics postponement to be implemented.

This paper applies a real option approach to analyze the optimal decisions of mergers, stock offers, and cash offers. We use the two-stage approach to investigate the optimal decisions of mergers and acquisitions. At the first stage, the merger company has to choose the target company to obtain the largest synergy, which comes from the increasing return to scale, improved performance, acquired R&D, and increased market power. At the second stage, the main work is to determine the takeover threshold (timing), exchange rate of stocks or bid premium under the three forms of mergers and acquisitions. We find that the increasing return to scale, improved performance, and increased market power will lower takeover threshold and speed up merger activity. Finally, the forms of mergers and acquisitions will affect the timing and the returns of the acquirer and acquiree. Cash offers will happen even later than mergers and stock offers. This thesis also constructs a model to study the multi-firms¡¦ merger strategies and derives the multi-firms¡¦ synergy value, timing and terms of merges. In addition, we study the effect of firms¡¦ competitive intensity, market power, fixed cost, and demand shocks on the decisions of merges. We find that the increased competitive intensity, increased market power, higher fixed cost, and lower demand shocks will enhance the motives of merges and accelerate merger activities.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2009. / Open access. Includes bibliographical references (p. 142-149). Print copy also available.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Naval Postgraduate School, 2003. / Title from title screen (viewed Apr. 5, 2004). "December 2003." "ADA420489"--URL. Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-69). Also issued in paper format.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

This work analyzes the effects that different information structures on the demand side of the market have on consumption decisions and the way prices are determined. We develop three theoretical models to address this issue in a systematic way. First, we focus our attention on the consumers' awareness, or lack thereof, of substitute products in the market and the strategic interaction between firms competing in prices and costly advertising in such an environment. We find that prior information held by consumers can drastically change the advertising equilibrium predictions. In particular, we provide sufficient conditions for the existence of three types of equilibria, in addition to one previously found in the literature, and provide a necessary condition for a fourth type of equilibrium. Additionally, we show that the effect of the resulting advertising strategies on the expected transaction price is qualitatively significant, although ambiguous when compared to the case of a newly formed market. We can establish, however, that the transaction price is increasing in the size of the smaller firm's captive market. In the second chapter, we study the optimal timing to buy a durable good with an embedded option to resell it at some point in the future, as well as its reservation price, where the agent faces Knightian uncertainty about the process generating the market prices. The problem is modeled as a stopping problem with multiple priors in continuous time with infinite horizon. We find that the direction of the change in the buyer's reservation price depends on the particular parametrization of the model. Furthermore, the change in the buying threshold due to an increase in ambiguity is greater as the fraction of the market at which the agent can resell the good decreases, and the value of the embedded option is decreasing in the perceived level of ambiguity. Finally, we introduce Knightian uncertainty to a model of price search by letting the consumers be ambiguous regarding the industry's cost of production. We characterize the equilibria of this game for high and low levels of the search cost and show that firms extract abnormal profits for low realizations of the marginal cost. Furthermore, we show that, as the search cost goes to zero, the equilibrium of the game under the low cost regime does not converge to the Bertrand marginal-cost pricing. Instead firms follow a mixed-strategy that includes all prices between the high and low production costs. / text

Stochastic price models have proven material to decision making in the oil industry when accurate valuations are important, but little consideration is given to their impact on decisions based on relative project rankings. Traditional industry economic analysis methods do not usually consider uncertainty in oil price, although the real options literature has shown that this practice underestimates the value of projects that have flexibility. Monetary budget constraints are not always the limiting constraints in decision making; there may be other constraints that limit the number of projects a company can undertake. We consider building a portfolio of upstream petroleum development projects to determine the relevance of stochastic price models to a decision for which accurate valuations may not be important. The results provide guidelines to determine when a stochastic price model should be used in economic analysis of petroleum projects. / text