Increasingly, firms are offering hybrid bundles — products that combine both good(s) and service(s). Some hybrid bundles, such as TiVo that combines a DVR and recording management are more visible, while some, such as GE‘s Powerplant System that includes a nuclear power plant and maintenance/project management are more obscure. While pricing strategies for a goods bundle have been well-studied, services bundles have been underexplored. Hybrid bundles, which are fundamentally different from bundles of goods or services, have received even less attention. In this dissertation, three essays offer important insights into different aspects of hybrid bundle pricing and provide important managerial implications and guidelines. Essay I develops an analytic model of optimal pricing for hybrid bundles by a monopolist. My results show that an increase in quality variability of the service is generally associated with a higher optimal hybrid bundle price and a lower optimal price of the good, but lower overall bundle profit. They also reveal that the optimal price of the service (good) in a hybrid bundle is higher (lower) when the good has diminishing unit cost and the service has constant unit cost. Essay II examines the effects of quality variability, independence, and complementarity on willingness-to-pay for hybrid bundle components using conjoint analysis experiments. The results show that higher quality variability of a service is associated with a wider distribution of willingness-to-pay, that independence between the good and the service has positive direct- and cross-effects on willingness-to-pay, that complementarity between components has a greater positive effect on the willingness-to-pay for the service than for the good, and that independence and complementarity interact to increase willingness-to-pay. Essay III develops a general model for the pricing of hybrid bundles offered in a competitive setting. I estimate the model using empirical data of a hybrid bundle comprising carpet and installation. The results show that the price of the service plays a crucial role in the demands of both the good and service and that the service cross-price effect on the demand for the good can be substantially higher than the direct-price effect of the good on its own demand.

Product bundling is a common tool to increase sales and profits for the firms when they sell products. In traditional market, because the consumer¡¦s reserve price to each product is different, adopting product bundling strategy can achieve their goal. Now , owing to the highly changed technology and the prevailing of computer and internet, there are plenty of forms and varieties of product bundling. It is more different to do the research about the product bundling in computer, software, or some high-tech information industries. In the light of the characteristic of these industries, it is necessary to modify the product bundling strategy to meet the demand. This study focuses on the product bundling strategy in software industry. A few days ago, in the case of Microsoft who violates the antitrust law, the public starts to pay attention to the product bundling strategy in software industry again. But the software industry has two very important characteristics. First, there are compatibility problems between different products. Second, it is difficult to define the boundary of products. So this study tries to build a model to explain the application of product bundling strategy in software industry, and use the model to confer the case of Microsoft. There are three objects in this study. First, analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of product bundling strategies in all kinds of conditions in the recent years. Second, using the model to prove that if there is only one monopoly firm in the main product market and it bundles its main and downstream products. Then the downstream competitor and the consumers will be harmed. Third, using the inference of the model to comment the case that the U.S department of justice who accuses Microsoft bundling its personal computer operation system and browser.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Drexel University, 2010. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-70).

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Delay-tolerant networking (DTN) is a system for constructing automated data networks in which end-to-end communication is reliable despite low data rates, possible sustained interruptions in connectivity, and potentially high signal propagation latency. As such it promises to provide an inexpensive and robust medium for returning telemetry from research vehicles in environments that provide meager support for communications: deep space, the surface of Mars, the poles or the sub- Arctic steppes of Earth, and others. This paper presents an overview of DTN concepts, including “bundles” and the Bundling overlay protocol. One possible scenario for the application of DTN to a telemetry return problem is described, and there is a brief discussion of the current state of DTN technology development.

Thesis advisor: Peter N. Ireland / This dissertation consists of two chapters. The first chapter: Does going to prison increase the chance that one eventually applies for U.S. disability insurance (DI)? Since the 1980's, there have been substantial increases in both the number of people who have been incarcerated and the number of people applying for DI. Both increases have caused higher costs to taxpayers. While several studies have explored the causes of the increased DI applications and several others have looked at the labor outcomes of ex-inmates, no study has yet asked whether prison itself has any effect on the DI application process. Prison, with its harsh conditions, could cause physical and mental disabilities that increase the chance of a DI application. Properly measuring this, however, requires considering any endogeneity that predisposes ex-inmates to a DI application prior to incarceration. To do this, I use the instruments of states' minimum wages and legal high school drop-out ages to explore the effect of increasing incarceration numbers on state-level DI applications. I find that prison does have a significant effect on DI applications; a 1.0% increase in incarceration causes approximately a 0.5% increase in DI applications six years after the initial increase in incarceration numbers. I find that prison's effect is especially strong for a means-tested group who also concurrently applies to Supplemental Security Income (SSI); here a 1.0% increase in prison leads to a 0.9% increase in people who apply for both DI and SSI after a six year lag. This suggests lower income groups are more sensitive to incarceration. Also, the cost of imprisonment should take into account the cost of subsequent DI applications and awards. The second chapter: This paper assesses the specific case of when a monopolist manufacturer producing two types of goods is allowed to bundle the goods when selling to retailers who are allowed to re-sell the goods individually, have territorial market power and have heterogeneity in the resale demand functions. While the literature covers bundling in a variety of forms, no paper has considered the effect that the presence of multiple retailers may have on an upstream manufacturer who bundles and how benefits to bundling may accrue to consumers, retailers, and manufacturer in the presence of retailer heterogeneity. It is shown that under plausible circumstances, the ability of a retailer to retain profit in the face of bundling may prevent consumers in other markets from realizing greater welfare-enhancing effects although bundling in these cases at least weakly improves consumer welfare and never diminishes it. It is also shown by example, that in the case of three retailers, some retailers may actually profit more when the upstream manufacturer bundles while other retailers may profit less. This suggests that in certain cases some retailers may even favor upstream bundling as their interests align with that of the manufacturer. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Managers within firms seek to align their portfolio of capabilities to best respond to their competitive environment. Processes used by firms to acquire resources, bundle those resources into capabilities, and then leverage those capabilities to obtain competitive advantage are of interest to scholars and practitioners alike. In this study I explore the bundling process and how firms create advantage from its use in different environmental conditions. Using policy capturing survey techniques analyzed with hierarchial linear modeling while manipulating environmental contexts of dynamism, munificence, and punctuated threats, I observe how firms vary their resource bundling processes to create advantage and improve performance. For each combination of environmental condition, hypotheses are presented and tested with respect to firm response. Due to a lack of differentiation between the three bundling sub-processes, several proposed hypotheses were not testable and thus, unsupported. Current theory details three bundling sub-processes; however, I demonstrate evidence that fewer or greater numbers of sub-processes may be required to capture the bundling process. Other evidence suggests that firms do alter bundling sub-processes in response to changing conditions of munificence, but fail to do so during punctuated events.

Frankfurt (Main), University, Diss., 2008.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2007. / Title from title screen (site viewed July 12, 2007). PDF text: iii, 108 p. : ill. UMI publication number: AAT 3252831. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

Drawing from mental accounting, reference price, attribution and categorization theories, we propose that bundle price discounts will influence perceived prices and quality of the individual bundle components, thus influence purchase intentions. Meanwhile, we investigate how these bundling effects interplay with the forms of bundling, complementarity and brand images of bundle components. The empirical results indicate that the impact of bundle price discount on evaluations of individual bundle components varies across bundling forms. In a mixed-joint bundle, the price discount increases consumer perceptions of the regular price of bundle components, but does not change quality perceptions. In a mixed-leader bundle, the price discount hurt consumer price and quality evaluations of the discounted product, but increased the undiscounted product's perceived quality. These effects are moderated by complementarity and the brand images of bundle components. Implications of these findings for marketing researchers and managers are presented along with suggestions for further research. / Ph. D.

Exploring coordinated relationships is an important task in data analytics. For example, an intelligence analyst may want to find three suspicious people who all visited the same four cities. However, existing techniques that display individual relationships, such as between lists of entities, require repetitious manual selection and significant mental aggregation in cluttered visualizations to find coordinated relationships. This work presents a visual analytics approach that applies biclusters to support coordinated relationships exploration. Each computed bicluster aggregates individual relationships into coordinated sets. Thus, coordinated relationships can be formalized as biclusters. However, how to incorporate biclusters into a visual analytics tool to support sensemaking tasks is challenging. To address this, this work features three key contributions: 1) a five-level design framework for bicluster visualizations, 2) BiSet, highlighting bicluster-based edge bundling, seriation-based multiple lists ordering, and interactions for dynamic information foraging and management, and 3) an evaluation of BiSet. / Ph. D.