Optimization of materials supply and inbound logistic operations has become increasingly important as firms have continued to pursue outsourcing options. Further, the proliferation of products and advances in information technology have greatly impacted retailers’ marketing strategies in the past decade. In this dissertation, we address how to optimally develop integrated sourcing and delivery planning, and how to optimally offer vertically differentiated products and bundles. In the first essay, we address a combined sourcing and delivery planning optimization problem, which is motivated by a practical problem facing materials and supply planners for construction projects in a leading corporation. We develop a decision support model and an effective solution approach for integrated sourcing and delivery planning for bulk materials. This approach, implemented and currently in use at the company to support material delivery planning for track maintenance projects, has yielded significant savings of millions of dollars annually. In the second essay, we study the problem of a retailer managing a category of vertically differentiated products. We consider two settings: the exogenous prices case and the endogenous prices case. In the former case, the selling prices are exogenously determined and the retailer’s only decision is to determine the set of products to offer. In the latter case, the retailer also determines the selling prices. We develop efficient methods to identify the optimal solutions for both cases and provide valuable insights and guidelines for practitioners. In the third essay, we study how to choose the optimal bundling strategy for a retailer offering vertically differentiated information goods. We characterize conditions under which pure bundling and mixed bundling strategies are optimal respectively. We provide efficient methods to identify which individual components to offer, whether or not to offer a bundle containing all the components and how to price the offered individual components and the bundle in order to maximize the retailer’s profit. / text

In this dissertation a new method is proposed to estimate willingness-to-pay (WTP). The method works as an additional interview scene appended to conjoint analysis and it is named throughout this dissertation as the Price Estimation scene (PE scene). In the preceding conjoint analysis price is not included as an attribute. Instead the exchange rate between conjoint utilities and willingness-to-pay is estimated in the PE scene. This is achieved by the use of product stimuli in addition to price scales that are adapted for each respondent in the interview reflecting his or her previously estimated part-worth utilities. In the PE scene the respondents are presented with a sequence of product choices with assigned prices and indicate whether they would actually purchase each of the presented product profiles. The PE scene is a method to estimate willingness-to-pay at an individual level based only on each respondent's provided information. Shortcomings of existing approaches that use conjoint analysis, such as a missing choice rule as well as problems that arise when price is included as an attribute are overcome. The PE scene was tested in an empirical investigation in which the WTPs of the customers of the Nokia online shop in Germany for different product bundles were estimated. (author's abstract)

本篇論文旨在探討在不確定狀況及競爭市場的假設下將不同商品組合出售是否較單獨 出售為佳。本篇計分五章：第一章先介紹組合商品策略（bundling strategy ）在行 銷上的應用及類型。第二章則為相關文獻探討。其中有的文獻是在確定狀況下，利用 組合商品之訂價策略來區分消費者，有的則是在不確定狀況下的二階段訂價（two pa rt tariff ），然而兩者皆在比較不同訂價策略之優劣。第三章則以耐久財及檢修服 務為例，在對檢修服務之需求不確定的狀況下，建立模式以比較組合耐久財及檢修服 務一起出售是否絕對較單獨出售為佳，或是在何種條件下方較佳，第四章則對模式之 結果在行銷策略上的涵義做一說明。第五章說明模式的限制及未來發展方向。