Thesis (Ph.D)--Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Kleywegt, Anton J.; Committee Member: Ayhan, Hayriye; Committee Member: Dai, Jim; Committee Member: Erera, Alan; Committee Member: Ward, Amy R. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

In pace with a growing awareness among customers, so does the demand for sustainable products increase in various markets. Sustainability is even referred to become a mega-trend (Lubin & Esty, 2010). Although, extensive research can be found on sustainability and its three pillars; environment, social and economic, little is known whether there is a general customer demand for sustainability for any type of good. Therefore, this study’s purpose has been to compare sustainability demand for convenience goods and shopping goods, with the research question ‘Is the customer’s sustainability demand different between different types of goods? And if so, what are the differences?’ By using a deductive approach, hypotheses has been drawn by examining existing research in the fields of consumer behaviour, customer behaviour and sustainability in general but also for the food and apparel industry respectively.With a quantitative method using a questionnaire, primary data has been collected of customers’ sustainability demand within the food and the apparel industries as representatives for convenience goods and shopping goods respectively. The questionnaire was designed to capture customers’ sustainability demand based on their perceived importance of the three pillars of sustainability. A comparison between the industries resulted in significant mean answers of 3,97 for food and 3,17 for apparel, on a six-point scale. Further,a marginally equal level was demanded for the three pillars within food whereas the environmental pillar was considerably less ranked within apparel. The study further compares the sustainable attitude against sustainable behaviour. Actual buying of sustainable goods within all three pillars was shown to be lower than demand for both types of goods. Lastly, an exploratory research was conducted on the two types of goods in combination with demographic factors, resulting in indications of what factors companies should take into consideration. The final conclusion of the research question was that there is a difference in customers’ sustainability demand for different types of goods.

Transportation is one of the most frequent problems in the business world. The major feature of the problem is that there are many warehouses and many delivery places. The objective of solving this problem is to find the amount of goods that should be sent from each warehouse to each customer while minimizing cost.Unfortunately, understanding the process and interpreting the results are not easy tasks. The method is very complex. The result is in the form of a table. We might say that it is not a friendly user-interface.In this thesis, we will create an application which uses a window as an interface, and uses minimal storage.Borland C++ v.4.0 is chosen to handle the implementation, and Borland Object Windows (class) Library for C++ v.2.0, OWL, is used for the interface. Therefore, this application operates on Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, but not on DOS. / Department of Computer Science

The buying decision process describes how the consumer makes a purchase decision through a rational process (Markin, 1979) and an understanding for how consumers make a purchase decision can according to Sands et al. (2010) be obtained by increased knowledge for the information search process (the second part of the buying decision process) before a purchase. Today’s society offers great opportunity to obtain information (Rahim & Clemens, 2012; Bawden & Robinson, 2009) and by that there are in other words good opportunities for a rational acting by the consumers. However, there are factors working against that consumers act rationally and seek information prior to their purchases primarily in the form of the concept of information overload (Bawden & Robinson, 2009) which claims that consumers are limited in their information search because there is too much information but also other factors such as lack of time (Wood & Neal, 2009) and ability to find information (Slegers et al. 2012) are believed to affect the information search process. The purpose of this essay is to describe the information search behavior of consumers prior to a purchase considering irrational purchase decisions or the possibility of rational purchase decisions linked to product category and age because these variables are assumed to have an impact on the information search behavior prior to a purchase (Nelson, 1970; Phillips & Sternthal, 1977; Sledgers et al., 2012). The method applied in this essay is structured interviews conducted in a shopping center in the central parts of Örebro and the participating respondents are consumers who just made a purchase. The results of the study indicate that the majority of the consumers are making irrational purchase decisions and that they therefore do not use the opportunity to act rationally, although today’s society provide good opportunities. The information search behavior doesn’t seem to depend on product category except that the information sources used differ among categories. The result also shows that younger consumers search more information in comparison with older consumers. Another finding is that neither ability to find information, lack of time or information overload seem to be reasons for that the majority of the consumers have not searched for information and nor do it seem to be the reason for why the consumers that do search for information stop to search. That they are not seeking seems instead to be because they feel that they know enough about the kind of product they have bought and the main reason that those who search stop to search is that they feel that they have found enough information to make a purchase decision. Key words: Consumer behavior, purchase decisions, the buying decision process, information search, rationality, irrationality, search goods, experience goods, information overload

In the distribution network of a large retailer, shipments can either be transported by the retailer's own trucks or outsourced to third-party logistics (3PL) companies. In the former case, shipments are consolidated and transported from their origins through an intermediate facility, namely a crossdock. At a crossdock, shipments are unloaded, sorted, re-consolidated, loaded and transported to their destinations. The consolidation process offers economies of scale that reduce the transportation costs. At the same time, it increases travel distances and incurs handling costs at a crossdock. For this reason, consolidation is uneconomic for a shipment in which origin and destination are located close to one other, especially through a distant crossdock. It is cheaper to outsource transportation of such a shipment to 3PL companies. This shipping decision raises a series of questions. Should a shipment be consolidated through a crossdock or outsourced to 3PL companies? How do facility locations, the operational cost of a crossdock and mode of shipments influence the shipping decision? Can the robustness and potential growth of a crossdock be measured? How does outsourcing affect the robustness and potential growth of a crossdock? We formulate a strategic model of a retailer's distribution network as an economic trade-off between consolidated shipments through a crossdock and outsourced shipments to 3PL companies. We study the locus of facility locations where the costs of a consolidated shipment and an outsourced shipment are equal and discover that the trade-off can be modeled by classical geometric curves, particularly an ellipse, a hyperbola, a limacon and a Cartesian oval. These curves can be developed into a preliminary routing and locating tool. We also observe interesting connections between the single hub crossdocking network and other fields of geometric study, such as Voronoi diagrams and geometric inversion. In addition, the area bounded by these curves represents the likelihood in which a particular shipment is consolidated through a crossdock. We expand this concept to multiple vendor-store pairs and suggest an index that measures robustness and potential growth of a particular crossdock. This asymptotic-probability index explains economic driving factors of consolidation and outsourcing. Although the derivation of the index is limited by the dimension and spatial distribution of facilities, its numerical value can be determined by a computer simulation. Therefore, we use Monte Carlo simulation to compute the proposed index to explain the outsourcing and the interaction between TL threshold0.1 and mode of shipments. The analysis and computer simulation suggest that outsourcing may cause an adverse effect in a single hub crossdocking network, resulting in the abrupt reduction of consolidated shipments in the network. Furthermore, we propose transportation planning to alleviate this effect and compare them to the optimal allocation. The routing and locating application of the model is illustrated using the Home Depot distribution network. Our model predicts 5.5% and additional 1.0% savings in transportation cost by re-allocation of shipments and re-location of crossdocks, respectively. The empirical study shows that the adverse effect of outsourcing can be eliminated by limiting the number of crossdocks used by each store.

Thesis (DBA(DoctorateofBusinessAdministration) )--University of South Australia, 2004.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2006. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 246-255) and index.

Thesis (MComm)--University of Stellenbosch, 2008. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references.

O setor público brasileiro tem grande influência na economia, considerando o volume de tributos que arrecada e também pelo volume de bens públicos que administra, os quais, em matéria contábil, em parte, representam ativos patrimoniais. Este trabalho teve como objetivo propor um modelo de identificação e de classificação de Ativos para as entidades do setor público, harmonizando os conceitos constitucionais, legais e normativos, especialmente com as Normas Brasileiras de Contabilidade Aplicáveis ao Setor Público. Procurou-se evidenciar a possível convergência de conceitos de Ativos para entidades do setor público, as definições de bens da União e dos Estados, assim definidos no artigo 20 e 31 da Constituição Federal de 1988, bem como a convergência de conceitos de Ativos de entidades setor privado para com os de bens públicos. Para tanto, realizou-se uma revisão bibliográfica quanto à conceituação de bens, de bens públicos, de ativos e do patrimônio público, previstas nos diversos regramentos constitucionais e legais do país e na literatura. O trabalho resultou na identificação das diversas classes de ativos públicos, na estruturação de um modelo de identificação e classificação dos bens, com exemplos de utilização, visando a facilitar e qualificar os procedimentos de registro e o relevo dos bens públicos. O que, o caso, poderá ser útil para o entendimento dos eventos contábeis relacionados à identificação e sua classificação. / The Brazilian public sector has great influence on the economy, considering the amount of taxes it collects, and also by the volume of public goods that manages, which in accounting matters partly represent corporate assets. This study aimed to propose a model for the identification and classification of assets for the public sector entities, harmonizing the constitutional, legal and regulatory concepts, especially with the Brazilian Accounting Standards applicable to the Public Sector. It was essayed to evidence the possible convergence of Assets concepts for public sector entities to the (União) Federal Government and States assets definitions, as delineated in the Article 20 and 31 of the 1988’s Federal Constitution and the convergence of assets concepts of entities from private sector towards public goods. For that a literature review was conducted on the concept of goods, public goods, assets and public property, under the various constitutional and legal specific regulations of the country and in the literature. The work resulted in the identification of several classes of public assets and in the structuring of a model for identification and classification of goods, with examples of use, in order to facilitate and qualify registration procedures and disclosure of public goods, which could be useful for the understanding of accounting events related to their identification and classification.