Includes bibliographical references. / The degree of sustaining business performance, while maintaining competitive costs, satisfied consumers and customers has become more difficult and harder to achieve. To date, both retailers and manufacturers are economically challenged as they enter into a new age and era that is characterised by a restructuring of the supply and demand known today, the one in which the consumer demand chain will both lead and direct all organisational processes. The greatest challenge in manufacturing and retail supply chains today continue to be the inconsistency of product availability. Both retailers and their manufacturers frequently find themselves in positions where they either have too much stock of specific stock-keeping units (SKUs) or insufficient stock levels of a particular SKU, Steve (2010). Retailers and their suppliers both seek to avoid the costly out-of-stock (OOS) situations, which result in lost revenue opportunity for both parties. OOS can also damage shopper loyalty as frustrated consumers might seek out alternative retailers for the same merchandise, while on the other hand suppliers' brand loyalty can be impacted if a competitor's product is substituted instead. It remains true that the two pillars of business, namely demand and supply, still rule. Traditionally, putting supply before demand, with its implied precedence, was the correct approach to apply, but in today's business environment, there is a major shift taking place, predominantly driven by the cycles in globalisation that would be faster than in the traditional way, oversupply in the fast -moving consumer goods industry, a parallel loss of pricing power, consumers with a twenty-four hours access to precise pricing information, which terminates the power of information scarcity, and shorter product life cycles. The global economic crash that represented a global economic storm led many organisations to rethink the manner in which organisations are led. A consensus exists among many authors and commentators that the emerging economic order has imposed changes to the very way companies are doing business.

<p> Programmatic advertising is an actively developing industry and research area. Some of the research in this area concerns the development of optimal or approximately optimal contracts and policies between publishers, advertisers and intermediaries such as ad networks and ad exchanges. Both the development of contracts and the construction of policies governing their implementation are difficult challenges, and different models take different features of the problem into account. In programmatic advertising decisions are made in real time, and time is a scarce resource particularly for publishers who are concerned with content load times. Policies for advertisement placement must execute very quickly once content is requested; this requires policies to either be pre-computed and accessed as needed, or for the policy execution to be very efficient. We formulate a stochastic optimization problem for per publisher ad sequencing with binding latency constraints. Within our context an ad request lifecycle is modeled as a sequence of one by one solicitations (OBOS) subprocesses/lifecycle stages. From the viewpoint of a supply side platform (SSP) (an entity acting in proxy for a collection of publishers), the duration/span of a given lifecycle stage/subprocess is a stochastic variable. This stochasticity is due both to the stochasticity inherent in Internet delay times, and the lack of information regarding the decision processes of independent entities. In our work we model the problem facing the SSP, namely the problem of optimally or near-optimally choosing the next lifecycle stage of a given ad request lifecycle at any given time. We solve this problem to optimality (subject to the granularity of time) using a classic application of Richard Bellman's dynamic programming approach to the 0/1 Knapsack Problem. The DP approach does not scale to a large number of lifecycle stages/subprocesses so a sub-optimal approach is needed. We use our DP formulation to derive a focused real time dynamic programming (FRTDP) implementation, a heuristic method with optimality guarantees for solving our problem. We empirically evaluate (through simulation) the performance of our FRTDP implementation relative to both the DP implementation (for tractable instances) and to several alternative heuristics for intractable instances. Finally, we make the case that our work is usefully applicable to problems outside the domain of online advertising.</p>

Proefschrift Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam.

Proefschrift Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam. / Lit. opg.: p. 125-133. - Met een samenvatting in het Nederlands.

Raspberry production in Utah is concentrated to a large extent in Utah county. According to the 1940 census, Utah county contains 62 percent of the state acreage of 611 acres. Average raspberry acreage in Utah is only about one-half acre per farm on farms reported as growing raspberries. With such small acreage the average producer cannot afford to devote very much time and effort to the production and marketing of raspberries. In the majority of cases raspberry production is carried on by the farmer's wife, as a means of gaining “pin” money for use in the household. Proceeds from raspberries are one of the first cash incomes of the year received from fruit production. The harvesting of raspberries begins about the 25th of June and lasts until the end of July in Utah county. Because of the small acreage per grower, short production season, and high perishability of raspberries, a problem of marketing arises. Previous to 1939, the Salt Lake Public Market was over-supplied with raspberries during peaks of production. This resulted in low prices. Peddlers and truckers dictated the price received by producers. Thus, low prices often resulted and caused the berries to be left on the vines as the prices would not pay the cost of picking and packing. In order to provide better market outlets, establish satisfactory grades and standards, and provide for more orderly marketing, the producers in Utah county organized a Cooperative Marketing Association in 1939. This association was organized for the purpose of marketing raspberries grown by producers in Utah county from Mapleton to Pleasant Grove. The purpose of this study is: (1) to show the problems relating to the marketing of raspberries in Utah, (2) to analyze data made available by the Utah Berry Growers' Association order to show market areas, methods of marketing, price received by method of sale, marketing expenses and to determine sales and prices received on week days and holidays, (3) to analyze the possibility of extending the markets for Utah raspberries.