Effects of e-Store Types and Industrial Characteristics on Business Performance

In recent years, there are more and more private label products in Taiwan¡¦s retailing channel. It is easy for consumer to purchase those products though supermarkets, hypermarkets, or convenience stores. Retailers have developed and sold private label products widely in the United State and Europe for past three decades, and high proportions of the consumers had such good impression for those products. Private label can create big profit for retailing channel especially in hypermarket in Taiwan, but the actual profit remains small for years. That¡¦s why we want to know what causes the result. In this article we hope to find some important facts and to provide suggestions for the future strategies. Private label products can have different performance through different categories, and many articles find that private label in some specific categories bring more profits than others. In this article, we choose ten different products to understand how product characteristics affect consumer behavior. We use convenience sampling in Taipei and Kaohsiung. By means of the questionnaire survey, we try to learn more about the effect of consumer behavior and product characteristics on hypermarket's private label¡¦s attitude and purchasing behavior. Both quality and price are key factors which can affect purchasing. The quality difference between national brands and private labels cause the lower purchasing intentions in private label. We also find that private label performs better in daily use products and stationery. It is shown that through different categories, the acceptance and attitude toward private label will be different. We suggest adding more factors of consumer behavior and product characteristics to understand the purchasing behavior and the attitude toward private label products in the future study.

Successful product design focuses on design principles that are relevant to a target market. Consequently, the better these principles are understood and used, the higher the likelihood that resulting products will be well-received in that market. This thesis presents a method for extracting market-specific design principles for any market. The method employs user/designer-described characteristics of products within a market to extract the design principles specific to that market. The method generalizes the product characteristics, seeks to discover design decisions that could have resulted in those characteristics, and then extracts the underlying design principles. To demonstrate the ability of the method to extract such principles, the method is applied to two disparate markets; (i) best-selling products in the US, and (ii) products created for the developing world. The two sets of resulting principles are compared and shown to be market-specific. The author conclude that the method indeed results in market-specific principles that can be used to guide design activities.

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There are many differentiated product industries in which firms offer multiple products in the same market. In making strategic decisions regarding entry, quality and quantity to be supplied for their multiple products firms must consider the competition with rivals as well as cannibalization of their own products that are close substitutes. In this setting, understanding the relationship between the behavior of consumer demand and firms decisions' regarding product characteristics and strategic variables like advertising are fundamental issues in industrial organization. This dissertation empirically explores these fundamental issues in the pharmaceutical and airline industries. The first paper of my dissertation estimates consumer demand for different anti-cholesterol drugs using panel data on a nationally representative sample of individuals who were diagnosed with cholesterol problems in the period 1996-2002. The data provides detailed information on individuals' medical conditions, medical and drug insurance coverage, drug purchases (if any), and other demographic and medical information. Individuals choose whether to purchase an anti-cholesterol rug and, if so, which drug to buy. The model permits flexible substitution patterns among drug choices and persistence in those choices by incorporating both observed and unobserved consumer heterogeneity. The estimates suggest that lower income patients without prescription drug insurance are very price sensitive: they are less likely to use drugs and, if they do use them, they tend to purchase the less expensive drugs. I find that roughly 500 thousand individuals without drug insurance who are currently not purchasing anti-cholesterol drugs would do so in the counterfactual world in which they are given the standard co-payment plan. The second paper also looks at consumer demands for anti-cholesterol drugs. While the first paper focused on the differentiated products, this paper explores the market expansion effects of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA). The study combines the individual data used in the first paper with monthly expenditure data on DTCA for the period 1996-2002. The dynamic demand model estimated in this paper explores the heterogeneous effects of DTCA. Overall, I find a positive effect from DTCA with short term elasticity of 0.107. Through persistence in consumer demand this effect lasts over multiple time periods. I find that individuals not taking a cholesterol drug respond more to advertising than those on the drug. In addition, I find that less educated individuals, those that may be unaware of their health condition, and those without health insurance are most responsive to DTCA. Finally, the third paper studies the effect of product ownership and quality on entry in the airline industry. Specifically, this paper empirically examines the decision of an airline to offer high quality nonstop service between cities given that the airline may or may not be offering lower quality one-stop service. I find that airlines that offer one-stop service through a hub are less likely to enter that same market with nonstop service than those that do not. In addition, the quality of the one-stop service is another determinant of entry. Airlines are more likely to enter a market with nonstop service if their own or their rival's one-stop service in the market are of lower quality. / text

Aus der Einleitung: "In der Vergangenheit wurden Konsumgüter für Massenmärkte entwickelt und produziert. Mittlerweile sind viele Märkte gesättigt und die Produkte haben sich in diesen Märkten funktional immer mehr angenähert. Dies bedeutete, dass die Produkte kostenoptimiert hergestellt werden müssen, um auf diesem Käufermarkt wettbewerbsfähig zu sein (Baumberger 2007). Gleichzeitig ist ein zunehmender Individualisierungswunsch durch die Kunden festzustellen (Fraunhofer Institut ISI 1998). Somit werden auch immer mehr kundenindividuelle Produkte gefordert (Huber et al. 2008). Durch den gesellschaftlichen Wandel hin zu einer Informationsgesellschaft hat der Kunde zusätzlich eine sehr spezifische Vorstellung von dem, was er möchte und gleichzeitig stehen ihm durch die Vernetzung mehr Anbieter zur Auswahl und stärken somit seine Position gegenüber den Unternehmen (Schaller et al. 2004)."

在數據分析的領域中，尤其在大數據的領域之中，因常含有相當高維度的預測變數，故特徵選擇是一個很重要的主題。這個主題在半導體的應用上，已經獲得相當豐碩的成果，但在IC基板的應用上，成果就相對顯得貧乏。所以，此次的研究(以IC基板中鑽孔製程為例)將透過以下的試驗方法(含：GR-SNBC (Gain Ratio with Naive Bayes Classifier)、SU-SNBC (Symmetrical Uncer-tainty with Naive Bayes Classifier)與SU-CART (Symmetrical Uncer-tainty with Classification and Regression Tree Classifier))，來建立可應用於IC基板製程時間預測上的一組屬性。最後，此一研究的成果不僅在於，使用資料挖礦的方法，來找出一組具有顯著性，而且可以用來預測的IC基板製程時間的產品特徵屬性；而且，發現若為了縮短製程時間，來自產品結構本身的因子，會比來自產品在生產管理上的因子更具顯著的效果。 / Feature selection is significate subject in domain of data analysis, especially in big-data with a lot of high dimension predictive variables. In semi-conductor field, this subject has already gotten a plenty of achievement, but not in IC-substrate; so in this research for example of drilling operation, through experiments, it builds a group of se-lective features for this field to predict process time, and the methods used are GR-SNBC (Gain Ratio with Naive Bayes Classifier), SU-SNBC (Symmetrical Uncertainty with Naive Bayes Classifier) and SU-CART (Symmetrical Uncertainty with Classification and Regression Tree Classifier). The contributions of this research are not only a selective product characteristics subset suggested to predict process-time in IC-substrate fab via the data-mining methods here, but also an observation that in order to shorten the process time, the factors of product construction weighs more than production management.

Aus der Einleitung: "In der Vergangenheit wurden Konsumgüter für Massenmärkte entwickelt und produziert. Mittlerweile sind viele Märkte gesättigt und die Produkte haben sich in diesen Märkten funktional immer mehr angenähert. Dies bedeutete, dass die Produkte kostenoptimiert hergestellt werden müssen, um auf diesem Käufermarkt wettbewerbsfähig zu sein (Baumberger 2007). Gleichzeitig ist ein zunehmender Individualisierungswunsch durch die Kunden festzustellen (Fraunhofer Institut ISI 1998). Somit werden auch immer mehr kundenindividuelle Produkte gefordert (Huber et al. 2008). Durch den gesellschaftlichen Wandel hin zu einer Informationsgesellschaft hat der Kunde zusätzlich eine sehr spezifische Vorstellung von dem, was er möchte und gleichzeitig stehen ihm durch die Vernetzung mehr Anbieter zur Auswahl und stärken somit seine Position gegenüber den Unternehmen (Schaller et al. 2004)."

Continuous technological development and increasing efficiency demands are driving products toward becoming more and more complex. For the aerospace industry - where the requirements for performance, safety and low environmental impact already are substantial - this means that more extensive quality assurance measures must be taken to ensure the fulfillment of the requirements of each individual component.However, to avoid that the work with quality improvement become too extensive and increase the product cost to unbearable levels it is necessary to have methods to prioritize and focus improvement efforts on the product features that matters most for fulfilling customer requirements. Therefore, the concept of Key Characteristics is used today, both in the aerospace and other industries; a term for those characteristics that have a significant impact on requirement compliance and whose outcomes at the same time are expected to vary considerably in manufacturing.The concept itself is similar among those who use it but the purpose of and methodology for identifying and managing Key Characteristics vary, even within the same industry. This thesis is therefore aimed to create a view of which factors that characterize an effective and efficient way for companies in the aerospace industry to work with Key Characteristics. The thesis involves a case study to create a framework for how companies within this industry work with Key Characteristics, a literature review to see which approaches are advocated by previous research and two benchmark studies to see examples of how Key Characteristics are used and handled in practice in industry.The results show that the work of Key Characteristics should meet three main criteria in order to be effective and efficient: • it must be clearly focused on the characteristics that have critical impact on customer requirements and at the same time considerable variation in production, • it should be initiated early in the product development process and then performed iteratively during the process of continuously reducing variation problems in manufacturing, and • it should identify Key Characteristics using both qualitative and quantitative tools to best capture all different kinds of requirements on the product.Finally a practical example is given of how the work with Key Characteristics should look like at GKN Sweden AB, the case study company in the aerospace industry, to effectively minimize the costs associated with production variation, and yet satisfy all customer requirements. / <p>Validerat; 20140811 (global_studentproject_submitter)</p>