Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This study examined the relationship between personality dimensions and supervisory ratings of job performance, in a sales context in Sweden. A sample of 34 telesales workers, employed at two major telecom companies, completed the NEO PI-3 (McCrae & Costa, 2010). As hypothesized, it was found that Extroversion, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism correlated moderately with job performance. In line with past research, this suggests that individuals, who display high levels of Extroversion and Conscientiousness, as well as low levels of Neuroticism, perform better in sales related occupations. Unlike hypothesized, no correlation was found between job performance and Agreeableness and Openness to Experience. Additional computations indicated the importance of specific sub dimensions of Extroversion and Conscientiousness in respect to job performance. Practical implications in respect to recruitment and directions of future research are discussed.

In this thesis we analyze optimal demand management policies for stochastic systems. In the first system considered, a manufacturer decides how to manage demand from customers that differ in their priority level and willingness to pay. He has limited production capacity and predetermined prices throughout the horizon. We find an optimal production and inventory strategy that rations current and future limited capacity between customer classes through reserving inventory for the future and accepting orders now for future delivery. Next, we extend these results to the case when the customers have different tolerance to delayed fulfillment, namely, first-class customers never accept backlogging whereas second-class customers agree to wait one period for a discount. We find an optimal policy similar to the production and inventory strategy that is used for the first system based on threshold values. The third system considers a firm whose recent performance in meeting quoted leadtimes affects future demand arrivals. We assume that the probability of a customer placing an order depends on the quoted leadtime, and both customer arrivals and processing times are stochastic. When capacity of the firm is infinite, we find the optimal leadtime to quote, and when capacity is finite and leadtime is industry-dictated, we determine that the optimal demand acceptance policy does not necessarily have a nice structure. We comment on the structure of the optimal policy for a special case and develop several heuristics for the general case. The final system considered in this thesis is the Sports and Entertainment industry, where demand is managed for a season of several performances by selling season tickets initially and single events later in the selling horizon. We specifically study the optimal time to switch between these market segments dynamically as a function of the state of the system and show that the optimal switching time is a set of time thresholds that depend on the remaining inventory and time left in the horizon.

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As more and more consumers getting used to surfing the internet, the situation which the e-shops confronting is also getting tougher and more competitive. How to impress their consumers becomes an important issue for the e-business corporate. In this difficult situation, a unique marketing model took over the websites¡¦ banners and the consumers¡¦ e-mail title unconsciously. This marketing model lets consumers receive their product freely but a little amount of dealing and delivering fees. The whole new marketing model tried to get consumers¡¦ notice with the surprising way of sales promotion. This thesis is about the issue that who will be the most interested in this marketing model, and what kind of product will be most suitable for this marketing pattern.

In our daily life, we can receive the information about sales promotion usually, and it is confused that research in the past posited sales promotion may erode brand equity. In another aspect, when researching sales promotion, researcher used simple sentence instead of original colorful information, and asked participants imagine the advertisement. We may believe that will be harmful to the credibility. According to the reasons before, this research follow Vidal and Ballester(2005), posited that sales promotion can contribute to build brand equity. This research uses fictitious brand and designs the fictitious advertisement to avoid the effect of stereo type in consumers mind. The outcome of this research suggests that sales promotion actually can contribute to build consumer-based brand equity. If corporation wants to make the brand different from competitors to let consumer identify the brand, it needs to design unique sales promotion.

Thesis (M.A.). / Cover title. Mimeo. copy. Includes bibliographical references.

The Atlas Copco group is an industrial group of companies that are making sales with customers located all around the world. This thesis is done at the ACTA-GI division (Atlas Copco Tools and Assembly Systems GI Division), where the sales process stretches through four main players; the Atlas Copco headquarter in Stockholm, local customer centers, distributors and end customers.   When having several different players in the sales process, the communication between these may sometimes be deficient. When news and information from the headquarter is released, it has to travel through several instances before reaching the distributors or the end customers. This leads to a deficient flow of communication where information is often delayed or misinterpreted before reaching its target. The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate how ACTA-GI can improve the flow of information in the sales channel and to develop a plan of action for increasing the engagement of the distribution partners by developing an online distributor portal. In order to investigate the best ways of handling distribution partners, this study contains both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The study contain a theory review on distribution and communication strategies, an analysis of the existing sales channels and current markets, an analysis of the content of the online portal, and a benchmarking study with a similar industrial company. The result is a plan of action for industry best practice and proposals for improvement areas.

Consumers are attracted to large assortments, but they experience negative consequences when they ultimately must make a choice form these large assortments. In Essay 1, four experiments examine whether a common retailer strategy--the use of recommendations such as "best seller" signs--attenuates or exacerbates these negative consequences. Results show that best seller signs can exacerbate decision difficulty and regret as consumers engage in a more extensive consideration of options, and these larger consideration sets are partly due to the increase consideration of non-signed options. The extent to which consumers have developed preferences is a key moderator of the effect of best seller signage on choice from large assortments. For consumers possessing more (less) developed preferences, best seller signage in large assortments increases (decreases) the size of consumer consideration sets and exacerbates (attenuates) decision difficulty and regret. The resultant choice outcome is that best seller signage is more likely to increase the overall quantity purchased when consumers have more compared to less developed preferences. Essay 2 investigates consideration set construction strategies consumers use to narrow down assortments into a more manageable consideration set, particularly when faced with large assortments. Past research proposes that consumers use two strategies to narrow down an assortment: include and exclude. Four experiments show that consumers are more likely to use an include strategy when faced with a large compared to a small assortment. It is argued that this preference for an include consideration set strategy is due to the decrease in relative effort required by an include strategy as the number of options in the set increases. The essay shows that compared to using an exclude strategy, the use of an include strategy leads consumers to (1) form smaller consideration sets, (2) express more (less) positive (negative) thoughts, (3) increase (decrease) the weighting of positive (negative) attributes, and (4) elaborate more on options in the consideration set and less on options not in the consideration set. The implications of using an include versus exclude strategy on final choice are explored and directions for future research are discussed.

published_or_final_version / Economics / Master / Master of Arts