Warranty is a powerful implement for marketing strategy that is used by manufacturersand creates satisfaction for consumers by ensuring to compensate for incorrect operation of the product. Warranty serviceresults ina cost named warranty cost for a manufacturer.This cost is a function of warranty policy, regions, and product failures pattern. Since this service coversthe cost of uncertain failu...

Feeding is the most important cost in the production of growing pigs and has a direct impact on the marketing decisions, growth and the final quality of the meat. In this paper, we address the sequential decision problem of when to change the feed-mix within a finisher pig pen and when to pick pigs for marketing. We formulate a hierarchical Markov decision process with three levels representing...

Substantial numbers of smallholder co-operatives in Africa fail each year due to their inability to be self-sustaining. Liberalization of Mali‘s cereal sector in the 1990s resulted in transition from a cereal deficit to self-sufficiency. However, problems like credit, poor marketing and low prices hindered real development of the sub-sector. In 1997, the FASO JIGI Cooperative marketing project,...

In E-commerce, purchase decisions of consumers are often strongly influenced by people who consumers know and trust, and word-of-mouth (WOM) is the most important factor when consumers are making a purchase decision. Many online consumers tend to wait for the opinions of early consumers before making a purchase decision to reduce the risk of buying products. So numerous E-commerce websites prov...

Genetic improvement of animals is a long term process and breeding programmes need to consider aspects that are of importance in the future. In addition to cost-effective pig production, factors that affect marketing of pork will become increasingly important. One important factor in marketing of pork is leanness. Consumers prefer lean meat for health reasons. This is taken into account in toda...

Institutional innovations are increasingly seen as key to achieving not only agricultural growth, by overcoming market failures, but also to ensure that poor smallholders also benefit from this process. This paper analyses institutional arrangements for vegetable marketing in East Africa from a transaction cost perspective. Marketing of vegetables is still dominated by spot markets with some, b...

the state and federal governments that pay much of the cost of prescription drugs for their employees and for the poor or uninsured. An alternative to this model is to have physicians, relying on their training and experience, peer-reviewed journa l articles, and non-industry-sponsored continuing medical education, determine what medications are appropriate for their patients. Elliott argues th...

services—which allow them to create and share in a timeand cost-effi cient way their own content, ideas, and opinions with virtually millions of people connected to the World Wide Web. This huge amount of useful information, however, is mainly unstructured (because it’s specifi cally produced for human consumption) and, hence, it isn’t directly machine-processable. The opportunity to capture th...