Widespread deployment of cameras in consumer products–most noticeably cell phones–has lead to a quest for improved cost efficiency in all manufacturing steps. Wafer-level manufacturing and assembly seems to offer a way forward for cost reduction. Whereas CMOS image sensors are already exclusively manufactured at the wafer level, this is not true for the lens stacks used in consumer cameras. The...

Loss Leading pricing is often referred to as an advertising strategy which allows retailers to attract consumers by subsidizing some products and make profits from other items; in this way, below-cost pricing may improve consumer welfare by compensating consumers for their lack of information. This paper shows that large retailers can instead use loss leading as an exploitative device at the de...

In this article, demand equations for import of consumer, intermediate and capital goods for the period 1971(2) to 1999(1), is estimated and analyzed, using the ARDL Pesaran & Shin method. The results show that the behavior of the different categories of imported goods in Iran is best explained by the parallel market exchange rate, implying this rate is a closer approximation fir the opportunit...

innovation has attracted considerable interest in recent years in improving competitive advantage for both profit and nonprofit organizations. service innovation offers the potential for substantially improving the performance, but performance gains are often obstructed by users’ unwillingness to accept and use available systems. this research aims to use the concept of reasoned action theory t...

Firms developing new products must often make a trade-o¤ between production costs and product quality: higher quality products are more valued by consumers, but also more costly to manufacture. We analyze the impact of activities that increase consumer value (quality improvement e¤orts) and activities that decrease production costs (cost reduction e¤orts) on the pro…t of a …rm. We demonstrate t...

Laypersons ("consumers") often have difficulty finding, understanding, and acting on health information due to gaps in their domain knowledge. Ideally, consumer health vocabularies (CHVs) would reflect the different ways consumers express and think about health topics, helping to bridge this vocabulary gap. However, despite the recent research on mismatches between consumer and professional lan...

The causes and ramifications of the rise in the consumer debt burden over time have been subject to much debate. This paper first offers a brief overview and analysis of the key economic variables used to evaluate consumer debt levels. The principal focus of the paper, however, is a broad review of the literature on the topic of consumer debt to provide a framework for how to assess recent cred...