Group buying is now a popular business mechanism whereby customers are encouraged to bargain together. Today’s group buying usually adopts a fixed group price rather than using a dynamic pricing mechanism and many retailers sell products using both a group buying and a posted price. Therefore, there are usually different shopping channels as the market can be divided into two segments, a group ...

We study the market partition between two distinct firms that deliver services to waiting-time sensitive customers. In our model, the incoming customers select a firm on the basis of its posted price, the expected waiting time and its brand. More specifically, we quantify by a cost any departure from the ideal brand expected by each incoming customer. Considering that the two underlying queuein...

There has been a wide discussion on the different properties between carbon taxes, cap-and-trade schemes and hybrid instruments such as cap-and-trade schemes with price floors and ceilings. There has been less discussion on the incentives to investment that each of these instruments may provide. We build a three-period model to investigate the incentives offered to a large firm with diversified...

The selection of the most suitable machining process for a given machining application is not straightforward and requires consideration of a number of techno-technological and economic criteria. Therefore is often viewed as a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM). This paper is focused on multi-criteria economic analysis of various machining processes by applying recently developed MCDM method...

We address the simultaneous determination of pricing, production, and capacity investment decisions by a monopolistic firm in a multi-period setting under demand uncertainty. We analyze the optimal decision with particular emphasis on the relationship between price and capacity. We consider models that allow for either bi-directional price changes or models with markdowns only, and in the latte...

Social smiling is universally regarded as being an infant's first facial expression of pleasure. Underlying co-constructivist emotion theories are the assumptions that the emergence of social smiling is bound to experiences of face-to-face interactions with caregivers and the impact of two developmental mechanisms--maternal and infant imitation. We analyzed mother-infant interactions from two d...

Address behavior is governed by politeness phenomenon which is culturally bound. This paper attempts to draw a cross-cultural comparison between Chinese and English address forms and, going beneath the surface, explore the cultural differences in value systems and their underlying philosophical sources. The study will help people develop a fuller understanding of the meanings of the address ter...

We use qualitative data to analyze the key elements of the price adjustment processes used at a large industrial manufacturer and several of its major customers. We focus on a specific episode, a price cut, which most vividly exemplifies the themes that emerge from our data. In the specific episode, market forces clearly dictate that the firm should cut prices, and everyone in the firm agrees w...