In this paper we examine the theoretical and empirical issues that arise for a decision maker who wishes to use the target population's preferences as an input for designing new products and services. The marketing literature suggests using essentially the same approach as that for the problem,...

A dynamic-programming heuristic is described to find approximate solutions to the problem of identifying a new, multi-attribute product profile associated with the highest share-of-choices in a competitive market. The input data consist of idiosyncratic multi-attribute preference functions...

We describe a model examining how a firm might choose the package size and price for a product that deteriorates over time. Our model considers four factors: (1) the usable life of the product, (2) the rates at which consumers use the product, (3) the relation between package size and the...

Recently proposed methods for product-line selection use the total utilities of candidate items to construct product lines maximizing seller's return or buyers' welfare. For conjoint (hybrid conjoint) data, enumerating the utilities of candidate items can be computationally infeasible if the...

We present some empirical regularities in the market shares of brands. Our cross-sectional data on market shares consists of 1,171 brands in 91 product categories of foods and sporting goods sold in the United States. One of our results is that the pattern of market shares for each of the...

Joint ordering policies are examined as a method for reducing the transactions cost for multiple products sold by a seller to a homogeneous group of buyers. The problem of determining efficient joint ordering policies has the same structure as the previously-examined problem of determining the...

Quantity discounts offered by a monopolist are considered in the context of a bargaining problem in which the buyer and the seller negotiate over the order quantity and the average unit price. All-units and incremental quantity discounts that permit transaction at a negotiated outcome are...