Marketing planning in India—A survey

This paper describes the response to a study of the marketing planning function in large-size companies in India and the techniques used to assess the level of sophistication achieved. The authors analyse their findings and conclude that although a high level of sophistication had not yet been achieved, the process was accelerating and there was a positive relationship between the size of the company and its profitability and the accompanying level of marketing planning sophistication.     

The World Fertility Survey: charting global childbearing

Interviewing some 350,000 women in 42 developing countries and 20 developed countries representing nearly 40% of the world's population, the World Fertility Survey (WFS) is in a unique position to document the historic 1970s slowdown in global population growth. This Bulletin describes efforts begun in 1972 to ensure high quality, internationally comparable, accessible data, the data's importance for policymakers, planners and researchers, and major findings available by early 1982 from directly assisted WFS surveys in 29 developing countries and contraceptive use data from WFS-type surveys in 16 developed countries. Marital fertility has declined in all developing regions except Africa but still averages from 4.6 children/woman in Latin America to 6.7 in Africa, while preferred family size ranges from 3.0 children in Turkey to 8.9 in Senegal--far above the average 2.2-2.5 children/woman needed to end developing countries' population growth in the long run. However, women ages 15-19 prefer nearly 2 children fewer than the oldest women ages 45-49; 3.8 vs. 5.7 on the average. Nearly 1/2 (48%) of married women surveyed in 27 countreis said they wanted no more children. Preventing all unwanted births would reduce birth rates up to 15 births/1000 population in these countries. Overall, 32% of married, fecund women in developing countries are using contraception compared to an average 72% in 16 developed countries. Education, literacy, and more available family planning services increase contraceptive use. Age at marriage is rising in Asia, but this factor alone has little effect on fertility. Infant mortality is higher in many developing countries than previously thought. Breastfeeding is an important restraint on fertility in most developing countries but is declining among more educated, employed, and urban women which could raise fertility if not compensated for by gains in contraceptive use.     

Knowing What Your Customer Wants: Improving Inventory Allocation Decisions in Online Movie Rental Systems

In Online Movie Rental Systems, customer desire to rent can often be observed before the actual consumption occurs. Desire represents uncensored (or true) demand information. Hence, the impact of inventory decisions (numbers of physical copies of different movies) can be accurately traced to the creation of desire (via Word‐of‐mouth), and then to rental. Word‐of‐Mouth (WOM) has been recognized as one of the most influential sources of information transmission, especially for experience goods. Poor inventory decisions may result in lost rentals in two ways: One is the loss of rentals because of low inventory (direct effect), and the other is the loss of the possible demand (rentals) that could have been created through WOM (indirect effect). We use data from an online DVD‐by‐mail firm to estimate the direct and indirect effects of inventory decisions, considering the circular relationship: Rental generates WOM, WOM creates Desire, and Desire turns into Rental. We find that the magnitude of indirect effects is significant, comparable to and sometimes even exceeding direct effects. The value of the empirical findings to facilitate better inventory allocation decisions is examined.     

Dynamic relationships between children’s higher‐order regulation and lower‐order reactivity predict development of attention problems

Dual‐process theories contend that interplay between higher‐order (i.e., regulatory) and lower‐order (i.e., reactive) systems influences the development of attention in early childhood. We therefore investigated interactions between an aspect of children's top‐down self‐regulation (i.e., effortful control; EC) and positive reactivity (indexed by observed positive affectivity; PA) and negative reactivity (indicated by cortisol stress reactivity and observed fear) in predicting children's early attention problems. We found that observed EC at the age of three predicted lower attention problems 2 years later, controlling for attention problems at baseline. Importantly, the predictive effect of EC was more pronounced for children higher in cortisol stress reactivity at the age of three; this pattern was not found for observed PA or fear. Findings align with dual‐process developmental theories that emphasize the dynamics between regulatory and reactive processes in shaping child development. Our study provides the first evidence supporting dual‐process interactions in the domain of attention problems and has implications for identifying early risk markers and informing early prevention programs for children at greater risk for attention problems.     

Aspects of the ecology and behaviour of a potential urban exploiter,the southern tree agama,Acanthocercus atricollis

Urbanisation has caused significant alterations to ecosystems, generally resulting in decreased biodiversity. However, certain animal species persist and thrive in urban environments by making use of available opportunities, anthropogenic resources, infrastructure and increased ambient and surface temperatures. These species are known as urban exploiters. We investigated the southern tree agama, Acanthocercus atricollis population trends, habitat use and basking and shading behaviour in a high-density urban human-populated housing metropolitan area in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. We marked individual southern tree agamas to determine habitat use and territories (n?=?37). The southern tree agama population density was high, and they had established set territories here. We conducted monthly observations (February 2017–July 2017 and March 2018–February 2019) to determine the degree of basking and shading behaviour with season and time of day and location. Southern tree agamas invested more than half of their time (57%) in basking behaviour during the overall observational study period. Basking and shading patterns changed with season and time of day. The number of basking southern tree agamas decreased during winter and basking commenced later. We found that increased anthropogenic infrastructure and supplementary food availability, decreased predators, and basking opportunities could have had an influence on their population increase and that the southern tree agama is a potential urban exploiter.

     

Projecting populations for major Pacific Island countries with and without COVID-19: pro-active insights for population policy

Journal of Population Research - The paper projects aggregate populations of six Pacific Island countries in both pre- and post-COVID19 scenarios using a Cohort Component Method for the period...     

Effects of face masks on language comprehension in bilingual children

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many children receive language input through face coverings. The impact of face coverings for children's abilities to understand language remains unclear. Past research with monolingual children suggests that hearing words through surgical masks does not disrupt word recognition, but hearing words through transparent face shields proves more challenging. In this study, we investigated effects of different face coverings (surgical masks and transparent face shields) on language comprehension in bilingual children. Three-year-old English-Mandarin bilingual children (N = 28) heard familiar words in both English and Mandarin spoken through transparent face shields, surgical masks, and without masks. When tested in English, children recognized words presented without a mask and through a surgical mask, but did not recognize words presented with transparent face shields, replicating past findings with monolingual children. In contrast, when tested in Mandarin, children recognized words presented without a mask, through a surgical mask, and through a transparent face shield. Results are discussed in terms of specific properties of English and Mandarin that may elicit different effects for transparent face shields. Overall, the present findings suggest that face coverings, and in particular, surgical masks do not disrupt spoken word recognition in young bilingual children.     

A new class of distribution having decreasing,increasing, and bathtub-shaped failure rate

In this article, we propose a new class of distribution which is based on the concept of exponentiated generalization with some modification so as to provide a better result in terms of flexibility. Our proposed distribution accommodates various shapes of hazard rate including the bathtub. Exponential distribution has been taken as the baseline distribution. Various statistical properties of the proposed distribution have been studied. We have used the method of maximum likelihood for estimation of the parameters of the proposed model. Last, we have analyzed four real datasets to illustrate the flexibility of the model in comparison to eight existing well-known distributions.     

Comparing Several Variances with a Control in Direction-mixed Families of Hypotheses

This article deals with simultaneous comparisons of k(k ? 1) populations with a control population with respect to variance in direction-mixed families of hypotheses. Computation of critical constants required for the implementation of the proposed procedures is discussed and selected values of the critical constants are tabulated. Power comparison of the proposed procedures with their existing competitors is carried out using Monte Carlo simulation. An example is given to illustrate the implementation of proposed procedures.     

Truncated Midzuno–Sen Sampling Schemes for Estimating Distribution Functions

We consider a truncated Midzuno–Sen sampling scheme. The proposed method can be used to estimate the distribution function of a study variable assuming that the distribution function of an auxiliary variable is known. The ratio estimator for estimating the distribution function is shown to remain unbiased. We introduce the first- and second-order inclusion probabilities under the truncated Midzuno–Sen sampling scheme. Numerical examples are provided to support our theoretical results.