Strategic Revenue Sharing with Daily Deal Sites: A Competitive Analysis

Promoting through daily deal sites has become popular in the past few years. Groupon is perhaps the best known provider of these promotions (also known as online discount vouchers) to customers. Daily deals differ from traditional coupons on three important dimensions: (i) They are not offered to consumers directly by firms but are offered through an intermediary, (ii) the promotional depth offered by these localized promotions tends to be higher, and (iii) consumers prepay for the discount vouchers, and then the daily deals site reimburses the retailer a prespecified negotiated percentage of each paid voucher. In this study, we build a theoretical model to explore the profitability of undertaking a daily deals campaign by firms. Our analysis identifies the role of types of consumers in the market, relative bargaining power of the local firms, revenue sharing agreements, and market characteristics, such as degree of product substitutability and extent of competition, on the profitability attained through daily deal promotions. Surprisingly, when demand spillovers exist, an asymmetric outcome, with one firm offering an online discount voucher and the competing firm not offering an online discount voucher, is an equilibrium under some conditions.      

Optimal pricing and production decisions in the presence of symmetrical and asymmetrical substitution

Firms may produce a variety of generally similar products or may practice “scientific pricing” or revenue management where the firm will offer similar or somewhat differentiated products in multiple market segments at different prices. Whenever generally similar products are available, the demand for the products is linked through the ability of the customer to substitute one product for another. One widely known type of demand substitution is referred to as inventory-driven substitution where a customer will substitute for a product that is out of stock by buying a similar product. A second type of substitution occurs as a response to price-differences when a customer substitutes a less expensive product for a similar higher priced product.     

Analytical results for IGFR and DRPFR distributions,with actuarial applications

An increasing generalized failure rate of a lifetime X defines an ageing concept, denoted by IGFR. Another notion, denoted by DRPFR, is defined by the decreasingness of the reversed proportional failure rate. In this article, we provide characterizations for both IGFR and DRPFR absolutely continuous lifetimes, based on monotonicity of quotients of probabilistic functionals and a result by Nanda and Shaked (2001 Nanda, A.K., Shaked, M. (2001). The hazard rate and the reversed hazard rate orders, with applications to order statistics. Ann. Inst. Stat. Math. 53:853–864.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). We derive the necessary conditions for the IGFR notion, based on stochastic orderings of truncated distributions, and we prove that the product of DRPFR lifetimes is also DRPFR; that the IGFR property is preserved by composition with certain risk aversion utility functions; and that the order statistics and the records (and the subsequent order statistic (record)) are IGFR under suitable assumptions, with similar results for DRPFR lifetimes. Also, we provide sufficient conditions for the hazard rate ordering of products and random products of IGFR lifetimes, and similar results for the reversed hazard rate order and DRPFR lifetimes, with a complementary result for the mean residual life order of random products of two families of IGFR lifetimes, we derive the upper and lower bounds for the cumulative distribution function of the product of IGFR lifetimes, and we provide the lower bounds for the risk function of an IGFR lifetime based on the distribution moments, and these bounds are extended for the product of IGFR lifetimes. We discuss extensively the applications of the results in insurance portfolios.     

Managing value appropriation in buyer–supplier relationships: The role of commercial decision resources

The resource-based view explains firms’ value appropriation in buyer–supplier relationships by pointing to sustained differences in economic efficiency across firms. Firms with more efficient resources create more value than competitors, which in turn provides a “protective cushion” against competition. However, just as firms may differ in the economic efficiency of their resources and in the value they create, they may also differ in their information processing and how successful they are at value appropriation. Building on the literature on decision-making under uncertainty in psychology, I argue that firms may increase their value appropriation in exchange relationships by investing in commercial decision resources that allow for more effective information processing in commercial decisions. Examples of commercial decision resources include IT-based systems for product costing and tracking customers/competitors, the design of commercial organization, control systems, and commercial experience and skill.     

运输服务业中基于期权的存量控制方法研究

将期权思想引入运输服务业的存量控制策略中,构建了基于期权的存量控制模型,应用买入期权召回已售出的产品,而卖出期权则被用来在最后销售阶段出售低价产品,并通过算例对模型进行了验证.该基于期权的存量控制方法的灵活性,不但减少了超售赔偿成本、忠诚度成本,降低了空座率,并且提高了当需求足够多时服务支付意愿高的顾客的可能性,从而能较大程度地提高运输服务企业的总收益.     

公司治理、审计风险与审计定价——基于CCGINK的经验证据

本文采用南开大学公司治理研究中心发表在2004年<管理世界>第二期的论文中公布的2002年度"中国上市公司治理100佳"的公司治理指数作为公司治理质量的替代变量,以"100佳"中的55家2001年至2004年的数据作为研究对象,采用多元回归方法,分析公司治理指数、审计风险、审计师规模与审计定价的关系.结果发现,公司治理指数越高,审计定价越低;随着公司治理指数提高.国际四大和本土五大明显降低了审计定价,而本土次五大的审计定价却没有明显下降,说明审计定价受到公司治理风险影响,国际四大及本土五大对源于公司内部治理的风险更加敏感.原因可能是大型事务所运用了风险导向审计模式,在争取到优质客户后,采取了合理的风险定价策略,以保持优质客户.上述发现对大型审计师获得审计收费声誉溢价的观点做了局部修正.     

Brownian–Laplace Motion and Its Use in Financial Modelling

Brownian-Laplace motion is a Lévy process which has both continuous (Brownian) and discontinuous (Laplace motion) components. The increments of the process follow a generalized normal Laplace (GNL) distribution which exhibits positive kurtosis and can be either symmetrical or exhibit skewness. The degree of kurtosis in the increments increases as the time between observations decreases. This and other properties render Brownian-Laplace motion a good candidate model for the motion of logarithmic stock prices. An option pricing formula for European call options is derived and it is used to calculate numerically the value of such an option both using nominal parameter values (to explore its dependence upon them) and those obtained as estimates from real stock price data.     

A Discussion on Nonlinear Models for Price Decisions in Rating-Based Product Preference Models

The purpose of this article is to discuss the application of nonlinear models to price decisions in the framework of rating-based product preference models. As revealed by a comparative simulation study, when a nonlinear model is the true model, the traditional linear model fails to properly describe the true pattern. It appears to be unsatisfactory in comparison with nonlinear models, such as logistic and natural spline, which offer some advantages, the most important being the ability to take into account more than just linear and/or monotonic effects. Consequently, when we model the product preference with a nonlinear model, we are potentially able to detect its ‘best’ price level, i.e., the price at which consumer preference towards a given attribute is at its maximum. From an application point of view, this approach is very flexible in price decisions and may produce original managerial suggestions which might not be revealed by traditional methods.     

Estimating mean-standard deviation ratios of financial data

This article treats the problem of linking the relation between excess return and risk of financial assets when the returns follow a factor structure. The authors propose three different estimators and their consistencies are established in cases when the number of assets in the cross-section (n) and the number of observations over time (T) are of comparable size. An empirical investigation is conducted on the Stockholm stock exchange market where the mean-standard deviation ratio is calculated for small- mid- and large cap segments, respectively.     

市场机会、进入决策与战略性并购:基于成长期权理论的一个案例研究

基于净现值的进入模型是对市场均衡状态下企业进入决策的一个描述.但在现实中,不均衡却是市场的一种常态,因此企业无从进行基于净现值的进入决策.本文首先建立了一个基于成长期权价值的进入模型,并指出在成长期权式的市场机会(即商业前景向好)出现时,企业的最优进入时机并不一定是单调的.而是依赖于进入成本、机会成本与成长期权价值三个变量的时序变动模式.这意味着企业家(创业者)不仅要在动态的市场环境中识别成长期权式的投资项目(创业项目),而且要能根据企业当前业务所处的生命周期阶段审慎地选择进入时机.鉴于已被证实的巨大商业前景,本文将互联网产业看作一项成长期权,并基于成长期权理论对微软的战略性并购进行了分析.