Competitive industrial marketing strategies

This paper argues that for firms marketing industrial goods, the terms—system, product, service and commodity—are better employed to characterize the way the firm competes rather than any intrinsic attributes of what it markets. It is shown that the same hardware can be transacted as a system, service, product of commodity, and the nature of the most popular transaction changes over time. The nature of these shifts and how the firm needs to match its strategy to reflect them are discussed, and the special case of diversified firms in industries subject to rapid transaction shifts is taken up. It is suggested that for such firms a divisional structure based on the type of transaction—‘transaction divisions’—rather than the conventional Product Type divisions may make the firm better able not only to match its strategy to such shifts but also better able to anticipate them.     

An advertising effect model

A model of advertising effects has been developed based on a distinction between “persuasion” advertising and “trigger” advertising. The former is designed to induce prospective purchasers to try the product and to establish a “product image”. The latter is aimed at “triggering” a purchase on the part of an individual whose image of the product has already been formed. The distinction has major implications for the type and timing of advertising. The model can be applied to determining an optimum distribution of advertising effort in the introduction of a new product, and the optimum advertising media mix.     

What is algorithmic governance?

This article contributes a coherent framework to the rich literature emerging in the field of algorithmic governance while also resolving conflicting understandings. Tracing the history of algorithmic governance to the broad architecture of the universal Turing Machine, the article identifies a common thread of critical concern in the literature on algorithmic governance: the growing institutional capabilities to move contestable issues to a space of reduced negotiability, raising questions of social asymmetry, inequity, and inequality. Within the social context of algorithmic governance, the article highlights three general areas of concern where the social negotiability of processes is threatened: the problem of power (surveillance), discrimination (social bias), and identification (system identity).     

Relative performance of academic departments using DEA with sensitivity analysis

The process of liberalization and globalization of Indian economy has brought new opportunities and challenges in all areas of human endeavor including education. Educational institutions have to adopt new strategies to make best use of the opportunities and counter the challenges. One of these challenges is how to assess the performance of academic programs based on multiple criteria. Keeping this in view, this paper attempts to evaluate the performance efficiencies of 19 academic departments of IIT Roorkee (India) through data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique. The technique has been used to assess the performance of academic institutions in a number of countries like USA, UK, Australia, etc. But we are using it first time in Indian context to the best of our knowledge. Applying DEA models, we calculate technical, pure technical and scale efficiencies and identify the reference sets for inefficient departments. Input and output projections are also suggested for inefficient departments to reach the frontier. Overall performance, research performance and teaching performance are assessed separately using sensitivity analysis.     

Codes of Contention: Building Regulations in Colonial Bombay, 1870‐1912

This paper investigates the contentious institutionalization of building codes in colonial Bombay. Based on original archival research, the paper demonstrates that building codes were inflected with a discourse of moral regulation that masked the material interests of the state. Resistance to these regulations came from many quarters; conflicts within the state, public opinion expressed in the press, and political strategizing of residents and landowners in the public sphere. The paper argues for greater attention to the historically variable interconnections between power and resistance in specific empirical contexts.     

Analyzing floor configurations for casino slot machines

Casino management desires to make effective use of the scarce floor space available for slot machines. Tradeoffs among the key variables were found by combining managerial judgement and data analysis; these were then used to develop an interactive micro-computer model which analyzes slot machine configurations. Although we present a single application, our approach may be employed over a wider range of problems, e.g. salesroom configurations, facility layout, etc.     

A process for hierarchical decision making with multiple objectives

This research was motivated by a recurring management problem of a large service organization in Philadelphia. The problem concerns the contraction of service facilities. Typically, management decisions of this type and magnitude affect the entire management hierarchy. Each manager in the hierarchy may have several objectives with respect to the problem. The perspective of each manager can contribute to the decision-making process by providing additional insight into both (a) what should be done and (b) the resistance to implementation which may result. Thus the output of this research is not a solution to a particular problem but rather a process for providing critical information for decisions of this type. This paper generalizes the information gathering process and presents the results of eliciting objectives from managers, formalizing objectives into measurable attributes, and interacting with the decision makers to use their implicit preference relationships over the set of Pareto-optimal alternatives. Intuitively, the procedure is appealing as it is flexible enough to allow formal input from all pertinent decision makers in the organization, it is hierarchically consistent, it is politically acceptable, and it is not cumbersome to apply.