Consumer preferences change through time and rms have to adjust their product positioning for their products to continue to be appealing to consumers. These changes in product positioning require xed investments such that rms engage in these repositionings only once in a while. We construct a model that can include both predictable and unpredictable consumer preference changes, and where a rm o...

This paper reports on action research activities during 2000-2001, involving first-year engineering students in an extended study programme of the School of Engineering at the University of Pretoria. Students in the participating group were enrolled for a support course aimed at facilitating the fundamental concepts underpinning a study in calculus as well as complementing the development of pe...

Strategy-proof mechanisms eliminate the possibility for gain from strategic misrepresentation of preferences. If market participants respond optimally, these mechanisms permit the observation of true preferences and avoid the implicit punishment of market participants who do not try to “game the system.” Using new data from a flagship application of the matching literature—the medical residency...

INTRODUCTION Workplace health promotion programs to prevent overweight and obesity in office-based employees should be evidence-based and comprehensive and should consider behavioral, social, organizational, and environmental factors. The objective of this study was to identify barriers to and enablers of physical activity and nutrition as well as intervention strategies for health promotion in...

the present study aimed to investigate the general pattern of brain dominance of undergraduate shiraz university students and its effect on the use of listening comprehension strategies. data was collected from 142 undergraduate shiraz university students. the hemispheric dominance test (hdt) was given to the participants to categorize them as right-, left- and whole-brain dominant, and the str...

This paper provides a complete solution to the existence of equilibria in games with any number of players that may be finite, infinite, or even uncountable; arbitrary strategy spaces that may be discrete, continuum, non-compact or non-convex; payoffs (resp. preferences) that may be discontinuous or do not have any form of quasi-concavity (resp. nontotal, nontransitive, discontinuous, nonconvex...

Non-expected utility theories, such as rank dependent utility (RDU) theory, have been proposed as alternative models to EU theory in decision making under risk. These models do not share the separability property of expected utility theory. This implies that, in a decision tree, if the reduction of compound lotteries assumption is made (so that preferences at each decision node reduce to RDU pr...

We study the possibilities of constructing strategy-proof rules that choose sets of alternatives as a function of agents' preferences over such sets. We consider two restrictions on the domain of individual preferences over sets. Assuming that all singletons are in the range of the rule, we show that only dictatorial rules can be strategy-proof on the larger domain. The smaller domain also allo...

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) approach user preference acquisition from a conversational point of view, where preferences are captured and put to use in the course of on-going natural language dialogue. The approach is motivated by its aim to make interaction efficient and natural, to acquire preferences from the user in a context when she is motivated to give them, as well as to fa...

Computational models are one of the very powerful tools for expressing everyday situations that are derived from human interactions. In this paper, an investigation of the problem of forming beneficial groups based on the members' preferences and the coordinator's own strategy is presented . It is assumed that a coordinator has a good intention behind trimming members' preferences to meet the u...