P variety is an important strategic tool that firms can use to attract customers and respond to competition. This study focuses on the retail industry and investigates how stores manage their product variety, contingent on the presence of competition and their actual distance from rivals. Using a unique data set that contains all Best Buy and Circuit City stores in the United States, the author...

Decision makers in a supply chain confront two main sources of uncertainty in market environment including uncertainty about customers purchasing behaviors and rival chains strategies. Focusing on competition between two supply chains, it is considered that each customer as an independent player selects products of these chains based on randomutilitymodel. Similar to quantal response equilibriu...

This paper provides a new explanation for tying that is not based on any of the standard explanations – efficiency, price discrimination, and exclusion. Our analysis shows how a monopolist sometimes has an incentive to tie a complementary good to its monopolized good in order to transfer profits from a rival producer of the complementary product to the monopolist. This occurs even when consumer...

We observed ritual combat and other agonistic behavior between male blacksnakes (Pseudechis porphyriacus) in a field population in central New South Wales. Combat bouts vary greatly in duration (2 to 30 minutes), and apparently function as male "strategies" to displace rival courting males. Direct attack and biting may serve to displace rival males in copulo. We briefly review published literat...

This paper presents a new competitive learning algorithm for data clustering, named the dynamically penalized rival competitive learning algorithm (DPRCA). It is a variant of the rival penalized competitive algorithm [1] and it performs appropriate clustering without knowing the clusters number, by automatically driving extra seed points far away from the input data set. It doesn’t have the "de...

When dissimilar stimuli are presented to each eye, perception alternates between both images--a phenomenon known as binocular rivalry. It has been shown that stimuli presented in proximity of rival targets modulate the time each target is perceptually dominant. For example, presenting motion to the region surrounding the rival targets decreases the predominance of the same-direction target. Her...

In the literature, the Rival Penalized Competitive Learning (RPCL) algorithm (Xu et al. 1993) and its variants perform clustering analysis well without knowing the cluster number. However, such a penalization scheme is heuristically proposed without any theoretical guidance. In this paper, we propose a general penalized competitive learning approach named Expectation-MiniMax (EMM) Learning that...