O important decision firms must make is to select the product line (characteristics and number of products) to offer consumers. This paper explores the effect of the interaction between consumer evaluation costs and pricing on the optimal product line length to offer consumers. Before deciding to buy a product among all products offered, a consumer learns the product line length. Given the prod...

in this paper, a numerical solution procedure is presented for the forced vibration of a piezoelectric nanowire under thermo-electro-mechanical loads based on the nonlocal elasticity theory within the framework of timoshenko beam theory. using hamilton’s principle, the nonlocal governing differential equations are derived. the governing equations and the related boundary conditions are discreti...

M consumer durable retailers often do not advertise their prices and instead ask consumers to call them for prices. It is easy to see that this practice increases the consumers’ cost of learning the prices of products they are considering, yet firms commonly use such practices. Not advertising prices may reduce the firm’s advertising costs, but the strategic effects of doing so are not clear. O...

BACKGROUND A higher slow vital capacity (VC) compared with forced vital capacity (FVC) indicates small airway collapse and air trapping. We hypothesized that a larger difference between VC and FVC (VC-FVC) would predict impaired exercise capacity in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). METHODS Pulmonary function and incremental cardiopulmonary exercise responses were as...

We study a periodically forced system of ODEs near a point of Hopf bifurcation, where the forcing frequency ωF is near the Hopf frequency ωH and the forcing amplitude ε is small. We assume that in this system only the forcing frequency is varied and we determine all small amplitude periodic solutions of the forced system that have frequency ωF . In other words, we examine the influence of the f...

We study the effect of random forces on a double-stranded DNA in unzipping the two strands, analogous to the problem of an adsorbed polymer under a random force. The ground state develops bubbles of various lengths as the random force fluctuation is increased. The unzipping phase diagram is shown to be drastically different from the pure case.

Trapdoor fracture is a type of orbital fracture frequently observed in pediatric patients after facial trauma. The treatment options and surgical outcomes associated with this fracture are controversial.This study investigated the surgery principles and strategies as well as the functional training for the recovery and prognosis of pediatric patients with trapdoor fracture.A retrospective study...

Rationale The relationship of functional parameters such as lung mechanics, chest kinematics, metabolism and peripheral and respiratory muscle function with the level of exercise tolerance remains a controversial subject. While it has been previously shown that pulmonary rehabilitation is capable of improving exercise tolerance in patients afflicted by COPD, as expressed by values of 6-minute w...

This paper describes the LDC forced aligner which is designed to align audio and transcripts. Unlike existing forced aligners, LDC forced aligner can align partially transcribed audio files, and also audio files with large chunks of non-speech segments, such as noise, music, silence etc, by inserting optional wildcard phoneme sequences between sentence or paragraph boundaries. Based on the HTK ...