The paper asks how a for-profit cable or satellite operator allocates a fixed channel capacity to different program types and how the different channels are bundled and priced. It also addresses the question how channel allocation and bundling decisions made by a for-profit firm differ from the decisions a welfare-maximizing firm would make. It also examines the effect on profits and welfare of...

The decision-theoretic rough set model is adopted to derive a profit-based three-way approach to investment decision-making. A three-way decision is made based on a pair of thresholds on conditional probabilities. A positive rule makes a decision of investment, a negative rule makes a decision of noninvestment, and a boundary rule makes a decision of deferment. Both cost functions and revenue f...

We make an economic case for CSR, arguing that profit-maximizing firms may better serve stakeholder interests than non-profits if and only if they enjoy a market advantage or can leverage their core business capabilities. Where this is not the case, profits from CSR may come at the cost of stakeholders.

This note studies the optimal dynamic decision-making problem for a retailer in a price-sensitive, multiplicative demand framework. Our model incorporates lost sales, holding cost, fixed and variable procurement costs, as well as salvage value. We characterize the structure of the retailer’s (discounted) expected profit-maximizing dynamic inventory policy for both finite and infinite selling ho...

Experimental data from low nitrogen and phosphorus diets (Carter et al, 1999, 2000, 2003) are being used to validate and/or modify the NRC swine growth model. A profit maximizing daily growth model that considers feed costs, excretion, waste management costs, and length of feeding period is being developed.

This paper analyzes a single-period inventory model of profit maximization with a reordering strategy in an imprecise environment. The entire period is divided into two slots and the customer demand is considered as a fuzzy number in situations where the demand in each slot is linguistic in nature and characterized as ‘demand is about d’. The reordering is to be done during the mid-season after...

We analyze the impact of an endogenous minimum quality standard (MQS) imposed on an industry collectively by producers based upon a profit criterion, a situation common to agricultural industries. A MQS can enhance net welfare in these settings because it may correct for deficient production of high-quality product by the industry in the absence of a MQS. However, we show that any MQS imposed v...

Central counterparties (CCPs) have increasingly become a cornerstone of financial markets infrastructure. We present a model where CCPs are necessary to implement efficient trade when trades are time-critical, liquidity is limited and there is limited enforcement of trades. We then show that – when collateral is sufficient to avoid default – profit-maximizing CCPs “overcollateralize” trades rel...

This paper presents an integrated framework for designing profit-maximizing products/services, which can also be produced at reasonable operating difficulty levels. Operating difficulty is represented as a function of product and process attributes, and measures a firm’s relative ease or difficulty in meeting customer demand patterns under specified operating conditions. Earlier optimum product...

We show that in many applied economic models, it is possible to reduce the dimensionality of the space of actions to what we call “sufficient decisions.” We find that for monopoly and oligopoly in multi-sided markets and multi-product markets, the market equilibrium can be transformed into an equivalent market equilibrium in which each firm makes a single decision. Because profit maximization c...