We study a rental system where a fixed number of heterogeneous users rent one product at a time from a collection of reusable products. The online DVD rental firm Netflix provides the motivation. We assume that rental durations of each user are independent and identically distributed with finite mean. We study transient behavior in this system following the introduction of a new product that is...

In addition to traditional factors, demographic changes also depend on factors such as marriage and divorce. Yet only a few researchers investigated the impact of divorce on housing costs. The aim of this paper is to estimate the effect of divorce on housing costs in Iran. Doing so, we have applied a fixed Panel Spatial Autocorrelation model using the data from a set of Iranian provinces over t...

This paper is a seminar paper that summarizes Fran­ cis Edward Su’s paper “Rental harmony: Sperner’s lemma in fair division” [1] in 1999. In this paper we introduce and prove Sperner’s Lemma. Then, we introduce the fair division problem and an al­ gorithm based on Sperner’s lemma that can solve some variants of the fair division problem.

This short paper examines the technological feasibility of a "video on demand service that is provided from a centralized location over a digital network. The video on demand service is considered to be a service similar to the currently popular videotape rental services. The problem is divided into two parts: communications and database access. It is argued that the incremental communications ...

Product-Service Systems are considered as facilitators for value creation to attain sustainability. This paper studies how service delivery and the co-creation process are two means of enhancing the design of valuable and sustainable solutions. The paper shows how service delivery and cocreation process are both in the core of the interaction between the provider and the customer and can be con...

Firms in multiple industries collect customer satisfaction data to measure service performance. Increasingly, however, many firms are now able to collect objective service performance data as well. This raises the question of whether measuring customer satisfaction is valuable to firms when objective service performance data are available. The authors answer this question via the use of unique ...

This paper examines how residential rental property ownership characteristics affect crime. It examines the incidence and frequency of disturbances, assaults, and drug possession and distribution using police incident report data for privately owned rental properties. Results show that a small percentage of rental properties generate incident reports. Count model regressions indicate that the d...

A common practice among large retailers is the low-price guarantee, rebating consumers if they find an identical product cheaper elsewhere. This provides consumers with some level of comfort in their purchase decision. A similar low-price guarantee is provided by numerous service industries that allow reservation of capacity, yet do not penalize the consumer for failure to keep that reservation...

This paper estimates hedonic price models for a sample of 610 vacation rental houses located in the vicinity of a lake and four-season ski-golf resort. Hedonic semilogarithmic regression models are estimated for peak summer and peak winter rentals for 2008. The regression estimates for weekly rental prices are conditioned on explanatory variables for house size, house quality, and locational fe...

Housing policy in Australia, at both the national and State level, is heavily reliant on the private rental sector to provide housing for low-income consumers. At the same time, there is evidence of significant market failure in the rental sector concerning access to and the supply of lower cost housing. Under a structures of housing provision framework, the institutional and structural process...