conceived in the book Marketing Places: Attracting Investment, Industry, and Tourism to Cities, States, and Nations that the world’s economic development has enlarged the competition among places. Whether a place talent shows itself and succeeds in the competition or not, the key is to market the place’s advantages through various strategic and effective methods [2]. “The place seller” (such as...

We analyze the effect of buyer, contract, and vendor characteristics on abnormal stock returns among firms that have announced large scale Information Technology (IT) and Business Process outsourcing (BPO) contracts. We draw upon a comprehensive dataset on outsourcing announcements, augmented with data from public sources. Salient buyer factors examined include use of a wide range of organizati...

We propose a new sample efficient algorithm to learn the parameters governing the purchasing behavior of a utility maximizing buyer, who responds to prices, in a repeated interaction setting. The key feature of our algorithm is that it can work with arbitrary price constraints that the seller may impose. This overcomes a major shortcoming of previous approaches, which use unrealistic prices to ...

Why don’t consumers demonstrate the same behavior when confronted with identical advertisements? What is the reason for these different perceptions of the same stimuli? How can we shape the right perception in the target audiences? How will advertisers be able to create a common concept which will result in a common behavior? Being informed about customer reactions, especially when they are exp...

This study emphasizes the importance of lifestyle and its influence on the consumer’s purchase behavior. The main purpose of this study is to empirically examine the association between the consumers’ general life styles and their consumption pattern. aIO measure was used to identify the lifestyle dimensions of the consumers. The study confirmed that there was a significant association between ...

One of the most exciting aspects of electronic shopping environments (such as online stores) is that they allow firms to create personalized customer interfaces. That is, user interfaces of commercial web sites can be designed to be adaptive to the specific interests, needs, and preferences of individual shoppers at particular points in time. In principle, such personalization can yield a uniqu...

Industrial buyers who seek to procure inputs have the option of contracting the process out to procurement intermediaries. Many of these intermediaries now operate using Internet-based software to enhance the efficiency of their services. We develop a theoretical model of a buyer who wishes to procure an input from one of many differentiated suppliers. The buyer chooses between conducting the p...

In many cases, buyers must incur search costs to find the price of a product. This search cost affects the behavior of consumers, and through that, it affects the profit maximizing behavior of the firms. As search costs change, so do the competitive marketing mix strategies of the firms. In predicting the effect of changing search costs on the equilibrium prices and allocations, it is important...

The rise to prominence of Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers has given new life to the debate about whether “buyer power” at intermediate links in a vertically related chain of industries is good or bad for consumers and hence whether it requires the attention of competition authorities. The term is rarely precisely defined, but as used by most commentators “buyer power” refers to the circums...