A central feature of demand for products in the fashion apparel segment is a pronounced product life cycle— demand for a fashion product tends to rise and fall dramatically in accordance with the rate of public of adoption. Product demands that vary in such a manner can be difficult to forecast, especially in the critical early period of a product’s life, when observed demand can be a very unre...

Researchers in the past have established their inventory lot-size models under trade credit financing by assuming that the demand rate is constant. However, from a product life cycle perspective, it is only in the maturity stage that demand is near constant. During the growth stage of a product life cycle (especially for high-tech products), the demand function increases with time. To obtain ro...

There is an increasing demand for individually tailored products with short delivery times. This demand can be satisfied with configurable products, which can be easily customized according to customer specifications. The designers of a configurable product must devise a plan that can be used repeatedly for realizing customer orders as working combinations of the available components. We use th...

Formality, Informality, and Social Welfare An industry is modeled in which entrepreneurs, who are heterogeneous in ability, may produce formally or informally. It is shown how the formal-informal mix depends on the distribution of ability, product demand and various parameter values. The industry equilibrium is compared to one in which informality is prohibited. With relatively high product dem...

Many airlines are struggling to survive in today's economy. A crucial contribution to the success of an airline is an e cient management of its revenues. The problem underlying revenue management is for the airline to decide whether to accept customer requests for air travel on a real time basis in order to maximize its expected revenue. Typically, an airline o ers several products (itinerary a...

This paper deals with the question of optimal inventory sizes in a compétitive environment in which the demand for a product at a vendor dépends on the inventory level of the product at that vendor relative to the inventories of the same product held by other competing vendors. The total demand for the product at all vendors is assumed to be fixed. This question is examined for two different re...

This paper studies a multi-product competitive newsboy problem with shortage penalty cost and partial product substitution. We characterize the unique Nash equilibrium of the competitive model and analyze some properties of the equilibrium. An iterative algorithm is developed on the basis of approximating the effective demand as well as the expected profit function for each product. Numerical e...

Research both in marketing and economics so far has treated product attributes as exogenous when estimating demand and supply models. While this assumption may be justified in the short run, in the long run managers make product-positioning decisions by taking into account the demand they face relative to the competitive landscape. In this paper, we take a first step toward exploring the positi...

Using data from the U.S. bicycle industry, we examine the relation among product variety, supply chain structure, and firm performance. Variety imposes two types of costs on a supply chain: production costs and market mediation costs. Production costs include, among other costs, the incremental fixed investments associated with providing additional product variants. Market mediation costs arise...

This paper presents an oligopoly model of multiproduct firms in which firms are endowed with possibly different marginal cost and product quality, and choose product ranges before product market competition. Consistent with empirical evidence on a positive relationship between firm size and product diversification, the analysis suggests that firms with higher quality-cost margins typically have...