Market Design

An agent-based computational modeling of the lottery market is established in this paper. Gamblers are modeled as autonomous agents with fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms. Three empirical observations from lottery markets are taken into account in the model of agents, namely, the halo effect and lottomnia, conscious selection of betting numbers, and aversion to regrets. The effect of the lottery tax rate (takeout rate) on tax revenue is studied in this framework. Our results show the existence of the Laffer curve. The Laffer curve indicates an optimal lottery tax rate at 40%, which is surprisingly close to the empirical tax rate averaged over the 25 lottery markets, 42%. The sensitivity of this result to the emergence of the interdependent preferences is also examined.

This paper first proposes a competitive market structure for reactive power procurement and then develops a methodology for incorporating voltage stability problems into the model. The owners of electric transactions should participate in this competitive framework and submit their own firmness bids in ($/MW) to the Independent System/Market Operator (ISO- IMO). ISO clears the market for reactive energy regarding the

Purpose The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the management challenges faced by international hotel operators when applying universally accepted management principles to the Cuban hospitality market. Design/methodology/approach The authors use both secondary and primary research sources based on fieldwork carried out in Cuba during the first semester of 2003 and a later visit during the months of December 2003 and January 2004. Eight in depth interviews were conducted with senior executives of Cuban, Spanish and French hotel corporations. Findings The paper presents a scenario where the state's role in the protection of the socialist revolutionary principles, combined with the need to adopt some market based management practices, constitutes a singular case in the world of hotel management. In the current Cuban institutional context, the implementation of some western best management practices can produce significant results, while others produce negative outcomes, and therefore, should be held back until the institutional context is changed. Practical implications The paper has implications for managers in suggesting that from a hotel perspective, the application of universally accepted best management practices must be carried out practice by practice and country by country. Originality/value This paper contributes to increased knowledge about the dilemmas of managing hotels in a still highly centralised socialist country but with an increasingly market based economy.

Purpose -In the discussion on service-dominant logic and its consequences for value creation and marketing the inner meaning of the value-in-use notion and the nature of service marketing have not been considered thoroughly. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the meaning of a service logic as a logic for consumption and provision, respectively, and explore the consequences for value creation and marketing. Design/methodology/approach -Being a research-based paper, the topic is approached by theoretical analysis and conceptual development. Findings -Discussing the differences between value-in-exchange and value-in-use, the paper concludes that value-in-exchange in essence concerns resources used as a value foundation which are aimed at facilitating customers' fulfilment of value-in-use. When accepting value-in-use as a foundational value creation concept customers are the value creators. Adopting a service logic makes it possible for firms to get involved with their customers' value-generating processes, and the market offering is expanded to including firm-customer interactions. In this way, the supplier can become a co-creator of value with its customers. Drawing on the analysis, ten concluding service logic propositions are put forward.

Purpose -In today's competitive markets where market offerings are far more complicated and customer interfaces are far broader than conventional marketing models assume, marketing has become increasingly tactical and lost control of the customer management process. The purpose of this paper is to develop a promise management-based approach to marketing with the goal of regaining customer management for marketing. Design/methodology/approach -The approach takes the form of a conceptual analysis Findings -According to the promise management approach marketing is viewed as a process of enabling and making promises as well as keeping promises in order to meet expectations created by promises made. Value creation in customer processes is considered the goal for marketing. It is claimed that by taking this view marketing can once again take full responsibility for customer management.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of product-service systems (PSS). It uses a multiple method approach to analyse literature and cases and synthesise a framework for the understanding and investigation of PSS. It demonstrates the need to consider the "organisation" or network, of firms involved in defining, designing and delivering value through the PSS. This is conceptualised as a product-service-organisation (PSO). Design/methodology/approach -The paper uses three complementary methodologies: a road-mapping analysis, investigating industrial challenges for collaborating enterprises, a multidisciplinary literature review of PSS concepts and analysis of two cases. Findings -The paper finds that value can be most effectively delivered by networks of collaborating firms, integrating the products and services they offer to create the value which customers seek. In short, creating value requires the simultaneous design of product, service and organisation -the PSO triangle.

Purpose -This paper serves two purposes. First, to identify the stages of the historical development of place marketing, because place marketing has developed over time through discrete phases, which differ in their sophistication as well as in their approaches and objectives. Secondly, to identify and articulate significant issues, which will determine the "way forward" for place marketing. Design/methodology/approach -Place marketing has been shaped by developments within marketing science and cognate disciplines but also by the external historical contexts at various spatial scales that determined its assumptions, goals and priorities. A concordance of a number of approaches to the evolution of place marketing is attempted and from this, conclusions are drawn about the current assumptions upon which place marketing is based. Findings -Seven issues are identified that appear to hinder marketing implementation from delivering its full contribution and are suggested here as significant for the future of place marketing. The most important ones refer to the need for a collective understanding and appreciation of place marketing, the achievement of wide cooperation and clear role allocation, the implementation of marketing as a long-term process and the expansion of marketing understanding to fields other than tourism development. Originality/value -The originality of this paper lies in the clear articulation of the historical episodes of place marketing development and, at the same time, the identification of the issues mentioned above, which will determine the effectiveness of place marketing practice. Therefore, the paper is of great value to both academic commentators and practitioners of place marketing.

Information technology has been considered the greatest innovation of the new era because it has a lot of fruitful social economic and scientific impacts. Regarding the economic effect, information technology has been of the essence into bringing the E. marketing into existence. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of information technology in E. marketing. The data are gathered in different ways: from the balance sheet and income statement of the companies; from government agencies; from a questionnaire among the E. Marketing users, E. marketing designers and the suppliers and the effects of information technology in the literature. The analyzed data and the review of the literature both manifest the following effects made by information technology: providing the opportunity at every place and time for advertisement; increasing the overall potential of advertisement; increasing the income for the companies; and decreasing the pollution and energy consumption.

In this paper, we discuss a one-sided many-to-many matching model. Unlike a labor market matching model, agents may not be divided into two in our model. Moreover, unlike a roommate model, each agent is allowed to have multiple partnerships in our model. In addition, two agents may form multiple partnerships between them. We consider that each agent has a specific preference on the possible matchings. We represent a matching as a multiple graph and consider stability and efficiency of matchings of the model. We give a characterization of a matching that is stable and not Pareto dominated by any individually rational matching. Finally, we show that a direct mechanism for selecting a stable matching that is not Pareto dominated by any individually rational matching is not strategy-proof.

Digital markets depend on recommender systems that facilitate the interaction among suppliers, distributors, and consumers; ultimately increasing sales volume and allegedly increasing user utility. Beyond this operational cornerstone, recommender systems also have a passive role on how these markets organize and behave (e.g. funneling consumers into few suppliers or promoting obscure products and services that can better satisfy consumer needs). The potential effect of recommendations appears to be larger on cultural or entertainment and media industries, where product’s uncertainty for consumers and producers is usually high. As such, cultural diversity and market concentration on content platforms (e.g. YouTube, Spotify) are susceptible to the effect of recommendation systems algorithms. The study of diversity has been a focal topic for individual recommendation optimizations, but little attention has been given to aggregated measures of diversity. Previous work on this area states that collaborative based recommender systems have an impact on sales diversity. I expand on this presenting an agent-based model to test the impacts of recommender systems on cultural markets. The model offers a framework to estimate the effects of state-of-the-art content-based and collaborative filtering algorithms on diversity. Early results confirm previous work. Next steps include the use of machine learning algorithms, social influence, and adaptive behavior of users. Current and future work will provide useful insights for marketing modeling, content platform policy, and the use of recommenders in market design.

We argue, using Philippe Starck's Juicy Salif lemon squeezer as a case study, that the personal creativity of a designer forms a necessary condition for a design's success. It does not, however, form a sufficient condition. We critically examine the implications of Adrian Forty's contention that 'no design works unless it embodies ideas that are held in common by the people for whom the object is intended'. We conclude that rather than looking to ideological factors for a sufficient condition of design success, it is better to look to descriptions of engaged use (and mis-use) of products. k c

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to present a new marketing mix based on MBA students' attitudes and opinions towards the marketing initiatives of business schools in South Africa. The post-graduate business education market is, and increasingly, getting more aggressive in their efforts to attract students on to their flagship degree, the MBA. The traditional marketing tools historically grouped into 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion), 5Ps (adding people) and 7Ps (adding physical facilities and processes) may be wanting in this market. Design/methodology/approach -The approach taken was a quantitative survey of students registered at state subsidized universities in South Africa. Findings -The factor analysed data showed seven quite distinct underlying factors in the marketing activities of these business schools, some covering the same elements of the traditional marketing mix: people, promotion, and price. There were, however, four different elements: programme, prominence, prospectus, and premiums. Research limitations/implications -While the survey included only MBA students from a sample drawn in South Africa, the study does highlight the fact that the traditional services marketing mix may not be as useful to the higher education sector as it might have been originally thought. Practical implications -The development of marketing strategy may be better served by this 7P model rather than the services mix. Originality/value -This paper presents the underlying factors that form the basis of a new marketing mix specifically for MBA recruitment.

We consider a setting of a two settlement power market where firms compete in the forward market and an uncertain real-time market. A recourse-based framework is proposed where firms make simultaneous bids in the forward market and take recourse in the real-time market contingent on the realization of uncertainty. The market participants include both generation firms as well as the independent system operator (ISO), the latter of which is assumed to maximize wheeling revenue. The resulting stochastic game-theoretic problem is seen to be a Nash game with coupled strategy sets, often referred to as a generalized Nash game. In general, the primal variational conditions of such problems are given by quasi-variational inequality. Yet, the associated complementarity problem in a primal-dual space admits a monotonicity property that allows us to derive an appropriate existence statement. Computation of equilibria is complicated by the challenge arising from the size of the sample-space. We present a distributed iterative regularization technique that is shown to scale well with the size of the sample-space. Finally, the paper concludes with the application of this model on an electrical network and provides insights on market design and operation.

The integration of food into urban planning is a crucial and emerging topic. Urban planners, alongside the local and regional authorities that have traditionally been less engaged in food-related issues, are now asked to take a central and active part in understanding the way food is produced, processed, packaged, transported, marketed, consumed, disposed of and recycled in our cities. Despite a growing body of literature on food and cities, the issue of planning cities in such a way they will increase food security and nutrition, not only for the affluent segments of society but primarily for the poor, is much less discussed, and much less informed by practices. This volume intends to fill this gap by putting more than 20 city-based experiences in perspective: Toronto, New York City, Providence and Portland in North America; Cape Town and Ghana in Africa; Milan in Europe; Lima and Belo Horizonte in South America; and, in Asia, Bangkok, Solo and Yogyakarta in Indonesia, and Tokyo.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to present a new marketing mix based on MBA students' attitudes and opinions towards the marketing initiatives of business schools in South Africa. The post-graduate business education market is, and increasingly, getting more aggressive in their efforts to attract students on to their flagship degree, the MBA. The traditional marketing tools historically grouped into 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion), 5Ps (adding people) and 7Ps (adding physical facilities and processes) may be wanting in this market. Design/methodology/approach -The approach taken was a quantitative survey of students registered at state subsidized universities in South Africa. Findings -The factor analysed data showed seven quite distinct underlying factors in the marketing activities of these business schools, some covering the same elements of the traditional marketing mix: people, promotion, and price. There were, however, four different elements: programme, prominence, prospectus, and premiums. Research limitations/implications -While the survey included only MBA students from a sample drawn in South Africa, the study does highlight the fact that the traditional services marketing mix may not be as useful to the higher education sector as it might have been originally thought. Practical implications -The development of marketing strategy may be better served by this 7P model rather than the services mix. Originality/value -This paper presents the underlying factors that form the basis of a new marketing mix specifically for MBA recruitment.

We evaluate the impact of stock market transparency and opacity design features on global trading activity, including the share of traded value for cross-listed stocks. Our methodology relies on a system of simultaneous structural equations estimated for the world's major exchanges. We find that in relatively opaque markets (those revealing little in the way of market depth), large stocks benefit from lower trading costs, lower volatility and higher traded value. Small stocks do best in highly transparent markets. Although several transparency features benefit all stocks, we conclude that transparency requirements can differ such that one design need not fit all stock sizes.

Page 1. The Art of the Entrepreneurial Marketer Dr Ian Fillis Senior Lecturer Department of Marketing University of Stirling Stirling FK9 4LA Scotland, UK [email protected] Abstract: This paper interrogates the notion of the art of the entrepreneurial marketer by ...

In media studies, there is recurrent fascination with how communication , especially when couched in terms of "information," tends to influence many spheres of social life and intellectual endeavor. Some of the key figures in that discipline have been especially attentive to the implications for politics of the modern advent of the "information economy." Nevertheless, we think that there has been little impetus among media scholars to explore how other disciplines , and in this case orthodox economics, have been providing competing accounts of the nature and importance of information over the same rough time frame. Furthermore, we think they might be surprised to learn that Friedrich Hayek and the neoliberals have been important in framing inquiry into the information economy for the larger culture for a couple of generations. This essay is a preliminary report on what would happen to intellectual history if media studies took the early development of the "economics of information" into account.

Purpose -Despite the availability of side-by-side price comparisons, online retailers often charge very different prices for the same product. The purpose of this paper is to identify the drivers of price differences in an online retail marketplace by examining pricing information from a sample of sellers in the market. Design/methodology/approach -An empirical, quantitative research study of Amazon Marketplace, using 498 observations of online sellers of a variety of electronics products was conducted. A regression analysis is employed to determine the drivers of these sellers' prices. Findings -The results provide a set of factors associated with deviation from the mean price Amazon Marketplace retailers charge for a given product. The authors find that online retailers that charge higher prices post additional channels of customer service, post their return policy, have lower reputation scores, display a retail brand logo, offer more products, and are not electronic specialists. Originality/value -The paper contributes to the theoretical understanding of the effects of information quality and governance structures on prices. This is the first study to focus on these issues in an online marketplace setting.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a new marketing mix based on MBA students' attitudes and opinions towards the marketing initiatives of business schools in South Africa. The post-graduate business education market is, and increasingly, getting more aggressive in their efforts to attract students on to their flagship degree, the MBA. The traditional marketing tools historically grouped into 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion), 5Ps (adding people) and 7Ps (adding physical facilities and processes) may be wanting in this market.

Design/methodology/approach – The approach taken was a quantitative survey of students registered at state subsidized universities in South Africa.

Findings – The factor analysed data showed seven quite distinct underlying factors in the marketing activities of these business schools, some covering the same elements of the traditional marketing mix: people, promotion, and price. There were, however, four different elements: programme, prominence, prospectus, and premiums.

Research limitations/implications – While the survey included only MBA students from a sample drawn in South Africa, the study does highlight the fact that the traditional services marketing mix may not be as useful to the higher education sector as it might have been originally thought.

Practical implications – The development of marketing strategy may be better served by this 7P model rather than the services mix.

Originality/value – This paper presents the underlying factors that form the basis of a new marketing mix specifically for MBA recruitment.

Purpose -SMEs are considered as engine for economic growth all over the world. After the globalization of market, SMEs have got many opportunities to work in integration with large-scale organizations. They cannot exploit these opportunities and sustain their competitiveness if they focus only on certain aspects of their functioning and work in isolation. This paper tries to identify the major areas of strategy development by SMEs for improving competitiveness of SMEs in globalised market. Design/methodology/approach -About 134 research papers, mainly from referred international journals are reviewed to identify thrust areas of research. On the basis of review, gaps are identified and research agenda is proposed. Findings -SMEs have not given due attention for developing their effective strategies in the past. They are localized in functioning. On export fronts SMEs face many constraints due to lack of resources and poor innovative capabilities. For sustaining their competitiveness, they have to benchmark their assets, processes and performance with respect to the best in industry. There is also need for developing a framework for quantifying the competitiveness by adopting a holistic approach. Originality/value -This paper explores major areas for research on SMEs. It will be of great value for researchers and professionals involved on SMEs management.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to verify whether relationship marketing is a new paradigm that has replaced transactional marketing. Design/methodology/approach – A literature and empirical study indicated that relationship marketing is neither an invention of the late twentieth century, nor prevailing in practice. This suggested that rather than a complete paradigm shift, relationship marketing and transactional marketing are complementary. Through interviewing five Scandinavian companies about their marketing priorities, their mix of transactional and relationship marketing approaches was studied. Findings – The paper finds that no company exclusively used the relationship marketing approach. Some were merely utilizing the traditional marketing concept of 4Ps; others were blending a relationship and transactional marketing mix. Research limitations/implications – This is a limited study, which calls for further validating. Practical implications – The Kotlerism of the 4Ps ...

This paper proposes a novel methodology, QFD based 3D morphological charts, to support variant design of simple and technically mature products. Customer's requirements are incorporated in developing the morphological charts through a holistic approach, One-Step QFD. In contrast to the traditional cascading deployment, members from marketing, design, and manufacturing teams concurrently derive the requirements from three different aspects. The charts driven by the deployment results produce design concepts of high feasibility through query by function, specification, and module of a product. They are presented in 3D assembly for better visual stimuli rather than clutter of 2D sketches. A computer-aided conceptual design system is implemented to realize the proposed ideas with computer mice as an example product. A design experiment is conducted to compare the quantity and quality of the concepts generated with and without the aid of the system. The results show that it promotes quick generation of innovative concepts while maintaining their manufacturability.

The views expressed in this Policy Discussion Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Policy Discussion Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate.

Originality/value -Despite the fact that much has been written about the dissemination of ICT, there is still a shortage of research in the field of small 3PLs with little empirical investigation into the usage of ICT by small 3PLs. This paper provides a contribution to the filling this void and suggests some possible research directions.

... Archana Kumar, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. ... consumers are purchasing these brands in modern shopping formats such as malls and department ... Bharadwaj, VT, Swaroop, GM, Vittal, I. (2005), "Winning the Indian consumer", McKinsey Quarterly, No ...

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have altered the balance of cost between activities within a firm and activities between firms. Easier co-operation allows companies to focus on their core strengths, while forming relations with other firms to supply the other needed skills to bring a product to market. Design, in one firm or in a consortium, is iterative and does

Two modes of matching people with jobs prevail at present: 1) hierarchical planning and 2) distributed markets. Each has strengths and limitations, but few systems have been designed to take advantage of strengths corresponding to both. With evolving information technology, however, the job-matching process could be accomplished far more equitably and efficiently using web-based markets within the firm, and intelligent agents offer excellent potential to help both potential employees and employers find one another in a distributed, electronic marketplace. But realizing this potential goes well beyond simply changing the rules of internal job matching or making agent technology available to job searchers. Rather, the corresponding markets and technologies must be designed, together, to mutually accomplish the desired results (e.g., efficient and effective matching) and conform to necessary properties (e.g., market clearing). Through the research described in this paper, we draw from Game Theory results to assess the feasibility of using two-sided matching algorithms to address this market-design problem. We also draw from current agent research to address the information technology dimension of the problem by implementing a proof-of-concept multi-agent system to enact, automate and support the corresponding market solution. This paper integrates the key economic and technological elements required to design robust electronic employment markets. And the corresponding research provides new knowledge and insight into co-development of the requisite economic markets and agent technologies.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to investigate business visitor behaviour at trade shows and to propose a complementary view based on the experiential perspective in marketing. Design/methodology/approach -The paper reports an ethnographic study conducted in the context of ten international trade shows in the textileapparel industry in Europe. Findings -The study sheds light on the nature of the experience provided by trade show exhibitors and organisers and on visitors' lived experiences. Trade shows immerse industrial buyers in a physical and cognitive experience that requires their active participation. Under such circumstances, industrial marketers who employ experiential marketing techniques are likely to increase their trade show performances. Originality/value -The paper adopts a new perspective that sees business visitor behaviour from an experiential standpoint and discusses the managerial implications that highlight the interplay of exhibitors and trade show organisers in designing and setting valuable experiences for visitors.

Purpose -SMEs are considered as engine for economic growth all over the world. After the globalization of market, SMEs have got many opportunities to work in integration with large-scale organizations. They cannot exploit these opportunities and sustain their competitiveness if they focus only on certain aspects of their functioning and work in isolation. This paper tries to identify the major areas of strategy development by SMEs for improving competitiveness of SMEs in globalised market. Design/methodology/approach -About 134 research papers, mainly from referred international journals are reviewed to identify thrust areas of research. On the basis of review, gaps are identified and research agenda is proposed. Findings -SMEs have not given due attention for developing their effective strategies in the past. They are localized in functioning. On export fronts SMEs face many constraints due to lack of resources and poor innovative capabilities. For sustaining their competitiveness, they have to benchmark their assets, processes and performance with respect to the best in industry. There is also need for developing a framework for quantifying the competitiveness by adopting a holistic approach. Originality/value -This paper explores major areas for research on SMEs. It will be of great value for researchers and professionals involved on SMEs management.

There is no academic consensus on which electricity market design provides the least distorting investment incentives. Theory suggests that "energy-only markets" can allow capacity cost recovery by generators. However, separate payments for capacity or reserve obligations do not need to rely on infrequent price spikes to remunerate reserve capacity. Three years after the controversial change from the compulsory British Electricity Pool with capacity payments to the decentralised energyonly New Electricity Trading Arrangements (NETA), we contrast the two market designs in terms of investment incentives, analyse NETA's balancing market failures, and review the case for regulatory support for investment.

The book gathers some of the most important theories of matching, and guides the reader to the discovery of the practice of Market Design. The field of Matching Theory is devoted to study and solve allocation problems into matching markets, where prices and payments cannot be used, and agents' preferences are the discriminants. The assignments' solutions lie at the crossing of Economics, Mathematics and Computational Science, and consist of mechanisms that have the strength to be tailored and implemented into real-world contexts. The economist becomes an engineer who uses theoretical tools for designing, and practically building, efficient markets for bettering the well-being of all the agents involved.

This paper studies the role of ex-ante information asymmetries in second price, common value auctions. Motivated by information structures that arise commonly in applications such as online advertising, we seek to understand what types of information asymmetries lead to substantial reductions in revenue for the auctioneer. One application of our results concerns online advertising auctions in the presence of "cookies," which allow individual advertisers to recognize advertising opportunities for users who, for example, are customers of their websites. Cookies create substantial information asymmetries both ex ante and at the interim stage, when advertisers form their beliefs. The paper proceeds by first introducing a new refinement, which we call "tremble robust equilibrium" (TRE), which overcomes the problem of multiplicity of equilibria in many domains of interest. Second, we consider a special information structure, where only one bidder has access to superior information, and show that the seller's revenue in the unique TRE is equal to the expected value of the object conditional on the lowest possible signal, no matter how unlikely it is that this signal is realized. In the third part of the paper, we study the case where multiple bidders may be informed, providing additional characterizations of the impact of information structure on revenue. Finally, we consider revenue maximization in a richer setting with a private component to valuations.