It is interesting to know the major assumptions in marketing.
- The customers are complete. It means that they can compare any two items. 'complete' here is similar to the definition in the math. There is no hole
- The customers are transitive. If the customer prefer A to B and B to C, then they prefer A to C.
- The more choices, the better.
Is any major assumption in MS/OR field? I never see anything like those three major assumptions in Marketing. But we can have similar one.
- The decision makers are complete. It means that they can compare any two solutions.
- The decision makers are transitive. If the decision makers prefer A to B and B to C, then they prefer A to C.
- The larger decision variable sets, the better result the decision makers can get.
6 comments:
I thought these assumptions are from Economics. Marketing folks just borrowed them.
The most relavant concept to "no hole" in math should be "closed". I thought "complete" in math means Cauchy sequences converge. "complete" in the Economics means the set can be totally ordered as a chain? Just kidding :)
Yes. I agree on your understanding on completeness in math. The limiting point a set is still contained in the set.
But it can also be considered in the more general cases. We can say natual number is complete under sum and product, but not complete under difference and dividen. And rational number is complete under all four basic operations but not complete under root and limit.
So here complete might just mean order.
Sometimes, terminologies are really confuse. One example is 'strategy'. I think it is most abused business word.
I don't know how other OR folks' definition of strategy. But in the MDP paradigm, 'strategy' is synnonymous to 'policy', which can be understood as sequence of time indexed distributions or a sequence of functions. At least that is what I thought of strategy :)
Another usage of strategy is found. But it is definitely not same as one in mind. For single location,multi-period inventory problem, we say (S,s) strategy(policy) is optimal. Then people doing strategy will definite laugh at us and tell us this is just operational level decision, no matter how long periods we use. So it is better to keep using 'policy' in stead of 'strategy'.
I guess a large portion of people who laugh at my definition even don't know how to define their stragegy unambiguously. They often resort to those big buzz words, with which the meaning of them are far from clear.
Again, let's speak what can be unabiguously spoken, leave the unspoken part out :)
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