CAREER: Product-line Design Optimization with Strategic Differentiation: Empirical Evidence and Modeling

该学院早期职业发展计划（Career）资助将利用最佳战略“差异化”来推进产品线设计的理论、定量建模和教育：在消费者考虑的属性方面，产品与其他产品的差异有多大。预测产品变体之间的相互作用，以更好地满足整个产品线的营销和监管目标，这对制造商来说是一个挑战。例如，为了帮助遵守燃油经济性法规，汽车制造商推出了新车型。为了在商业上取得成功，制造商需要将它们与公司产品线和竞争对手的其他车辆区分开来。从历史上看，当制造商未能做到差异化时，节能汽车的销量就会低于预期，一些公司不得不因不符合燃油经济性规定而支付罚款。如果汽车公司能够在战略上区分它们的汽车——例如，让它们的汽车相对更小，加速性能更好，既比它们更大、更豪华的汽车，也比竞争对手更便宜、更节能的小型车——它们可能会增加销量，避免被罚款。不幸的是，工程师使用的现有产品线设计模型在支持战略差异化决策方面的能力有限，因为模型的属性没有得到很好的理解，没有足够的证据表明它们能够充分预测现实世界的行为，而且组织通常没有内部专业知识来使用和调整它们以适应适当的环境。研究成果将使制造商能够系统地优化产品线设计，在满足监管限制的同时达到公司目标的解决方案。为了实现本研究的目标，本研究将推导并实证检验在市场和监管条件下关于战略差异化的新假设，并确定能够代表这种行为的产品线优化模型的类别。研究方法将产品线优化建模与计量经济学分析相结合。对行业产品线数据的新分析将解释在行业中发现的战略差异化的系统特性。项目成果将促进以下理论的发展：(1)在设计决策、消费者偏好分布和监管约束的不同特征下，能够简洁而可信地解释最优战略差异化（如集群、压裂和发散定位）的基本特性；(2)基于经验支持的产品线设计模型，该模型考虑到对一个产品变体属性的调整将如何影响产品线中其他变体的市场和监管目标，从而优化工程设计变量。一项综合研究和教育计划将加强本科教育，建立一个从业者教育计划和在线门户网站，以扩大学术界、工业界和政府之间的协作学习和模式转移。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant will advance the theory, quantitative modeling, and education of product-line design using optimal strategic "differentiation": how different a product is from others in terms of attributes consumers consider. Anticipating interactions among product variants to better meet overall product-line marketing and regulatory goals is challenging for manufacturers. For example, to help comply with fuel economy regulations, automotive manufacturers have introduced new sets of vehicles. To do so in a commercially successful way, the manufacturers need to differentiate them from other vehicles in the company's product line and their competitors'. Historically, when manufacturers have failed to differentiate, the sales of fuel-efficient vehicles have been lower than expected, and some companies have had to pay penalties for not meeting the fuel economy regulations. If companies could strategically differentiate their cars--for example by making them relatively smaller, with better acceleration, than both their larger, more luxurious vehicles, as well as their competitors' cheaper and more-efficient small cars, they might have increased sales and averted the penalties. Unfortunately, existing product-line design models used by engineers are limited in their ability to support strategic differentiation decisions, because the models' properties are not well understood, there is not enough evidence that they predict real-world behavior adequately, and organizations often do not have in-house expertise to use and adapt them for the appropriate contexts. The research outcomes will enable manufacturers to systematically optimize product-line designs, reaching solutions to firm objectives while meeting regulatory constraints.To achieve the goals of this research, the work will derive and empirically test new hypotheses about strategic differentiation under sets of market and regulatory conditions and identify classes of product-line optimization models capable of representing this behavior. The research approach combines product-line optimization modeling with econometric analysis. New analyses of industry product-line data will explain systematic properties of strategic differentiation found in industry. The project outcomes will enable the development of (1) a theory that parsimoniously yet credibly explains fundamental properties of optimal strategic differentiation (e.g., clustering, fracturing, and divergent positioning) under different characteristics of design decisions, consumer preference distributions, and regulatory constraints; and (2) empirically-supported product-line design models that optimize engineering design variables considering how adjustments to one product variant's attributes will affect market and regulatory goals of other variants in the line. An integrated research and education plan will enhance undergraduate education and establish a practitioner education program and online portal to scale-up collaborative learning and model transfer between academia, industry, and government.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.