Conjoint analysis is a statistical technique used to elicit partworth utilities for product attributes from consumers to aid in the evaluation of market potential for new products. The objective of the share-of-choice problem (a common approach to new product design) is to find the design that maximizes the number of respondents for whom the new product's utility exceeds a specific hurdle (reservation utility). We present an exact branch-and-bound algorithm to solve the share-of-choice problem. Our empirical results, based on several large commercial data sets and simulated data from a controlled experiment, suggest that the approach is useful for finding provably optimal solutions to realistically sized problems, including cases where partworths contain estimation error.integer programming, combinatorial optimization, product design, marketing, conjoint analysis, optimization

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It is common for a city to use expensive incentives such as a state-of-the-art stadium or tax exemptions to induce a major professional sport team to relocate to or remain in its area. A city does so because it expects a professional sport team to enhance the local economy. In this article, the authors use an event study approach to evaluate the advisability of this strategy. Their results suggest that major league sports franchises from the four major U.S. team sports (baseball, football, basketball, and hockey) have an adverse impact on local per capita income for U.S. markets in both the short and long run.

War destroys health facilities and displaces health workers. It has a devastating impact on population health, especially in vulnerable populations. We assess the geographical distribution of the impact of war on healthcare delivery by comparing the pre-November 2020 and the November to June 2021 status of health facilities in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. Data were collected from February 2021 to June 2021, during an active civil war and an imposed communication blackout in Tigray. Primary data were collected and verified by multiple sources. Data include information on health facility type, geocoding and health facility status (fully functional (FF), partially functional (PF), not functional, no communication). Only 3.6% of all health facilities (n=1007), 13.5% of all hospitals and health centres (n=266), and none of the health posts (n=741), are functional. Destruction varies by geographic location; only 3.3% in Western, 3.3% in South Eastern, 6.5% in North Western, 8% in Central, 14.6% in Southern, 16% in Eastern and 78.6% in Mekelle are FF. Only 9.7% of health centres, 43.8% of general hospitals and 21.7% of primary hospitals are FF. None of the health facilities are operating at prewar level even when classified as FF or PF due to lack of power and water or essential devices looted or destroyed, while they still continue operating. The war in Tigray has clearly had a direct and devastating impact on healthcare delivery. Restoration of the destroyed health facilities needs to be a priority agenda of the international community.

Finitization transforms a discrete distribution into a distribution with smaller support of specified size. In special cases finitization preserves moments (moments of the order n finitization coincide with those of the parent distribution). We create a moment preserving finitization method for power series distributions by introducing an alternative representation and showing how to finitize members of this new class in a manner that preserves moments of the parent distribution. We provide results on convolutions and a reproductive property for power series distributions that have been finitized in this manner, and show how these finitized distributions accelerate variate generation in simulation.