David R. Rink

Whenever respondents must rank-order a large number of items and/or the reliability of their rankings may be questionable, balanced incomplete block designs (BIBDs) represent a more effective means for doing so than either complete rankings or paired comparisons for business and marketing researchers. By providing a type of balancing and replication across items and respondents, BIBDs significantly reduce the number of subjective evaluations each individual must make. But, at the same time, BIBDs allow a limited number of respondents as a group to rank many items. This balancing and replication in BIBDs also reduces standard deviation, which increases the precision of a study. BIBDs, therefore, can improve response rates as well as increase the accuracy and reliability of the data collected. After discussing the general nature of BIBDs and statistical techniques for analyzing preference data collected by BIBDs, three business-related applications are presented to illustrate the benefits of BIBDs. Next, caveats concerning the use of BIBDs are presented. In the last section, advantages of BIBDs are discussed

Establishing the initial price for a new product is one of the most important decisions a firm will make. Implementing and adjusting this price over the sales cycle of the new product are crucial decisions for both its short- and long-term success. A modification of the product life cycle (PLC) concept is presented to reflect one of the many alternative price-setting strategies available to the company. After justifying and illustrating the modified PLC pricing strategy, applications and limitations are presented and discussed.

Most major universities expect MBA students to take a full-course load each term. Also, as a condition of graduation, MBA students must work full-time in small teams on focused-based consulting (FBC) projects for large-sized corporations. After being given the assignment and deadline, team members work tirelessly to complete their project. Such experiences facilitate the transition of major universities’ MBA students into the real business world. On the other hand, most MBA students at small-sized universities work full-time for a company during the day and take one or two courses in the evening each semester. Despite these constraints, Indiana University Kokomo (IUK) (Kokomo, Indiana, USA) was able to successfully develop and implement a required MBA-level FBC course (C599). In addition to having a positive influence on IUK’s MBA students, this course has had a significant impact upon the economic development of small-sized firms in northcentral Indiana. This paper chronicles the “trials and tribulations” the School of Business encountered in creating and executing C599. After presenting representative comments from client companies and MBA students, six implementation problems with C599 are discussed along with subsequent modifications. Finally, suggestions for small-sized universities like IUK who want to develop and implement their own MBA consultative course are presented.