Comment: Product line design optimization

摘要

The development of new products spans functional boundaries. The border between marketing and engineering is perhaps where this interface is more intense and important. Even when marketing managers and engineers have the same overall objective (e.g., firm's market share), their priorities and constraints are quite different. It can be very hard to develop and solve optimization models that are general enough to account for key variables on both sides simultaneously. However, as optimization methods evolved in the recent years, the problems that they could solve became more and more comprehensive and realistic. This issue of IJRM presents two very interesting papers that take an important further step towards realism in product line optimization. Hence, 1 would like to congratulate Michalek et al. (2011-this issue), and Tsafarakis et al. (2011-this issue) for their key contribution to this literature. Both expand the marketing optimization toolbox with interesting and comprehensive methods to solve the problem of product line design.