P roduct sales and rentals often occur in parallel, allowing customers to choose their preferred option. In settings where consumers face significant value uncertainty, rentals also provide a mechanism for consumers to discover whether they like a product. For some products, such as movies and books, the rental option may yield a significant proportion of the utility associated with ownership. The convenience of renting products in digital forms (e.g., e-books) makes the managerial challenge of jointly pricing rentals and sales increasingly relevant. Rental and sales prices are interdependent not only because consumers can choose between the two options, but also because a customer may rent before purchasing. Given these considerations, and allowing for consumer uncertainty, we analyze the optimal joint pricing of product rentals and sales. We show that when consumers have a relatively high probability of liking a product, and will experience a significant drop in their post-rental residual utility, then the practice of allowing a portion of the rental price to apply to a future purchase is optimal.
Managing the effects of risks on projects is known as a key factor for successful project management. In this paper, a new structure is introduced to measure the risks. By combining RBS (Risk Breakdown Structure) -a classified set of all the risks of the whole project-with WBS (Work Breakdown Structure), a new matrix called RBM (Risk Breakdown Structure) is constructed. RBM indicates the impact of the risk sources on work packages (WPs). Here, for better consistency with the nature of EPC projects, the structure of RBM is modified to give a better imagination of the project components affected by time risks. In addition, the way of measuring the risk number is modified and an improved RPN (Risk Project Number) is produced which considers the time delay and the slack of activities which intensify or compensate the risks. Such modification provides a more reliable tool to decide which parts of the projects should be focused so that the risks are controlled. This methodology was applied in a typical Power Plant's EPC project and the results in terms of measuring the time risks have been reported to be reasonable.
The occurrence and severity of risks are directly associated with the project factors, and in the case of determining a logical and significant correlation between project factors and risks, the final conditions of the project based on the initial and definite project factors can be predicted. In this research, a final list of 112 risks was prepared using the views of experts. Then, the risks’ weight was determined based on their impact on time and cost and according to the repetition of each risk in the earlier studies, as well as the use of 630industry experts using online web-based forms. Afterwards, 21 project factors that could affect the probability of occurrence and severity of risks related to time and cost were identified, and these factors were prioritized for each risk using the views of 25 experts. Then, applying the Pareto Principle, 14 project factors were identified. In all 4cases, including calculating the weight of risks in the technical literature as well as the experts’ views by time and cost, 14 selected factors were the same, but the weight and effects were different. The results indicate that considering these factors, the risks of time and cost increase from the initial estimate can be accurately predicted.
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