Complementary Items Research Articles

The effects of merchandise coordination and juxtaposition on consumers’ product evaluation and purchase intention in store-based retailing

Many retailers attempt to juxtapose and coordinate complementary products in their stores on the basis of key attributes because good coordination of complementary items can provide consumers with relevant information for their evaluation of individual products. In addition, the aesthetic appeal and the social impression that good coordination offers can be transferred to the products themselves. On the basis of these theories, the authors test the effects of merchandise coordination and juxtaposition (vs. separation) on consumer behavior using actual clothing items as stimuli in a laboratory setting. The authors find that coordination affects consumers’ evaluation of and purchase intention toward a target item only when the item is juxtaposed with a complementary item. This effect can be explained by the aesthetic response of consumers to and their social impression of a grouping of the items. Furthermore, in comparison with displaying the two items separately, juxtaposing them in a poorly coordinated manner appears to depress the target item's evaluation, though juxtaposing them in a well-coordinated manner does not seem to improve the evaluation.

農薬の分子構造別の塩素分解性に関する研究

One hundred and one pesticides listed as “Complementary Items for Setting the Targets for Water Quality Management in Japan” were divided into 16 groups on the basis of their structures. The degradation of 96 pesticides and 5 oxidation by-products in chlorination was studied to determine the potential of the purification process. Pesticides containing sulfur (S) were easily degraded; for 38 pesticides out of 46 examined pesticides, only 50 % or less of their original concentration remained after 4 hours. On the other hand, pesticides without S were hardly degraded; for 45 pesticides out of 50 examined pesticides, more than 50 % of their original concentration remained even after 24 hours. Thus, the potential for degradation of the pesticides by chlorination can be approximated by the presence or absence of S in their chemical formulae. Oxons (P=O), which are oxidation by-products of organophosphate pesticides containing P=S, were hardly degraded. Therefore, oxons may remain in chlorinated water for a long time.

Optimal retail assortments for substitutable items purchased in sets

AbstractWe consider the problem of optimizing assortments in a multi‐item retail inventory system. In addition to the usual holding and stockout costs, there is a fixed cost for including any item in the assortment. Customers' preferences for items include both probabilistic substitution patterns and the desire to purchase sets of complementary items. We develop a demand model to capture this behavior, and derive tractable approximations that allow us to formulate the optimization problem as a 0–1 mixed integer linear program. Numerical examples are solved to illustrate key insights into how both complementary and substitute items affect the optimal assortment and the expected profit. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 50: 793–822, 2003.

Exposure to Benevolent Sexism and Complementary Gender Stereotypes: Consequences for Specific and Diffuse Forms of System Justification

It has been argued that seemingly benevolent and complementary gender stereotypes serve to maintain or increase support for the system of gender inequality, especially among women. In prior work, support for this hypothesis has been indirectly inferred from the existence of stereotypes themselves or on the basis of purely correlational findings. We conducted three experimental studies (N = 484) in which male and female research participants were exposed to different types of gender-related beliefs and subsequently asked to complete measures of either gender-specific or diffuse system justification. Results were highly consistent across studies and demonstrated that, compared to control conditions, activating (a) communal or complementary (communal + agentic) gender stereotypes, or (b) benevolent or complementary (benevolent + hostile) items from Glick and Fiske's (1996) Ambivalent Sexism Inventory increases both specific and diffuse support for the status quo among women.

Preference based assessment of the quality of life of disabled persons

A new method for assessing preference based outcome measures in rehabilitation with assistive devices is reported. The method uses a standard utility instrument, the EuroQol, with complementary items on mobility and social relationships. In addition, a problem solving scale (PIRS) is introduced. Validation has been carried out in a multicenter study of mobility, hearing and communication devices. Utilities and problem solving scores covary strongly for mobility interventions but not for those dealing with communication. So far it is not explained whether the investigated communication interventions result in moderate utility gain only, or whether there is a bias in the corresponding utility scores. Further research on this has been started. The issue of deriving utility weights for the PIRS has also been started. We recommend the described method to be used for cost-utility analyses of rehabilitation measures for disabled persons.

An Optimal Auction for Complements

This paper considers the optimal selling mechanism for complementary items. When buyers are perfectly symmetric, the optimal procedure is to bundle the items and run a standard auction. In general, however, bundling the items is not necessarily desirable, and the standard auctions do not maximize revenue. Moreover, the optimal auction allocation may not be socially efficient since the auction must discriminate against bidders who have strong incentives to misrepresent their true preferences.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Number: D44.

Psychopathological verbal expression of self-perceived stress in three groups of psychotic patients.

Self-perceived stress in 293 psychotic patients (schizophrenic, toxic and brief reactive psychoses) and a control group of 40 sane individuals was evaluated by means of the Frankfurt Complaint Questionnaire. For this purpose, scores obtained in 6 'complementary items' of third version of this questionnaire were studied, both in global and in detailed form. These items reflect coping mechanisms exerted towards situations perceived as stressful which can produce clinical manifestations similar to the well-known 'negative symptoms' of schizophrenia. Results show that self-perceived stress in all groups of patients is significantly higher than in the control group. In contrast, no significant differences among the three groups of patients are obtained. In conclusion, we point out the relevance of studying the psychotic patient's self-perceived stress in order to detect and minimize or even avoid the patient's risk situations, independent of his/her diagnosis. This will be especially useful to obtain optimal conditions for rehabilitation.

Implicit Price Bundling of Retail Products: A Multiproduct Approach to Maximizing Store Profitability

The presence of demand interrelationships among substitute and complementary goods in retail stores was demonstrated by Mulhern in 1989 and was extended by Walters in 1991. Retail pricing strategies should incorporate such demand interdependencies to maximize store profitability. The authors review multiple-product pricing and develop a theoretical framework for retail pricing and promotion policies based on the implicit price bundling of related products. They empirically calibrate how the regular and deal prices of individual brands influence the sales of substitute and complementary items. More important, they demonstrate how retailers can maximize profitability by exploiting the interdependencies in demand that are present among retail products.

Expert systems

Complementary recommendation aims to recommend items that are dissimilar but relevant to, and likely purchased together with, the items a user has purchased. Although many efforts have been made, the existing works for complementary recommendation still suffer from two shortcomings. First, the existing works often model the complementarity between items in terms of their co-occurrence patterns, which overlooks the influence of user intent. In fact, the intents of the users even with similar historical behaviors might be different and consequently need different complements. Second, the existing works often encode the complementary relationship at item level. In real world, however, different aspects of an item might contribute different complementarities to the same item, and the complementary information at aspect-level tends to be related with the intents of users. To overcome the two shortcomings, in this paper we propose a novel model called Aspect-level Complementarity Learning for Intent-aware Complementary Recommendation (AICRec). In particular, we propose a User Intent Perceiving (UIP) module, which enables AICRec to differentiate users’ separate intents even though they are in similar scenarios. Meanwhile, we also devise an Aspect-level Complementarity Learning (ACL) module to infer an item’s finer-grained complementarities to a user’s intent at aspect-level, which helps AICRec personalize the recommended complementary items with respect to the user’s intent. At last, extensive experiments conducted on real datasets verify the superiority of AICRec over the state-of-the-art methods for complementary recommendation.

Children's Identification of Category Relations in Lists Presented for Recall

Abstract In an investigation of developmental differences in awareness of category relations 108 children (36 each from kindergarten, third grade and sixth grade) were presented with one list of taxonomically-related materials and a second list of complementarily-related items for recall. Immediately prior to recall, children were asked whether they had noticed in the lists any “groups of pictures that were alike or went together in some way.” Results (ps < .001) were as follows: (a) measures of category identifications increased with age with kindergarteners in a standard condition generally being unaware of categories; (b) at all grade levels, category identifications were greater with the taxonomic than with the complementary items; (c) Ss made significantly more identifications when categories were made more salient by blocking and informing manipulations; (d) third-graders identified significantly more categories following item recall than did either the kindergarteners or sixth-graders. The results ...

Evidence for Developmental Changes in Categorization Criteria for Children and Adults

Results from a variety of seemingly unrelated research areas indicate that between the ages of 6 and 9, there is a change from a tendency to categorize according to complementary criteria to a tendency to categorize according to similarity criteria. For example, younger children are more likely to categorize complementary items such as a hammer and a nail, while older children are more likely to categorize similar items such as a nail and a pin. Studies of free classification, conceptual styles, word associations, word definitions, and memory clustering indicate such a change. There is also evidence that this change may reverse itself in old age. There are two possible sources for such developmental changes – they may originate primarily from internal, organismic changes or primarily from external, environmental changes. Evidence for both positions was presented and an argument was made in favor of the position that these changes in categorization criteria result primarity from external, environmental changes.