On the construction of balanced repeated measurements designs with good circular properties

Several fields,such as biological,medical,public health,agricultural sciences,etc.,require circular balanced repeated measurement designs with fewer unequal number of repeated measure-ments than the number of treatments.Also,the availability and high cost of experimental subjects in these fields prefer the design in fewer experimental units.However,balancing the carryover effects of the treatments in minimal experimental subjects is one of the problems in this case.In this paper,several new series of minimal circular nearly strongly balanced RMDs in periods of two and three different sizes are constructed.The proposed construction of designs has high efficiency and,therefore,can save the cost of experimentations due to a fewer exper-imental subjects.Most of the designs are very useful because of the unavailability of strongly balanced RMDs for these combinations of parameters.A list of sets of shifts for the construction of minimal circular nearly SBRMDs has also been mentioned in the Appendix.

COORDINATING PRICING, ORDERING AND ADVERTISING FOR PERISHABLE PRODUCTS OVER AN INFINITE HORIZON

Numerous empirical studies show that advertising effort can stimulate demand in both current and future periods, and there is an interaction between pricing, advertising and ordering decisions. How do these decisions interact with each other and what is the effect of advertising on pricing and ordering decisions？ To understand this interaction, we consider a newsvendor-type firm that sells a perishable product in a stable market and dynamically determines the joint ordering, pricing and advertising strategies. The problem is modeled as an infmite horizon newsvendor problem with an advertising carryover effect and price-sensitive demand. We characterize the optimal pricing, advertising and inventory strategies and their comparative statics, and consider how this policy differs from the traditional approach without the advertising effect. We show that the optimal effective advertising level is monotonically increasing with the effective advertising level in the previous period, and hence the optimal strategies （advertising, pricing, inventory level） globally converge to the steady states in the long run. We numerically show that the optimal policy can reap significant profit, which underscores the importance of the advertising-driven ordering and pricing strategies.

Tonal coarticulation patterns in quadrisyllabic words and phrases with normal stress of mandarin

Quadrisyllabic words and phrases with normal stress of Mandarin were used to study the tonal coarticulation. It was firstly found that the F0perturbation at the starting-point and the ending-point of the F0 curve in each syllable caused by tonal coarticulation is larger than the intrinsic F0 difference of vowels at the starting-point and the ending-point of it. As for the tonal coarticulation, it was discovered that tonal coarticulation in word and phrase with normal stress is different to that in the nonsense sequence with even stress, and in word and phrase with normal stress, the tonal coarticulatory effects are unidirectional, and the carryover effect does not extend to the ending-point of tone-section of the following syllable and the anticipatory effect does not extend to the starting-point of tone-section of the preceding one, and the F0 perturbation by tonal coarticulation has its pattern.