EXTENDED ALGORITHM FOR OPTIMAL PRODUCT POSITIONING

Optimal product positioning in an attribute space has been formulated according to the axiom of choice as a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem. To solve it, Albers and Brockhoff have designed the special purpose algorithm PROPOSAS. It works under simplified assumptions: Euclidean metric, equally weighted dimensions of the attribute space and equal sales per customer. The following article shows that the basic ideas of PROPOSAS are flexible enough to be expanded to cover a weighted Minkowski-metric as well as different revenues from the customers. Furthermore, the calculation of a new upper bound is described which reduces CPU-time considerably. © 1979.