There is an opening in Tata Interactive for a Project Manager - Simulations. Contact Amrit Sarkar (amrits@tatainteract ive.com, 022-66438556) directly in case you are interested in this profile. A sample modeling assignment is provided below.
For more information about the company you can visit http://www.tatainte ractive.com/
MATH MODELING ASSIGNMENT
Your assignment is to create a mathematical model in MS Excel using an imaginary company facing a certain situations related to the topic given.
New Product Adoption
Imagine that you are part of a company that has designed a new, high end tech product (It could be something like a new breathrough model of a mobile phone etc)
Construct a dynamic model of the consumer adoption process. Essentially, make assumptions on the number of potential consumers available for this product. A potential consumer can adopt to this product and become an adopter due to several forces , that include –
Price – the price level that can determine how many new consumers adopt and how fast? The lower the price; the more attractive the product. However, at the same time a lower price could imply lower profitability to the organization
The product attractivess – You can assume an index for this. For instance, a product attractiveness index of 120 implies its very attractive – however this could also imply higher development costs – and possibly a higher price (which could supress demand) or more time to break even
Advertising & marketing spending – this could generate the initial set of adopters and awareness
Word of Mouth – which would be generated basis how satisfied initial adopters are, how many times they come into contact with the potential population (a contact is needed to generate Word of Mouth – contacts could be physical or virtual, like blogs etc. You can simply assume a single contact variable – like each initial adopter would come into contact with 3 potential consumers). Word of mouth would lead to more/ less number of adopters depending on whether its favorable or not.
If you feel that more variables need to be included to make the model more robust, then do so.
Keep your model in such a way that I can change elements like price, product attractivess, contact rate, advertising spending and see different behavioral changes in the model.
