Satisfying customers and lowering costs in foodservice: can both be accomplished simultaneously?

Calculus offers essential techniques for businesses seeking to optimize pricing strategies and revenue. In this case, a bakery wants to determine the ideal price and daily sales volume to maximize revenue. By modeling how changes in price affect demand and revenue, the bakery can apply calculus to make data-driven decisions.The demand function relates the price per cupcake to the number of cupcakes sold and captures how lower prices increase sales. Based on market data, the demand function can...

Researchers have tested many persuasion strategies, including the foot-in-the door and the door-in-the-face techniques, in a variety of contexts. Ultimately, the principles are effective in selling products and changing people’s attitude, ideas, and behaviors (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004).

In microeconomics, consumer surplus represents the economic gain that consumers experience when they purchase a good or service for less than the highest price they are willing to pay. This surplus arises from the characteristics of the demand function, which links the quantity of a good to the price consumers are willing to pay. As the quantity of a good increases, the price that consumers are willing to pay for each additional unit typically decreases, resulting in a downward-sloping demand...

One influential perspective on what motivates people's behavior is detailed in Tory Higgin's self-discrepancy theory (Higgins, 1987). He proposed that people hold disagreeing internal representations of themselves that lead to different emotional states.

Control systems are everywhere in contemporary society, influencing diverse applications from aerospace to automated manufacturing. These systems can be found naturally within biological processes, such as blood sugar regulation and heart rate adjustment in response to stress, as well as in man-made systems like elevators and automated vehicles. A control system is essentially a network of subsystems and processes that collaboratively convert specific inputs into desired outputs.
At the heart...

Another way in which a group presence can affect performance is social loafing—the exertion of less effort by a person working together with a group. Social loafing occurs when our individual performance cannot be evaluated separately from the group. Thus, group performance declines on easy tasks (Karau & Williams, 1993). Essentially individual group members loaf and let other group members pick up the slack. Because each individual’s efforts cannot be evaluated, individuals become less...