B&B Enterprises is Now Online

[John Sterman]

A new version of the B&B Enterprises management flight simulator is
now available online. In B&B Enterprises, you launch and manage a
hot new consumer product in a competitive market. You make
marketing, pricing, and capacity expansion decisions as you try to
maximize your companys profits throughout the product lifecycle.
You face a simulated competitor, learning curves, word of mouth,
capacity acquisition delays, and other realistic features of dynamic
market environments. You can choose from a wide range of market
environments and competitor strategies, including a "mystery
scenario" in which customer behavior and competitor strategy are
unknown. The simulation illustrates how capacity overshoot and price
wars can occur due to misperceptions in feedback of competitive
growth markets.

B&B has been widely used in teaching and research; the new web
version, developed in conjunction with Forio Business Simulations,
offers enhanced features for both teaching and research, including
context-sensitive help and the ability for instructors to collect
data and track student performance.

You can try the new B&B Enterprises at:
http://www.forio.com/bandb.htm. Subscriptions are available at:
http://www.forio.com/bandbsubscribe.htm.

The B&B Enterprises web simulation works with both Netscape and IE
browsers, for all versions of both the Windows and Mac operating
systems.

Several papers describe the model and its dynamics, including

Paich, M. and J. D. Sterman (1993). "Boom, Bust, and Failures to
Learn in Experimental Markets." Management Science 39(12): 1439-1458.
Also reprinted in G. P. Richardson (ed.) (1996), Modelling for
Management. Aldershot, UK, Dartmouth Publishing Company. 1: 229-248.

Langley, P., M. Paich, and J. Sterman , Explaining Capacity Overshoot
and Price War: Misperceptons of Feedback in Competitive Growth
Markets, available at http://web.mit.edu/jsterman/www/B&B_Rev.html.

John Sterman
From: John Sterman <jsterman@MIT.EDU>