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Abstract/Description

The decision to purchase one consumer product over another is becoming more challenging as the choices that are made available to consumers have increased. This research studies the decision making process when consumers purchase an inflatable bounce house. In addition to cost, a variety of features such as structure size, weight capacity, weight of product, customer ratings, and the number of customer ratings must be compared. It is difficult to make a direct comparison of each of these individual features through traditional methods. As a result, Data Envelopment Analysis is used to compare the outputs and inputs to determine which inflatable bounce houses are most efficient compared to the others being evaluated. Twelve bounce houses were evaluated through Data Envelopment Analysis and seven were found to be more efficient than other bounce houses that were evaluated. This study also provided some suggestions for the inefficient bounce houses to become efficient.

Note on the Author

Janice Bowen and Rebecca Uboldi worked together to develop a study that would assist consumers in selecting and purchasing an inflatable bounce house through the use of Data Envelopment Analysis. Their project was completed in the fall of 2014 under the mentorship of Dr. Xiangrong Liu (Management).

Rights Statement

Articles published in The Undergraduate Review are the property of the individual contributors and may not be reprinted, reformatted, repurposed or duplicated, without the contributor’s consent.

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