ABSTRACT
In the present market scenario, determining the launch time of a successive generational product is a critical decision. The timing decision depends upon whether the firm wants to push the product into the market before the competitors or wants to invest more time in perfecting the product design and development. The launch time is affected by different factors such as the cannibalization effect, promotional cost, the duration of promotion of the existing generational product, etc. An early introduction may hinder the current generation’s sales, while a delay may result in the firm’s loss of opportunity. In the past, many researchers have developed a model for the introduction time of successive generations. However, the majority of the work done is in a crisp environment. In the real market, parameters like cost and target sales of the previous generation are imprecise. So, the notion of fuzziness can be applied to cope with this ambiguity, which differentiates our study. Here, a fuzzy optimization problem has been formulated to capture this scenario, and the proposed work is illustrated with a numerical example.
