The primary objective of the research paper is to provide some insights on the concepts of intellec-tual capital and its important dimensions alongside to investigate the possible association between intellectual capital and attainment of competitive advantage. This study focuses on Iraqi hotel industry which is an under-research area in the context of intellectual capital and its relationship with competitive advantage. An adapted questionnaire was utilized to collect the responses from top and middle level managers of four and five-star hotels in Iraq. The reliability and validity of data collec-tion instrument were measured through Cronbach’s alpha, Composite Reliability and Average Var-iance Extracted respectively. The competitive advantage was then regressed against Human, Rela-tional and Structural capital by application of Partial Least Square methodology. Results of the study showed a positive and strong connotation among intellectual capital and attainment of competitive advantage. The human capital had the highest contribution for competitive advantage in hotel sector of Iraq. The top management of hotels should take interest to develop, maintain and retain human capital to attain competitive advantage over competitors.

This paper optimizes joint mixed bundling, assortment planning and pricing problems for complementary retail categories that comprise substitutable items. These categories are divided into one primary category and multiple secondary categories and based on cross-selling effect, customers of primary category can opt to buy from other categories. It is assumed that the bundle can comprise one product of each offered complementary categories. A mixed-integer nonlinear programming is proposed that maximizes total profit by optimizing strategy of bundling, assortment selection and prices of single products and the bundle under a maximum-surplus customer choice model. Then because of computational considerations, this model is linearized and converted to a mixed-integer linear programming; whereby exact solution for even large-scale problems can be obtained. The results show that if cross-selling effect between product categories is overlooked or bundling of products is not allowed, then significant profit losses, will be resulted. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on bundling strategies in assortment selection decisions.

This paper deals with data mining applications for the supply chain inventory management. ABC characterization is typically utilized for stock items arrangement on the grounds that the quantity of stock items is large to the point that it is not computationally practical to set stock and admin-istration control rules for every individual item. Moreover, in ABC classification, the inter-relationship between items is not considered. But practically, the sale of one item could influence the sale of other items (cross selling effect). Consequently, within each cluster, the inventories should be classified. In this paper, a modified approach is proposed considering both cross-selling effect and clusters to rank stock items. A numerical case is utilized to clarify the new ap-proach. It is represented that by utilizing this modified approach; the ranking of items may get influenced bringing about higher profits.