Decision Making & Negotiations

Griliches' 1994 presidential address considers the limited success economists had in trying to account for the productivity slowdown of the 1970s and 1980s and "urges us toward the task of observation and measurement." In the 1990s, the high rates of productivity growth emphasized the need for new models of productivity, this time turning to estimating organization-level determinants of productivity focusing on businesses' use of new computer-based information technologies (IT), and new methods of work organization (Timothy Bresnahan et al., 2002).

Preference structures that underlie survey or experimental responses may systematically vary during the administration of such measurement. Maturation, learning, fatigue, and response strategy shifts may all affect the sequential elicitation of respondent preferences at different points in the survey or experiment. The consequence of this phenomenon is that responses and effects can vary systematically within the dataset.

How do people react to those who have helped them? The authors propose that a recipient's evaluation of a helper's intentions and the recipient's own attitudes about future interactions with the helper depend partly on the recipient's perceptions of how the helper decided to assist: on the basis of affect, of role, or of cost-benefit calculation.

Motivation research distinguishes two types of goals: (a) ideals, which relate to people's hopes, wishes, and aspirations, and (b) oughts, which relate to people's duties, obligations, and responsibilities. We propose that, in persuasion, the accessibility of ideals increases consumers' reliance on their subjective affective responses to the ad relative to the substance of the message, whereas the accessibility of oughts increases consumers' reliance on the substance of the message relative to their subjective affective responses.

We address infinite-horizon models for oligopolies with competing retailers under demand uncertainty. We characterize the equilibrium behavior which arises under simple wholesale pricing schemes. More specifically, we consider a periodic review, infinite-horizon model for a two-echelon system with a single supplier servicing a network of competing retailers. In every period, each retailer faces a random demand volume, the distribution of which depends on his own retail price as well as those charged by possibly all competing retailers.

The authors hypothesize that when managers integrate two projections to form a sales estimate, they evoke and use a sales range to judge inappropriately the plausibility of each projection. This judged plausibility, as well as the "margin of error" (based on the market research company's typical accuracy), is used to assign weights to each projection. Five experiments find strong evidence for this process and demonstrate a resulting bias.

It is increasingly apparent that the financial value of a firm depends on intangible assets (e.g., brands, customers, employees, knowledge) that are not on the balance sheet. In this paper, we focus on the most critical aspect of a firm—its customers. Specifically, we demonstrate how valuing customers makes it feasible to value firms, including high growth firms with negative earnings.

The authors propose and test a new "polyhedral" choice-based conjoint analysis question-design method that adapts each respondent's choice sets on the basis of previous answers by that respondent. Polyhedral "interior-point" algorithms design questions that quickly reduce the sets of partworths that are consistent with the respondent’s choices. To identify domains in which individual adaptation is promising (and domains in which it is not), the authors evaluate the performance of polyhedral choice-based conjoint analysis methods with Monte Carlo experiments.

Product Management, 4th ed., by Lehmann and Winer is a defining text that covers three major tasks facing today's product mangers: analyzing the market, developing objectives and strategies for the product or service in question, and making decisions about price, advertising, promotion, channels of distribution and service. Product Management utilizes the familiar Marketing Plan as the unifying framework for its lessons, and takes a "hands-on" approach toward preparing graduates to assume the position of product manager.