Decision Making & Negotiations

Over a decade ago, these two perspectives on motivation--Deci and Ryan?s (1991) theory of self-determination and Triandis? (1990) cultural theory of individualism-collectivism--were presented at the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation as discrete areas of inquiry in psychology. The consecutive presentation of these perspectives was portentous--both in terms of the research to follow and the recognition by many psychologists that social psychological findings need to be understood within the socio-cultural context in which they occur.

This research focuses on the diffusion patterns of the adjacent generations of technology and its relation to the time that elapses between them (intergeneration time). The authors analyze 45 new technologies in 15 industries and find that the adoption curves systematically vary across generations from 2 years for dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips to more than 30 years for steelmaking. The longer the intergeneration time, the slower the adoption of the subsequent technology.

We consider a setting where a firm delegates an investment decision and, subsequently, a sales decision to a privately informed manager. For both decisions corporate income taxes have real effects. We show that compensating the manager based on pre-tax residual income can ensure after-tax NPV-maximization ("goal congruence") for each decision problem in isolation. However, this metric fails if both decisions are nontrivial, since it requires asset-specific hurdle rates and hence precludes asset aggregation.

This paper studies the capital budgeting process in a setting where a manager is privately informed about the profitability of an investment project and enjoys nonpecuniary benefits of control ("empire benefits"). I characterize the optimal required rate of return and show that a delegation scheme with residual income-based compensation can replicate the benchmark performance achieved under centralization. The main result of the paper is that the optimal capital charge rate for computing residual income always exceeds the required rate of return as a result of empire benefits.

We propose and test new adaptive question design and estimation algorithms for partial-profile conjoint analysis. Polyhedral question design focuses questions to reduce a feasible set of parameters as rapidly as possible. Analytic center estimation uses a centrality criterion based on consistency with respondents' answers. Both algorithms run with no noticeable delay between questions. We evaluate the proposed methods relative to established benchmarks for question design (random selection, D-efficient designs, adaptive conjoint analysis) and estimation (hierarchical Bayes).

The chapter has two main sections. The first one describes various violations of the Law of One Price. The section that follow it considers a related, but very different and fundamental issue: Why do people trade?

Find the book in which this chapter appeared at Taylor & Francis. Many Taylor & Francis and Routledge books are also now available as eBooks at tandfebooks.com.

How do you market in today's "experience culture"—as conventional advertising grows increasingly ineffective, and customers grow increasingly independent? There's No Business That's Not Show Business demonstrates how to use "show biz" techniques to cut through the clutter, engage your customers personally, differentiate your product or brand—and create real, long-term value. These techniques can be adapted for any product, service, or market—consumer or B2B.

We consider a two-echelon distribution system in which a supplier distributes a product to N competing retailers. The demand rate of each retailer depends on all of the retailers' prices, or alternatively, the price each retailer can charge for its product depends on the sales volumes targeted by all of the retailers. The supplier replenishes his inventory through orders (purchases, production runs) from an outside source with ample supply. From there, the goods are transferred to the retailers.

The Pfaat protein family alignment annotation tool is a Java-based multiple sequence alignment editor and viewer designed for protein family analysis. The application merges display features such as dendrograms, secondary and tertiary protein structure with SRS retrieval, subgroup comparison, and extensive user-annotation capabilities.