Decision Making & Negotiations

We analyze forms of synergy between emic and etic approaches to research on culture and cognition. Drawing on the justice judgment literature, we describe dynamics through which the two approaches stimulate each other's progress. Moreover, we delineate ways in which integrative emic/etic frameworks overcome limitations of narrower frameworks in modeling culture and cognition. Finally, we identify advantages of integrative frameworks in guiding responses to the diverse justice sensitivities in international organizations.

Generalized knowledge comes from cumulating results across studies, a process known as meta-analysis. Efficiently increasing generalized knowledge in a defined area-estimates of price or advertising, for example-is one important goal for research. Because (1) most meta-analyses are based on highly inefficient and unbalanced natural experiments or designs and (2) additional studies are costly, carefully selecting the next study is important.

We study the Mt/G/∞ queue where customers arrive according to a sinusoidal function λt = λ + A sin(2 π t/T) and the service rate is μ. We show that the expected number of customers in the system during peak congestion can be closely approximated by (λ + A)/ μ for service distributions with coefficient of variation between 0 and 1.

This paper describes novel market-based technologies for systematic, quantifiable and predictable protection of information systems against attacks. MarketNet establishes a financial market to regulate and protect access resource access and to account for their use. A domain offers access to its resources to cIients who can pay with its currency. It controls its exposure to attacks by pricing critical resources high and by limiting the currency available to potential attackers.

It has been suggested that evaluations may be based on a "How-do-I-feel-about-it?" heuristic, which involves holding a representation of the target in mind and inspect feelings that this representation may elicit. Previous studies have shown that reliance on such feelings depends on whether they are believed to be representative of the target. This paper argues that it also depends on whether feelings toward the target are regarded as relevant.

We show how a simple normal approximation to Erlang's delay formula can be used to analyze capacity and staffing problems in service systems that can be modeled as M/M/s queues.

The fact that people frequently cooperate in the single-trial Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game indicates that their decision making in conflicts is not always guided by game-theoretic analyses of expected outcomes. Whereas most theorists have accounted for cooperation in terms of an ethically rooted concern for matching another's “good faith” cooperation (Hofstadter, 1985), others have argued that cooperation reflects several distinct social norms or heuristics (Elster, 1989).

This study investigates factors influencing causal attributions in managerial decision making. Three categories of factors are identified: (i) prior beliefs (ii) background frequencies, and (iii) covariation cues. The impact of factors in each of the above categories on causal attribution are studied in a marketing decision making context. Subjects demonstrated a bias toward assigning causality to variables that occurred infrequently or were controllable. Also, subjects were particularly influenced by the joint-occurrences of cause and effect variables.

This note gives a simple proof that in a (r, q) system the average outstanding backorders andthe average stockouts per unit time are jointly convex in the two control variables q and r.