Decision Making & Negotiations

Six years after the passage of the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program, commonly known as TARP, it remains hard to measure the total social costs and benefits of the assistance to banks provided under TARP programs. TARP was not a single approach to assisting weak banks but rather a variety of changing solutions to a set of evolving problems. TARP's passage was associated with significant improvements in financial markets and the health of financial intermediaries, as well as an increase in the supply of lending by recipients.

Of all publications on success in sales appearing in this century and many decades previously, The Challenger Sale has perhaps generated more discussion and controversy among sales leaders, strategic account program directors and strategic account managers than any other. But does this widely read and discussed volume actually represent the breakthrough that Neil Rackham suggests, or is it just an interesting examination of sales that serves mainly as an infomercial for the Corporate Executive Board (sponsor of the research) and its affiliates?

We comment on Gilovich and colleagues' program of research on happiness resulting from experiential versus material purchases, and critique these authors' interpretation that people derive more happiness from experiences than from material possessions. Unlike goods, experiences cannot be purchased, and possessions versus experiences do not seem to form the endpoints of the same continuum.

We develop a dynamic contingent-claim framework to model S. Myers's idea that a firm is a collection of growth options and assets in place. The firm's composition between assets in place and growth options evolves endogenously with its investment opportunity set and its financing of growth options, as well as its dynamic leverage and default decisions. The firm trades off tax benefits with the potential financial distress and endogenous debt-overhang costs over its life cycle.

In the wake of recent revelations about US involvement in torture, and widespread and seemingly-growing support of torture in the US, we consider how people judge the value of information gained from informants under coercion. Drawing on past work on confirmation biases and moral judgments, we predicted, and found, that American torture supporters are more likely than opposers to see coerced information as relatively valuable and necessary in a scenario describing the foiling of an al-Qaeda terrorist attack.

Among both laypersons and researchers, extensive use of first-person singular pronouns (i.e., I-talk) is considered a face-valid linguistic marker of narcissism. However, the assumed relation between narcissism and I-talk has yet to be subjected to a strong empirical test.

We propose that an individual's regulatory focus moderates the significant role social network density — the degree of interconnectedness among a person's social contacts — plays in shaping life satisfaction. Evidence from Study 1 indicates that participants with high prevention effectiveness reported higher life satisfaction when they were embedded in a high-density network, whereas participants with low promotion effectiveness reported lower life satisfaction when they were embedded in a low-density network.

The fields of judgment and decision making (JDM) and cultural psychology have not seen much overlap, but recent research at the intersection of culture and JDM has provided new insights for both fields. This chapter reviews recent advances, with a focus on how studying cultural variations in JDM has yielded novel perspectives on basic psychological processes. JDM perspectives can propose novel explanations for differences across national cultures beyond those suggested by the prevailing models of culture.

We develop a model to understand and predict customers’ observed multichannel behavior in a customer support setting.