Decision Making & Negotiations

Health is a major component of well-being and quality of life (QOL) and an increasingly costly one. We examine the role of employers for promoting QOL. A meta-analysis examines the impact of fifty well-being programs, which address six health issues and use seven marketing approaches. The analysis indicates that well-being programs and marketing approaches significantly improve employee health and depend on company size and employee gender. Results, based on sixty studies, show there is significant opportunity to efficiently tailor corporate health programs.

We report the results of a large-scale field experiment performed in the context of the national launch of a new cosmetic product. The manufacturer launched this new product using three promotional tools in parallel: full-page advertisements in fashion magazines, free standing inserts (FSI) in Sunday newspapers, and a viral marketing campaign. Each promotional tool featured an identical discount coupon for the new product, but with different redemption codes across promotional tools.

This paper examines the relation between ownership, corporate form, and innovation for a cross-section of private and publicly traded innovating firms in the US and 15 European countries. A striking novel observation emerges from our analysis: while most innovating firms in the US are publicly traded conglomerates, a substantial fraction of innovation is concentrated in private firms and in business groups in continental European countries.

In 3 studies, participants made choices between hypothetical financial, environmental, and health gains and losses that took effect either immediately or with a delay of 1 or 10 years. In all 3 domains, choices indicated that gains were discounted more than losses. There were no significant differences in the discounting of monetary and environmental outcomes, but health gains were discounted more and health losses were discounted less than gains or losses in the other 2 domains.

Donald E. Sexton, PhD, a professor of marketing at Columbia University and president of The Arrow Group, Ltd., discusses one key way to link marketing activity to financial performance.

Stock-outs convey information about the propensity of other consumers to purchase a product and this can increase the willingness of marginally interested consumers to buy. But in order to leverage stock-outs, firms must be able to capture the extra demand.

This paper studies the value of external commitment to policy reforms in the case of WTO/GATT accessions. The accessions often entail reforms that go beyond narrowly defined trade liberalization, and have to overcome fierce resistance in the acceding countries, as reflected in protracted negotiations. We study the growth and investment consequences of WTO/GATT accessions, with attention to a possible selection bias. We find that the accessions tend to raise income, but only for those countries that were subject to rigorous accession procedures.

This chapter discusses Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based methods for estimating continuous-time asset pricing models. We describe the Bayesian approach to empirical asset pricing, the mechanics of MCMC algorithms and the strong theoretical underpinnings of MCMC algorithms. We provide a tutorial on building MCMC algorithms and show how to estimate equity price models with factors such as stochastic expected returns, stochastic volatility and jumps, multi-factor term structure models with stochastic volatility, time-varying central tendancy or jumps and regime switching models.

We develop a model for the competitive interactions in service industries where firms cater to multiple customer classes or market segments with the help of shared service facilities or processes so as to exploit pooling benefits. Different customer classes typically have distinct sensitivities to the price of service as well as the delays encountered.