Decision Making & Negotiations

We develop semiparametric Bayesian Thurstonian models for analyzing repeated choice decisions involving multinomial, multivariate binary or multivariate ordinal data. Our modeling framework has multiple components that together yield considerable flexibility in modeling preference utilities, cross-sectional heterogeneity and parameter-driven dynamics. Each component of our model is specified semiparametrically using Dirichlet process (DP) priors.

Managing word-of-mouth has become a significant marketing activity, as marketers try to identify opinion leaders and take advantage of the influence they wield over potential consumers.

The provision of choice in terms of how people use goods and services has been proposed as a vehicle of improvement of social welfare. This article highlights some of the costs and benefits of creating choice, and it discusses how much choice policy makers and other agents (e.g., employers, retailers) should ideally grant and in what form they should grant it.

The provision of choice is one of the most common vehicles through which managers empower employees in organizations. Although past psychological and organizational research persuasively suggests that choice confers personal agency, and is thus intrinsically motivating, emerging research indicates that there could be potential pitfalls. In this chapter, we examine the various factors that could influence the effects of choice. Specifically, we examine individual-level factors such as the chooser's socioeconomic status and cultural background.

How can the poorer countries of the world be helped to help themselves through freer, fairer trade? In this challenging and controversial book Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and his co-author Andrew Charlton address one of the key issues facing world leaders today. They put forward a radical and realistic new model for managing trading relationships between the richest and the poorest countries.

We study how multi-product queueing systems should be controlled so that sojourn times (or end-to-end delays) do not exceed specified leadtimes. The network dynamically decides when to admit new arrivals and how to sequence the jobs in the system. To analyze this difficult problem, we propose an approach based on fluid-model analysis that translates the leadtime specifications into deterministic constraints on the queue length vector.

The aim of strategy is to master a market environment by understanding and anticipating the actions of other economic agents, especially competitors. A firm that has some sort of competitive advantage--privileged access to customers, for instance--will have relatively few competitors to contend with, because potential competitors without an advantage, if they have their wits about them, will stay away. Thus, competitive advantages are actually barriers to entry and vice versa. In markets that are exposed, by contrast, competition is intense.

Focusing on asset returns governed by a factor structure, the APT is a one-period model, in which preclusion of arbitrage over static portfolios of these assets leads to a linear relation between the expected return and its covariance with the factors. The APT, however, does not preclude arbitrage over dynamic portfolios. Consequently, applying the model to evaluate managed portfolios is contradictory to the no-arbitrage spirit of the model.