Strategy

Cultural commentators addressing the differences between high art and mere entertainment have suggested that the standards of popular appeal governing the tastes of ordinary consumers differ from the criteria for excellence employed by professional critics in rendering expert judgments. These concerns appear in discussions of the cultural hierarchy (distinguishing among levels of tastes) and in claims that commercialism tends to degrade cultural objects (by catering to tastes that represent the lowest common denominator).

Affective states of the same valence may have distinct, yet predictable, influences on decision processes. Results from three experiments show that, in gambling decisions, as well as in jobselection decisions, sad individuals are biased in favor of highrisk/high-reward options, whereas anxious individuals are biased in favor of low-risk/low-reward options. We argue that these biases occur because anxiety and sadness convey distinct types of information to the decision-maker and prime different goals.

Stochastic Economic Lot Scheduling Problems (ELSPs) involve settings where several items need to be produced in a common facility with limited capacity, under significant uncertainty regarding demands, unit production times, setup times, or combinations thereof. We consider systems where some products are made-to-stock while another product line is made-to-order. We present a rich and effective class of strategies for which a variety of cost and performance measures can be evaluated and optimized efficiently by analytical methods.

This paper deals with Markov decision processes with a countable state space. We demonstrate that a single, relatively simple condition suffices to guarantee that the value-iteration method converges and that an optimal policy can be computed via this method, once the existence of a solution to the average cost optimality equation has been established via any of the many available sets of existence conditions.

This paper extends the classic two-armed bandit problem to a many-agent setting in which N players each face the same experimentation problem. The main change from the single-agent problem is that an agent can now learn from the current experimentation of other agents. Information is therefore a public good, and a free-rider problem in experimentation naturally arises.

We provide a simple binomial framework to value American-style derivatives subject to trading restrictions. The optimal investment of liquid wealth is solved simultaneously with the early exercise decision of the nontraded derivative. No-short-sales constraints on the underlying asset manifest themselves in the form of an implicit dividend yield in the risk-neutralized process for the underlying asset. One consequence is that American call options may be optimally exercised prior to maturity even when the underlying asset pays no dividends.

Consumers make multi-category decisions in a variety of contexts such as choice of multiple categories during a shopping trip. While complementarity gives managers some control over consumers' buying behavior, co-occurrence or co-incidence is less controllable. Other acts that may affect multi-category choice may be household preferences or household demographics. Not accounting for these 3 factors simultaneously could lead to erroneous inferences.

Different theories, areas of substantive interest, and methods are needed to prevent consumer behavior from becoming increasingly isolated and of marginal relevance in market research. More progress will be made by focusing on relatively underresearched areas, such as: 1. focus on time, 2. the adaptive consumer, and 3. relevant dependent variables. Avenues for substantive focus include: 1. important decisions, 2. not just price and advertising, and 3. the impact of major events. Issues that arise with respect to the methods used to study consumer behavior include: 1.