Faculty AI Research

Objective. To develop insights on the impact of size, average length of stay, variability, and organization of clinical services on the relationship between occupancy rates and delays for beds. Data Sources. The primary data source was Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Secondary data were obtained from the United Hospital Fund of New York reflecting data from about 150 hospitals.

Though word-of-mouth (w-o-m) communications is a pervasive and intriguing phenomenon, little is known on its underlying process of personal communications. Moreover as marketers are getting more interested in harnessing the power of w-o-m, for e-business and other net related activities, the effects of the different communications types on macro level marketing is becoming critical.

This paper examines agency as a mechanism that can predict cultural differences in human motivation. In elaborating on the theory of self-construal (Markus and Kitayama, 1991) and drawing on past research on culture, we propose that people from cultures stressing independence are more personally agentic, whereas people from cultures stressing interdependence are more collectively agentic?which results in culturally contrasting differences in cognition and human motivation.

The authors examined how gender stereotypes affect negotiation performance. Men outperformed women when the negotiation was perceived as diagnostic of ability (Experiment 1) or the negotiation was linked to gender-specific traits (Experiment 2), suggesting the threat of negative stereotype confirmation hurt women's performance relative to men.

This paper argues that it is important to include the other party's payoff in a competitor's utility (satisfaction) function. Examples of the impact are provided as well as implications for multi-stage games (competitions). A sample of 200 provides empirical support for the critical role other party results play in satisfaction, in particular the importance of relative payoffs. Several implications emerge, including a parsimonious explanation for the exponential pattern of shares in mature markets.

Previous research suggests that attitudinal resistance to information that challenges a prior evaluation increases with the amount of information underlying the prior evaluation. We revisit this proposition in a context in which a set of important claims about a target brand are presented either alone—a lower amount of "isolated"? information—or along with other favorable, but less important claims— a higher amount of "embedded" information. Results from two experiments show that when the challenge occurs immediately after the initial evaluation, a greater amount of "embedded"?

This paper examines the impact of a specific property tax limit, Proposition Image in Massachusetts, on the fiscal behavior of cities and towns in Massachusetts and the capitalization of that behavior into property values. Proposition Image places a cap on the effective property tax rate at 2.5% and limits nominal annual growth in property tax revenues to 2.5%, unless residents pass a referendum allowing a greater increase.

We address multi-item inventory systems with random and seasonally fluctuating, and possibly correlated, demands. The items are produced in two stages, each with its own lead-time; in the first stage a common intermediate product is manufactured. The production volumes in the first stage are bounded by given capacity liits. We develop an accurate lower bound and close-to-optimal heuristic strategies of simple structure. The gap between them, evaluated in an extensive numerical study, is on average only 0.45%.

The subject of this paper is autoregressive (AR) modeling of a stationary, Gaussian discrete time process, based on a finite sequence of observations. The process is assumed to admit an AR(∞) representation with exponentially decaying coefficients. We adopt the nonparametric minimax framework and study how well the process can be approximated by a finite-order AR model. A lower bound on the accuracy of AR approximations is derived, and a nonasymptotic upper bound on the accuracy of the regularized least squares estimator is established.

The authors examine two aspects of brand loyalty, purchase loyalty and attitudinal loyalty, as linking variables in the chain of effects from brand trust and brand affect to brand performance (market share and relative price). The model includes product-level, category-related controls (hedonic value and utilitarian value) and brand-level controls (brand differentiation and share of voice). The authors compile an aggregate data set for 107 brands from three separate surveys of consumers and brand managers.

We examine the hypothesis that dividend taxes are capitalized into share prices by focusing on investors? implicit valuations of retained earnings versus paid-in equity. Retained earnings are distributable as taxable dividends, whereas paid-in equity is distributable as a tax-free return of capital. Consistent with dividend tax capitalization, firm-level results for the United States indicate that accumulated retained earnings are valued less per unit than contributed capital. In addition, differences in dividend tax rates across U.S.

The authors investigate two competing hypotheses about how chronic vividness of imagery interacts with the vividness and salience of information in decision making. Results from four studies, covering a variety of decision domains, indicate that chronic imagery vividness rarely amplifies the effects of vivid and salient information. Imagery vividness may, in fact, attenuate the effects of vivid and salient information. This is because, relative to nonvivid imagers, vivid imagers rely less on information that appears obvious and rely more on information that seems less obvious.

Financial statement analysis has traditionally been seen as part of the fundamental analysis required for equity valuation. But the analysis has typically been ad hoc. Drawing on recent research on accounting-based valuation, this paper outlines a financial statement analysis for use in equity valuation. Standard profitability analysis is incorporated, and extended, and is complemented with an analysis of growth. An analysis of operating activities is distinguished from the analysis of financing activities. The perspective is one of forecasting payoffs to equities.

We examine the hypothesis that dividend taxes are capitalized into share prices by focusing on investors' implicit valuations of retained earnings versus paid-in equity. Retained earnings are distributable as taxable dividends, whereas paid-in equity is distributable as a tax-free return of capital. Consistent with dividend tax capitalization, firm-level results for the United States indicate that accumulated retained earnings are valued less per unit than contributed capital. In addition, differences in dividend tax rates across U.S.

To understand really new products, consumers face the challenge of constructing new knowledge structures rather simply changing existing ones. Recent research in categorization suggests that one strategy for creating representations for these new products is to use information already contained in familiar product categories. While knowledge from multiple existing categories may be relevant, little research has examined how (and if) consumers process information drawn from more than one domain.

A Sunday New York Times article on a potential development of new cancer-curing drugs caused EntreMed's stock price to rise from 12.063 at the Friday close, to open at 85 and close near 52 on Monday. It closed above 30 in the three following weeks. The enthusiasm spilled over to other biotechnology stocks. The potential breakthrough in cancer research already had been reported, however, in the journal Nature, and in various popular newspapers (including the Times) more than five months earlier.

This research examined the effects of anxiety on subsequent message processing. Experiment 1, conducted just before the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, manipulated anxiety by presenting Hong Kong participants with negative or positive potential consequences of the handover. Consistent with research documenting the cognitive deficits produced by anxiety, lower levels of message elaboration were obtained under high (vs. low) anxiety for an anxiety-unrelated message.

Although diffusion models have been successfully used to predict the adoption patterns of new products and technologies, little research has examined the psychological processes underlying the individual consumers adoption decision. This study uses the knowledge transfer paradigm, studied often in the context of analogies, to demonstrate that both existing knowledge and innovation continuity are major factors influencing the consumers adoption process. In two experiments, the authors demonstrate that the relationship between expertise and adoption is relatively complex.

It has been recently suggested that sponsor identification may be biased in favor of prominent brands. All things equal, consumers are more likely to attribute sponsorship to brands that they perceive to be more prominent in the marketplace, such as large-share brands. This article offers additional empirical evidence for this phenomenon and examines the underlying processes. The results of a controlled laboratory experiment replicate the phenomenon and show that this bias arises only when consumers are unable to retrieve the name of the sponsor directly from memory.

Pricing financial options often requires Monte Carlo methods. One particular case is that of barrier options, whose payoff may be zero depending on whether or not an underlying asset crosses a barrier during the life of the option. This paper develops variance reduction techniques that take advantage of the special structure of barrier options, and are appropriate for general simulation problems with similar structure. We use a change of measure at each step of the simulation to reduce the variance arising from the possibility of a barrier corssing at each monitoring date.

We examine consumers' price sensitivity using a new approach that incorporates probabilistic thresholds for price gains and price losses in the reference price models. We model the threshold as a function of company, competitor and consumer specific factors. Model application to scanner panel data for coffee shows that our model is superior in fit compared to ordinary logit and two existing reference price models.

Many tendencies in social perceivers' judgments about individuals and groups can be integrated in terms of the premise that perceivers rely on implicit theories of agency acquired from cultural traditions. Whereas American culture primarily conceptualizes agency as a property of individual persons, other cultures conceptualize agency primarily in terms of collectives such as groups or nonhuman actors such as deities or fate.

Recent papers have developed analytical models to explain and quantify the benefits of delayed differentiation and quick response programs. These models assume that while demands in each period are random, they are independent across time and their distribution is perfectly known, i.e., sales forecasts do not need to be updated as time progresses. In this paper, we characterize these benefits in more general settings, where parameters of the demand distributions fail to be known with accuracy or where consecutive demands are correlated.

This article develops precise connections among two general approaches to building interest rate models: a general equilibrium approach using a pricing kernel and the Heath, Jarrow, and Morton framework based on specifying forward rate volatilities and the market price of risk. The connections exploit the observation that a pricing kernel is uniquely determined by its drift. Through these connections we provide, for any arbitrage-free term structure model, a representative-consumer real production economy supporting that term structure model in equilibrium.

The seemingly quick global recovery from the Asian financial crisis and its limited effect on industrial countries produced far less sould searching about capitalism's basic principles than the Great Depression. The author argues that the global economic arrangements were inadequate in both instances and that the IMF requires serious reform to ensure a more stable global economic environment.

Shareholders of a Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC) tend to live in the area which it serves, and an RBOC's customers tend to hold its shares rather than other RBOCs' equity. The geographic bias of the RBOC investors is closely related to the general tendency of households' portfolios to be concentrated, of employees' tendency to own their employers' stocks in their retirement accounts, and to the home country bias in the international arena.

In this paper we review the literature on first offers in negotiations. We explore the determinants of who will make the first offer, how extreme that first offer will be, what effect the first offer has on the value of the final outcome, and how first offers influence post-negotiation evaluations. The PDF attached here may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record. Copyright © 2001 by the American Psychological Association. Reproduced with permission.

This paper evaluates the practice of determining staffing requirements in service systems with random cyclic demands by using a series of stationary queueing models. We consider Markovian models with sinusoidal arrival rates and use numerical methods to show that the commonly used "stationary independent period by period" (SIPP) approach to setting staffing requirements is inaccurate for parameter values corresponding to many real situations.

We analyze a model of inventory competition among n firms that provide competing, substitutable goods. Each firm chooses initial inventory levels for their good in a single period (newsboy-like) inventory model. Customers choose dynamically based on current availability, so the inventory levels at one firm affect the demand of all competing firms. This creates a strategic interaction among the firms' inventory decisions. Our work extends earlier work on variations of this problem by Karjalainen (1992), Lippman and McCardle (1997) and Parlar (1988).

Professional services firms (e.g., consultants, accounting firms, or advertising agencies) generate and sell business solutions to their customers. In doing so, they can leverage the cumulative experience gained from serving their customer base to either reduce their variable costs or increase the quality of their products/services. In other words, their "production technology" exhibits some form of increasing returns to scale.

A study uses Procter & Gamble's value pricing strategy as an opportunity to examine consumer and competitor response to a major, sustained change in marketing-mix strategy. The study estimates an econometric model to trace how consumers and competitors react to such changes. For the average brand, the study finds that deals and coupons increase market penetration and surprisingly have little impact on customer retention as measured by share-of-category requirements and category usage.

A monopolist sells a single product to a market where the customers may be enticed to accept a delay as to when their orders are shipped. The enticement is a discounted price for the product. The market consists of several segments with different degrees of aversion to delays. The firm offers a price schedule under which the customers each self-select the price they pay and when their orders are to be shipped. When a customer agrees to wait, the firm gains advanced demand information that can be used to reduce its supply chain costs.