When consumers' willingness-to-pay increases by a uniform amount, the change in the resulting monopoly price is generally indeterminate. Our analysis identifies sufficient conditions on the underlying demand curve which predict both the sign and the magnitude of the resulting price change.
We argue that a way culture influences decisions is through the reasons that individuals recruit when required to explain their choices. Specifically, we propose that cultures endow individuals with different rules or principles that provide guidance for making decisions, and a need to provide reasons activates such cultural knowledge. This proposition, representing a dynamic rather than dispositional view of cultural influence, is investigated in studies of consumer decisions that involve a trade-off between diverging attributes, such as low price and high quality.
In the immediate aftermath of the onset of the global financial crises, attention was focused on the weaknesses in the borrowing countries; the suggestion was that, by pursuing unsound policies and indulging in "crony capitalism" these countries had brought the ills upon themselves.
Rapid comprehensive change in the physical pattern of a city is a minor revolution — as is the transformation of 42nd Street and Times Square. Two decades ago the agenda for change posed two big questions: Is it possible for cities to reshape what the market is likely to deliver in an area? Is large-scale redevelopment even a plausible political objective, especially when aggressive actions such as condemnation are deemed a necessary part of the 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).
Research extending over twenty years in behavioral decision theory has led to the development of two important research streams--mental accounting and reason-based choice. This paper explores recent research on the role of mental accounting and reason-based choice in the construction of consumer preferences. Evidence suggests that the principles of mental accounting often regulate the purchase and consumption of luxuries and that reasons may play an important part in this process.
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.
Conventional wisdom and decades of psychological research have linked the provision of choice to increased levels of intrinsic motivation, greater persistence, better performance, and higher satisfaction. This investigation examined the relevance and limitations of these findings for cultures in which individuals possess more interdependent models of the self. In two studies, personal choice generally enhanced motivation more for American independent, than for Asian interdependent selves.