Decision Making & Negotiations

We present simple adverse selection model in which a firm finds it advantageous to insure against bad outcomes and thereby improve its credit quality and reduce its cost of capital.

We propose a procedure for representing a time series as the sum of a smoothly varying trend component and a cyclical component. We document the nature of the comovements of the cyclical components of a variety of macroeconomic time series. We find that these comovements are very different than the corresponding comovements of the slowly varying trend components.

Marketing Aesthetics offers clear guidelines for harnessing a company's total aesthetic output — its "look and feel" — to provide a vital competitive advantage.

We provide a framework in which we link the valuation and asset allocation policies of defined benefits plans with the lifetime marginal productivity schedule of the worker and the pension plan formula. In turn, we examine the retirement policies that are implied by the primitives of the model and the value of pension obligations. Our model provides an explicit valuation formula for a stylized defined benefits plan. The optimal asset allocation policies consist of the replicating portfolio of the pension liabilities and the growth optimum portfolio independent of the pension liabilities.

In the chapter, we review existing literature and offer some new empirical evidence concerning developmental trends in intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. We then examine several possible explanations for these developmental findings and consider their implications for social and educational policy.

A report examines whether gender differences in cognition during the depressed mood exist even when males and females are not depressed. Results reveal that females' thoughts are more internally focused than males'.

Decision-makers often do not or cannot predict at the time of choice how their tastes may change by the time the outcomes are experienced. This paper explores the implications of making decisions by maximizing experienced utility ex post rather than ex ante. Focusing on being satisfied with choice in retrospect results in quite different kinds of problems than a prospective orientation that projects one's current preferences into the future.

We give a unified probabilistic analysis for a general class of bin packing problems by directly analyzing corresponding mathematical programs. In this general class of packing problems, objects are described by a given number of attribute values. (Some attributes may be discrete; others may be continuous.) Bins are sets of objects, and the collection of feasible bins is merely required to satisfy some general consistency properties.

We propose and analyze a heuristic that uses region partitioning and an aggregation scheme for customer attributes (load size, time windows, etc.) to create a finite number of customer types. A math program is solved based on these aggregated customer types to generate a feasible solution to the original problem. The problem class we address is quite general and defined by a number of general consistency properties.