Decision Making & Negotiations

This special section is the result of an effort by several scholars to move marketing academic research toward greater practical relevance. This initiative, called Theory Practice in Marketing (TPM), started with a conference at Columbia Business School in 2011, and the five papers published in this special section were presented at the second TPM conference held at Harvard Business School in 2012.

Do people know when they are seen as pressing too hard, yielding too readily, or having the right touch? And does awareness matter? We examined these questions in four studies. Study 1 used dyadic negotiations to reveal a modest link between targets' self-views and counterparts' views of targets' assertiveness, showing that those seen as under- and over-assertive were likely to see themselves as appropriately assertive.

We examine changes in banks' market-to-book ratios over the last decade, focusing on the dramatic and persistent declines witnessed during the financial crisis. The extent of the decline and its persistence cannot be explained by the delayed recognition of losses on existing financial instruments. Rather, it is declines in the values of intangibles — including customer relationships and other intangibles related to business opportunities — along with unrecognized contingent obligations that account for most of the persistent decline in market-to-book ratios.

We propose an approach for using individual-level data on social interactions (e.g., number of recommendations received by consumers, number of recommendations given by adopters, number of social ties) to improve the aggregate penetration forecasts made by extant diffusion models. We capture social interactions through an individual-level hazard rate in such a way that the resulting aggregate penetration process is available in closed form and nests extant diffusion models.

Using country index returns from 8 developed countries and 8 emerging market countries, we re-explore the benefits to international diversification over the past 30 years. To examine various theories in a comparable way, we intentionally limited ourselves to an examination of country index returns and a limited number of types of investments.

There are obvious economic predictors of ability and willingness to invest in environmental sustainability. Yet, given that environmental decisions represent trade-offs between present sacrifices and uncertain future benefits, psychological factors may also play a role in country-level environmental behavior. Gott's principle suggests that citizens may use perceptions of their country's age to predict its future continuation, with longer pasts predicting longer futures.