Decision Making & Negotiations

Whether done intentionally or out of habit, many behaviors are repeated. Prior research has demonstrated that past behavior is an excellent predictor of future behavior in contexts as varied as media use, eating and drinking, substance abuse, voting, and travel mode choice, just to name a few. Although no one denies the evidence regarding the prevalence of repeat behavior and the predictive power of past behavior, two issues remain intensely debated

In this chapter, we discuss and extend the findings of our recent research agenda that examines product mix adjustments by Indian firms during the 1990s. During this period, a large fraction of Indians added products to their product mix suggesting that these constraints felt by Mitter twenty years after his article appeared in press had been to some extent eased. This period of firm-level scope expansion coincided with India's large-scale trade liberalization.

In social dilemmas, negotiations, and other forms of strategic interaction, mind-reading — intuiting another party's preferences and intentions — has an important impact on an actor's own behavior. In this paper, we present a model of how perceivers shift between social projection (using one's own mental states to intuit a counterpart's mental states) and stereotyping (using general assumptions about a group to intuit a counterpart's mental states).

We consider three "crisis shocks" related to key features of the 2007-2008 crisis, for emerging and developed economies: (1) the collapse of global trade, (2) the contraction of credit supply, and (3) selling pressure on firms' equity. Using an international cross-section of firms, we find that returns' sensitivities to these shocks imply large and statistically significant influences on residual equity returns during the crisis period (after controlling for normal risk factors that are associated with expected returns).

This chapter on mind perception reviews social cognitive research on how individual perceivers draw inferences about the beliefs, desires, intentions, and feelings of others around them, a process that is at once remarkable and nearly ubiquitous. We begin by examining how perceivers do this, discussing research on various inferential sources, including reading situations, faces, behavior, social groups, and the self. We also discuss accounts that address how perceivers might shift between these inferential sources, such as embracing stereotyping in lieu of social projection or vice versa.

A series of laboratory and field experiments test the effect of considering options sequentially (one at a time) versus simultaneously (all at once) on an individual's satisfaction with and commitment to their chosen option. The results converge to reveal a detrimental effect of choosing from sequentially presented options. Unlike simultaneously presented options, the sequential presentation of options evokes hope for a better option to become available in the future and regret from potentially passing one up.

We present a novel linear program for the approximation of the dynamic programming cost-to-go function in high- dimensional stochastic control problems. LP approaches to approximate DP have typically relied on a natural “projection” of a well-studied linear program for exact dynamic programming. Such programs restrict attention to approximations that are lower bounds to the optimal cost-to-go function.

Government officials, policy analysts, practitioners, and academics from diverse perspectives across the globe have enthusiastically endorsed the promise of public-private engagement to solve pressing problems of public policy.  The endorsement often is a rallying cry for a change in policy or reform of a prevailing policy regime.  In theory and practice, the idea of public-private (PP) blurs prevailing distinctions between roles and actions traditionally considered properly “public” and those roles and actions conventionally considered properly “private.”  It signifies a shi

We examine decision makers' use of tacit linguistic intuitions and explicit linguistic knowledge for brand name translations from English to Chinese. We present a market study, which reveals that managers intuitively use linguistic sound and meaning characteristics, that is, which sounds and meanings best fit for the Chinese translation of the English names. A subsequent experiment shows that generalized types of existing name approaches (that is, whether the names are translated based on sound or based on meaning) are employed as explicit benchmark standards for new names.