Decision Making & Negotiations

We characterize the equilibrium behavior in a broad class of competition models in which the competing firms' market shares are given by an attraction model, and the aggregate sales in the industry depend on the aggregate attraction value according to a general function. Each firm's revenues and costs are proportional with its expected sales volume, with a cost rate that depends on the firm's chosen attraction value according to an arbitrary increasing function.

The packet is the fundamental unit of transportation in modern communication networks such as the Internet. Physical layer scheduling decisions are made at the level of packets, and packet-level models with exogenous arrival processes have long been employed to study network performance, as well as design scheduling policies that more efficiently utilize network resources. On the other hand, a user of the network is more concerned with end-to-end bandwidth, which is allocated through congestion control policies such as TCP.

We analyze a planning model for a firm or public organization that needs to cover uncertain demand for a given item by procuring supplies from multiple sources. The necessity to employ multiple suppliers arises from the fact that when an order is placed with any of the suppliers, only a random fraction of the order size is usable. The model considers a single demand season with a given demand distribution, where all supplies need to be ordered simultaneously before the start of the season.

The silver lining effect predicts that segregating a small gain from a larger loss results in greater psychological value than does integrating them into a smaller loss. Using a generic prospect theory value function, we formalize this effect and derive conditions under which it should occur. We show analytically that if the gain is smaller than a certain threshold, segregation is optimal. This threshold increases with the size of the loss and decreases with the degree of loss aversion of the decision maker.

We consider a revenue maximizing make-to-order manufacturer that serves a market of price and delay sensitive customers and operates in an environment in which the market size varies stochastically over time. A key feature of our analysis is that no model is assumed for the evolution of the market size. We analyze two main settings: i) the size of the market is observable at any point in time; and ii) the size of the market is not observable and hence cannot be used for decision-making.

We consider a single product revenue management problem where, given an initial inventory, the objective is to dynamically adjust prices over a finite sales horizon to maximize expected revenues. Realized demand is observed over time, but the underlying functional relationship between price and mean demand rate that governs these observations (otherwise known as the demand function or demand curve), is not known.

We investigate how making highly consequential, highly undesirable decisions affects emotions and preference for autonomy. We examine individuals facing real or hypothetical decisions to discontinue their infants' life support who either choose personally or have physicians choose for them. Findings from a multidisciplinary approach consisting of a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews and three laboratory studies reveal that perceived personal causality for making tragic decisions generates more negative feelings than having the same choices externally made.

No matter your field, industry, or specialty, as a leader you make a series of crucial decisions every single day. And the harsh truth is that the majority of decisions — no matter how good the intentions behind them — are mismanaged, resulting in a huge toll on organizations, the people they employ, and even the people they serve.

Health is a major component of well-being and quality of life (QOL) and an increasingly costly one. We examine the role of employers for promoting QOL. A meta-analysis examines the impact of fifty well-being programs, which address six health issues and use seven marketing approaches. The analysis indicates that well-being programs and marketing approaches significantly improve employee health and depend on company size and employee gender. Results, based on sixty studies, show there is significant opportunity to efficiently tailor corporate health programs.