Decision Making & Negotiations

In this paper, we examine how people evaluate unusual objects and how they intuit whether others will like those objects. We focus on two predictions. First, we believe that an object's uniqueness is susceptible to framing by drawing attention toward or away from the object's unusualness. We expect such "uniqueness framing" interacts with needs for uniqueness (NFU): high NFU perceivers will like the same objects (e.g., neckties, names) more when asked to dwell on the object's uniqueness vs. typicality while low NFU perceivers will like them less.

Sometimes multiple tools may be used simultaneously or in succession in everyday mindreading. Yet surely we rely on somoe tools at some times more than others. The central question I wish to address here, and that I suggest is not well answered, is "Which tool is used when?" More complex and elegant answers to this question await us, but in the meantime I develop several claims in this chapter about which-tool-when contingencies.

We examine racial preferences in dating using data that allow for the direct observation of decisions of randomly paired individuals in a Speed Dating experiment. Females exhibit stronger racial preferences than males. Furthermore, we observe stronger same race preferences for blacks and Asians than for Hispanics and whites. Accounting for self-reported shared interests considerably reduces the observed effect of racial preferences.

Psychological research has repeatedly demonstrated two seemingly irreconcilable human tendencies. People are motivated towards internal consistency, or acting in accordance with stable, self-generated preferences. Simultaneously though, people demonstrate considerable variation in the content of their preferences, often induced by subtle external influences. The current studies test the hypothesis that decision makers resolve this tension by sustaining illusions of preference consistency, which, in turn, confer psychological benefits.

Age differences in intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and the relationships of each to academic outcomes were examined in an ethnically diverse sample of 797 3rd-grade through 8th-grade children. Using independent measures, the authors found intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to be only moderately correlated, suggesting that they may be largely orthogonal dimensions of motivation in school.

What's a customer really worth? Can you find out, without endlessly complex modelling? And once you know, what should you do with that knowledge? Managing Customers as Investments has the answers. You'll learn simple ways to get reliable customer value information - in a form you can use. You'll discover how to use it to measure marketing effectiveness, generate improvements throughout the entire customer relationship lifecycle, and improve decision making. Everyone tells you to manage your business around customers. This book tells you how to do it.

This paper provides a model of investment timing by managers in a decentralized firm in the presence of agency conflicts and information asymmetries. When investment decisions are delegated to managers, contracts must be designed to provide incentives for managers to both extend effort and truthfully reveal private information. Using a real options approach, we show that an underlying option to invest can be decomposed into two components: a manager's option and an owner's option. The implied investment behavior differs significantly from that of the first-best no-agency solution.

Study Objective: Significant variation in emergency department patient arrival rates necessitates the adjustment of staffing patterns to optimize the timely care of patients. This study evaluates the effectiveness of a queueing model in identifying provider staffing patterns to reduce the fraction of patients who leave without being seen.

Objective: To examine the relationship between ambulance diversions and the incidence of myocardial infarction deaths in New York City. Methods: We obtained data for 1999 and 2000 on all 9,743 deaths due to myocardial infarction in New York City, as well as periods of diversion status for 58 New York City area hospitals operating under a central ambulance dispatch by the New York City Fire Department. Negative binomial regressions were used to model the percentage increase in myocardial infarction deaths associated with diversion status.