Economics Insights @ CBS

While customer management has become a top priority for practitioners and academics, little is known about how managers actually make customer management decisions. Our study addresses this gap and uses the adaptive decision maker as well as the fast and frugal heuristics frameworks to gain a better understanding of managerial decision making. Using the process-tracing tool MouselabWEB, we presented sales managers in retail banking with three typical customer management prediction tasks.

Successful businesspeople are often attributed somewhat mystical talents, such as the ability to mesmerize an audience or envision the future. We suggest that this mystique — the way some managers are perceived by observers — arises from the intuitive logic that psychologists and anthropologists call magical thinking. Consistent with this account, Study 1 found that perceptions of a manager's mystique are associated with judgments of his/her charismatic vision and ability to forecast future business trends.

The 2008 financial crisis exemplifies significant uncertainties in corporate financing conditions. We develop a unified dynamic q- theoretic framework where firms have both a precautionary-savings motive and a market-timing motive for external financing and payout decisions, induced by stochastic financing conditions. The model predicts (1) cuts in investment and payouts in bad times and equity issues in good times even without immediate financing needs; (2) a positive correlation between equity issuance and stock repurchase waves.

How are the designs of corporate buildings used to create meaning and project a corporate image and personality" We distinguish functionalist architecture ("form follows function"), which focuses on the primary, utilitarian function of a building, from experiential architecture ("from function to form"), which uses the form of a building to communicate symbolically about the organization.