Economics Insights @ CBS

The intensity of modern business has increased pressure for innovation, which places greater emphasis on creativity. This article explores one of the central sites of creativity in the American corporate world, the advertising agency. We examine how creativity in agencies is managed, controlled, and channeled to produce advertisements. We contend that the brand advertised and the agency’s creative collaborations have properties of ritual symbols and that rituals mediate tension inherent in two forces, stability and change, which define the brand and the advertising collaboration.

We argue that differences between the landscapes of influence situations in Indian and American societies induce Indians to accommodate to others more often than Americans. To investigate cultural differences in situation-scapes, we sampled interpersonal influence situations occurring in India and the United States from both the influencee's (Study 1) and the influencer's (Study 2) perspectives. We found that Indian influence situations were dramatically more likely than U.S. situations to feature other-serving motives and to result in positive consequences for the relationship.

A fundamental challenge facing social perceivers is identifying the cause underlying other people’s behavior. Evidence indicates that East Asian perceivers are more likely than Western perceivers to reference the social context when attributing a cause to a target person’s actions. One outstanding question is whether this reflects a culture’s influence on automatic or on controlled components of causal attribution.

The Pampas of Argentina have shown some of the most consistently increasing trends in precipitation during the 20th century. The rainfall increase has partly contributed to a significant expansion of agricultural area, particularly in climatically marginal regions of the Pampas. However, it is unclear if current agricultural production systems, which evolved partly in response to enhanced climate conditions, may remain viable if (as entirely possible) climate reverts to a drier epoch.

The authors test methods, based on cognitively simple decision rules, that predict which products consumers select for their consideration sets. Drawing on qualitative research, the authors propose disjunctions-of-conjunctions (DOC) decision rules that generalize well-studied decision models, such as disjunctive, conjunctive, lexicographic, and subset conjunctive rules. They propose two machine-learning methods to estimate cognitively simple DOC rules. They observe consumers' consideration sets for global positioning systems for both calibration and validation data.