Economics Insights @ CBS

Recent evidence suggests that many organizational members and leaders are seen as under- or over-assertive by colleagues, suggesting that having the "right touch" with interpersonal assertiveness is a meaningful and widespread challenge. In this article, I review emerging work on the curvilinear relation between assertiveness and effectiveness, including evidence from both qualitative descriptions of coworkers and ratings of colleagues and leaders.

This paper considers a profit maximizing make-to-order manufacturer that offers multiple products to a market of price and delay sensitive users, using a model that captures three aspects of particular interest: first, the joint use of dynamic pricing and leadtime quotation controls to manage demand; second, the presence of a dual sourcing mode that can expedite orders at a cost; and third, the interaction of the aforementioned demand controls with the operational decisions of sequencing and expediting that the firm must employ to optimize revenues and satisfy the quoted leadtimes.

We present six experiments that tested whether lacking control increases illusory pattern perception, which we define as the identification of a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli. Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions.