Economics Insights @ CBS

Considerable research has examined how securities information, once accessed, is cognitively processed to arrive at buy, sell or hold decisions. In contrast, this paper examines whether training novice investors to simply apply the information accessing strategies used by better-performing security analysts, prior to actual cognitive processing of the information, would improve their performance. We obtain performance differences by comparing trained subjects who used the recommended strategies with untrained subjects.

Aggregate level simulation procedures have been used in many areas of marketing. In this paper we show how individual level simulations may be used support marketing theory development. More specifically, we show how a certain type of simulations that is based on complex systems studies (in this case Stochastic Cellular Automata) may be used to generalize diffusion theory one of the fundamental theories of new product marketing.

This research examines, across 2 studies, the interplay between the valence and arousal components of affective states and the affective tone of a target ad. In the first study, music was used to induce a pleasant or unpleasant mood, while controlling for arousal. Participants were subsequently exposed to an ad that either had a positive-affective tone or was ambiguous in its affective tone. As predicted, the valence of the affective state colored the evaluation of the ad in a mood-congruent direction, but this coloring effect occurred only when the ad had an ambiguous-affective tone.

The effects of justice and dispositional attribution on reactions to negative supervisory feedback were examined in two studies. Study 1 showed that criticism delivered with greater interpersonal fairness resulted in more favourable dispositional attributions about the supervisor, more acceptance of the feedback, and more favourable reactions towards the superior and the organization. The beneficial influence of just interpersonal treatment was general across various feedback contexts, although the magnitude varied.