Economics Insights @ CBS

This article examines the time between product development and market launch, and its relation to the subsequent diffusion of consumer durables. We find that this "incubation time" is long. Further, it is a useful predictor of the shape of the subsequent sales diffusion curve. Using the Bass model as a base, we find that the longer the incubation time, the lower the coefficient of innovation (p) and the longer the time to peak sales. Further, using the incubation time in a Bayesian forecasting model significantly improves forecasts early in the life cycle.

Conventional wisdom and decades of psychological research have linked the provision of choice to increased levels of intrinsic motivation, greater persistence, better performance, and higher satisfaction. This investigation examined the relevance and limitations of these findings for cultures in which individuals possess more interdependent models of the self. In two studies, personal choice generally enhanced motivation more for American independent, than for Asian interdependent selves.

This paper extends the classic two-armed bandit problem to a many-agent setting in which N players each face the same experimentation problem. The main change from the single-agent problem is that an agent can now learn from the current experimentation of other agents. Information is therefore a public good, and a free-rider problem in experimentation naturally arises.