Economics Insights @ CBS

The authors argue that cultures differ in implicit theories of individuals and groups. North Americans conceive of individual persons as free agents, whereas East Asians conceptualize them as constrained and as less agentic than social collectives. Hence, East Asian perceivers were expected to be more likely than North Americans to focus on and attribute causality to dispositions of collectives. In Study 1 newspaper articles about "rogue trader" scandals were analyzed, and it was found that U.S.

In this paper we develop a residual-income model showing how taxes on dividends affect the relative valuation of retained earnings versus contributed equity, as well as the value of expected future earnings. Tests of predictions from our model for a sample of Compustat firms from 1975-94 suggest that overall firm value, and the relative valuation weights investors assign to retained earnings, contributed equity, and current earnings, all critically depend on dividend taxes.

This paper considers whether stock price elasticity affects corporate financial decisions. Basic economic principles and the existing theoretical literature predict that firms choosing the Dutch auction instead of the fixed price tender offer should be those firms expecting to face greater stock price elasticity.

This paper describes a family of discrete-review policies for scheduling open multiclass queueing networks. Each of the policies in the family is derived from what we call a dynamic reward function: such a function associates with each queue length vector q and each job class k a positive value r_k(q), which is treated as a reward rate for time devoted to processing class k jobs. Assuming that each station has a traffic intensity parameter less than one, all policies in the family considered are shown to be stable.

We analyze a general model of dynamic vehicle dispatching systems in which congestion is the primary measure of performance. In the model, a finite collection of tours are dynamically dispatched to deliver loads that arrive randomly over time. A load waits in queue until it is assigned to a tour. This representation, which is analogous to classical set-covering models, can be used to study a variety of dynamic routing and load consolidation problems.