Economics Insights @ CBS

This paper presents an applied methodology to assist managers in strategically setting prices and allocating resources over the product, brand, or adoption (diffusion) life cycle. While substantial theoretical work has been achieved in this area in the management science and operations research disciplines, approaches which can be implemented as managerial tools are generally lacking.

A report examines whether gender differences in cognition during the depressed mood exist even when males and females are not depressed. Results reveal that females' thoughts are more internally focused than males'.

We consider the problem of scheduling N jobs on M parallel machines so as to minimize the maximum earliness or tardiness cost incurred for each of the jobs. Earliness and tardiness costs are given by general (but job-independent) functions of the amount of time a job is completed prior to or after a common due date. We show that in problems with a nonrestrictive due date, the problem decomposes into two parts. Each of the M longest jobs is assigned to a different machine, and all other jobs are assigned to the machines so as to minimize their makespan.

As the only practical way to deal with most path-dependent instruments, Monte Carlo estimation is now one of the workhorses of modern derivatives valuation. It has the advantage of being relatively easy to implement in its basic form, and, given enough computer resources, it will converge asymptotically to the correct answer. Yet, once these general principles are acknowledged, one faces the fact that many problems have such high dimension that the basic Monte Carlo technique can require an enormous number of simulations before convergence to a reasonably accurate answer is achieved.