Decision Making & Negotiations

The paper "Whence Reform?" by the Polish economists Marek Dabrowski, Stanislaw Gomulka, and Jacek Rostowski (DGR) is a welcome and revealing commentary on what is called the "Stiglitz Perspective." Our main response is gratitude at DGR's agreement with the main theses of "Whither Reform?" such as the critiques of voucher privatization and of the attempts to quickly install institutional reforms involving long agency chains. Our positions are not poles apart.

From the publisher: From the "guru to Wall Street's gurus" comes the fundamental techniques of value investing and their applications. Bruce Greenwald is one of the leading authorities on value investing. Some of the savviest people on Wall Street have taken his Columbia Business School course on the subject. Now this dynamic and popular teacher, with some colleagues, reveals the fundamental principles of value investing, the one investment technique that has proven itself consistently over time.

Shareholders of a Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC) tend to live in the area which it serves, and an RBOC's customers tend to hold its shares rather than other RBOCs' equity. The geographic bias of the RBOC investors is closely related to the general tendency of households' portfolios to be concentrated, of employees' tendency to own their employers' stocks in their retirement accounts, and to the home country bias in the international arena.

Most of the market microstructure literature focuses on the liquidity of individual securities, whereas much of the asset pricing literature examines the association between systematic risk and return. We document the presence of a systematic, time-varying component of liquidity. At the moment, neither the inventory nor the asymmetric information-based approach to liquidity explains the systematic, time-varying component of liquidity.

Tests for mediation and moderation are widely employed, usually in a formulaic manner. However, these tests are only a means to the goal of developing a causal understanding of a phenomenon.

The author is asked to consider the following: For a meta-analysis, how should one decide if the same independent variable was used in all studies? When one is studying the effect of a drug, it is relatively easy. However, in consumer experiments, all the experimenters may state that they manipulated the same construct, but they actually manipulated the construct in two different ways, and the type of manipulation produces differences in the results.

Recent papers have developed analytical models to explain and quantify the benefits of delayed differentiation and quick response programs. These models assume that while demands in each period are random, they are independent across time and their distribution is perfectly known, i.e., sales forecasts do not need to be updated as time progresses. In this paper, we characterize these benefits in more general settings, where parameters of the demand distributions fail to be known with accuracy or where consecutive demands are correlated.

This paper integrates pricing and replenishment decisions for the following prototypical two-echelon distribution system with deterministic demands. A supplier distributes a single product to multiple retailers, who in turn sell it to consumers. The retailers serve geographically dispersed, heterogeneous markets. The demand in each retail market arrives continuously at a constant rate, which is a general decreasing function of the retail price in the market. The supplier replenishes its inventory through orders (purchases, production runs) from a source with ample capacity.

This paper evaluates the practice of determining staffing requirements in service systems with random cyclic demands by using a series of stationary queueing models. We consider Markovian models with sinusoidal arrival rates and use numerical methods to show that the commonly used "stationary independent period by period" (SIPP) approach to setting staffing requirements is inaccurate for parameter values corresponding to many real situations.