Decision Making & Negotiations

Returns policies are usually thought of as being a way to insure retailers against excess inventory. The work of Pellegrini (1986), Chu (1993), Lin (1993) and Padmanabhan and Png (1997) highlights the fact that there is considerably more to returns policies than just a mechanism for insurance. Our work identifies a heretofore undocumented rationale for returns policy: its role in learning the demand for a new product. The model of manufacturer?retailer interaction assumes that the demand is uncertain but correlated across time periods.

Professional services firms (e.g., consultants, accounting firms, or advertising agencies) generate and sell business solutions to their customers. In doing so, they can leverage the cumulative experience gained from serving their customer base to either reduce their variable costs or increase the quality of their products/services. In other words, their "production technology" exhibits some form of increasing returns to scale.

Two marketing and communications experts present a cutting-edge model for managing group creativity, expanding on the ideas introduced in Bernd Schmitt's revolutionary Experiential Marketing. Bernd Schmitt, a leader in experiential thinking, introduced the concept of the "experience organisation" a business that thrives on innovation, buzzes with ideas, rejects bureaucracy, questions convention and allows the spirit of its employees to soar. Now he teams up with Laura Brown to show not only that these companies exist, but how any company can become one.

Current psychological theory and research affirm the positive affective and motivational consequences of having personal choice. These findings have led to the popular notion that more choice is better, that the human ability to desire and manage choice is unlimited. Findings from three studies starkly challenge the implicit assumption that having more choice is necessarily more intrinsically motivating than having fewer options.

Several online firms, including Yahoo!, Amazon.com, and Movie Critic, recommend documents and products to consumers. Typically, the recommendations are based on content and/or collaborative filtering methods.

I survey and assess the development of continuous-time methods in finance during the last 30 years. The subperiod 1969 to 1980 saw a dizzying pace of development with seminal ideas in derivatives securities pricing, term structure theory, asset pricing, and optimal consumption and portfolio choices. During the period 1981 to 1999 the theory has been extended and modified to better explain empirical regularities in various subfields of finance.

This paper describes a general approach for dynamic control of stochastic networks based on fluid model analysis, where in broad terms, the stochastic network is approximated by its fluid analog, an associated fluid control problem is solved and, finally, a scheduling rule for the original system is defined by itnerpreting the fluid control policy.

A study examines the sale of a product across channels. Using data from 35 movies, exponential sales curves are estimated for both theater attendance and video rentals. How knowledge of the sales parameters in the first channel helps predict sales in the subsequent channel is demonstrated.

The authors propose a new methodology called the "coupled-hazard approach" to study the global diffusion of technological innovations. Beyond its ability to describe discontinuous diffusion patterns, the method explicitly recognizes the conceptual difference between the timing of a country's introduction of the new technology (the so-called implementation stage; Rogers 1983) and the timing of the innovation's full adoption in the country (the confirmation stage).