Decision Making & Negotiations

Documents cultural differences in how individuals represent the social world. The authors' primary claim is that in European American cultural contexts the boundary between the self and another person (any other person) is primary, whereas in East Asian cultures the boundary between the ingroup (the self and other members of important groups) and the outgroup is primary. To test this claim, they adapted a number of research paradigms that have been used to demonstrate self-other differences among members of Western cultures and added a distinction between ingroup and outgroup others.

Different theories, areas of substantive interest, and methods are needed to prevent consumer behavior from becoming increasingly isolated and of marginal relevance in market research. More progress will be made by focusing on relatively underresearched areas, such as: 1. focus on time, 2. the adaptive consumer, and 3. relevant dependent variables. Avenues for substantive focus include: 1. important decisions, 2. not just price and advertising, and 3. the impact of major events. Issues that arise with respect to the methods used to study consumer behavior include: 1.

This paper studies an incomplete contracting model to compare the effectiveness of alternative transfer pricing mechanisms. Transfer pricing serves the dual purpose of guiding intracompany transfers and providing incentives for upfront investments at the divisional level. When transfer prices are determined through negotiation, divisional managers will have insufficient investment incentives due to "hold-up" problems. While cost-based transfer pricing can avoid such "hold-ups", it does suffer from distortions in intracompany transfers.

The author argues that trade liberalization must be balanced in agenda, process and outcomes, including not only sectors in which developed countries have a comparative advantage, like financial services, but also those in which developing countries have a special interest, like agriculture and construction services. Account must be taken of the marked disadvantage that developing countries have in participating meaningfully in negotiations.

The author argues that making markets work requires sound financial regulation, competition policy and policies to facilitate the transfer of technology and to encourage transparency, some fundamental issues neglected by the Washington consensus.

We describe effective time partitioning heuristics for dynamic lot-sizing problems in multiitem and multilocation production/distribution systems. In a time-partitioning heuristic, the complete horizon of (say) N periods, is partitioned into smaller intervals. An instance of the problem is solved, to optimality, on each of these intervals, and the resulting solution coalesced into a solution for the complete horizon. The intervals are selected to be of a size which permits the use of exact and effective solution methods (e.g., branch-and-bound methods).

In this chapter, we provide a survey of analytical models which can be used to assess the benefits and costs associated with delayed product differentiation in a large variety of settings.

This paper addresses the simultaneous determination of pricing and inventory replenishment strategies in the face of demand uncertainty. More specifically, we analyze the following single item, periodic review model. Demands in consecutive periods are independent, but their distributions depend on the item's price in accordance with general stochastic demand functions. The price charged in any given period can be specified dynamically as a function of the state of the system. A replenishment order may be placed at the beginning of some or all of the periods. Stockouts are fully backlogged.

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 rk(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.