Working Papers

Most markets clear through a sequence of sales rather than through a Walrasian auctioneer. Because buyers can decide between buying now or later, rather than only now or never, buyers’ current “willingness to pay’ is much more sensitive to price…

We consider a single-product firm in which arriving orders are processed by an information processing system before being downloaded to the production system. The design problem is to choose an appropriate technology for the information (…

A series of recent analytic papers have investigated the issue of how to compensate a salesforce using either the agency theory paradigm or transaction cost analysis. Similarly other more descriptive investigations have led to practical…

Recent studies have documented a pervasive pattern of judgmental bias in negotiations. To explain such biases, previous research has focused primarily on how cognitive processes affect negotiation processes. In contrast, the present study…

Research on negotiations has flourished over the past several years. Much of this work has focused on cognitive biases in negotiations. However, the role social processes play in negotiations has received surprisingly little attention from…

The span of a given collection of securities is the set of state-contingent claims to value that can be obtained by trading the securities. In a simple one-period model, this is literally the linear span (the set of all finite linear combinations…

This paper presents a model of electoral competition in which candidates raise campaign contributions from interest groups by choosing policies that serve the interests of those groups and expend those contributions to influence uninformed voters…

Organizations often hire workers whom they will not promote. We think that this practice triggers career interdependence, where hiring un- promotable workers sometimes harms but in some cases helps the mobility chances of other employees. We…

The existence and stability of invariant distributions for stochastically monotone processes is studied. The Knaster-Tarski fixed point theorem is applied to establish existence of fixed points of mappings on compact sets of measures that are…

This paper considers single-item inventory systems with immediate delivery and no economies of scale. Bounds are provided on the value loss relative to optimal cost for restricting attention to the class of inventory stocking policies that…

Organizations often encounter the same competitors in more than one market. Some conclude that these “multipoint” rivals should deter one another from competing, but empirical support for this hypothesis is lacking. Using an integration of…

This paper introduces the concept of strategic learning to explain long run dynamics of strategic behaviors and organizations. Strategic learning is organizational learning which improves the strategic capability of the organization and changes…

The first analysis of this part, Analysis 4, presents and analyzes various possible technological improvements. Proposing such improvements requires more understanding of appropriate technologies than would be provided by a typical Operations…

We initiated this section in the Nov-Dec 1989 issue of Interfaces with the publication of the National Cranberry Case and an invitation to submit analyses by May 1, 1990. We promised to “review the reports, select and edit the best sections from…

This article analyzes the value of a corporation as a function of_x000B_its ownership structure. Shareholders can acquire costly information_x000B_about the manager’s effort to produce output. Concentrating share_x000B_ownership leads the…

The last three or four years have seen an explosion in the literature on asset markets with asymmetric information and especially on trading mechanisms, an area called the ‘microstructure of financial markets.” There are a number of reasons for…

In this paper we examine the relation between a firm’s stock return and the earnings of other firms in the same industry, controlling for the firm’s own earnings. We document considerable cross-industry variation in the relation between a firm’s…

The authors derive a theoretical relationship between the market share price elasticity matrix and the aggregate brand switching matrix using a logit model of individual consumer choice among competing brands. The elements of the market-level…

We present one possible rationale for the emergence of everyday low pricing (EDLP) as a competitive strategy in grocery retailing. Using a game theoretic model, we show that under certain circumstances two competing retailers choose different…

We study the viability of a securities market model with continuous trading in which agents are required to remain solvent at all times and cannot add funds to their portfolio of securities in excess of an exogenous endowment. We show that…