EGO UTILITY,OVERCONFIDENCE, AND TASK CHOICE

This paper models behavior when a decision maker cares about and manages her self‐image. In addition to having preferences over material outcomes, the agent derives “ego utility” from positive views about her ability to do well in a skill‐sensitive, “ambitious,” task. Although she uses Bayes' rule to update beliefs, she tends to become overconfident regarding which task is appropriate for her. If tasks are equally informative about ability, her task choice is also overconfident. If the ambitious task is more informative about ability, she might initially display underconfidence in behavior, and, if she is disappointed by her performance, later become too ambitious. People with ego utility prefer to acquire free information in smaller pieces. Applications to employee motivation and other economic settings are discussed. (JEL: D83, D11)     

Anticipating Regret: Why Fewer Options May Be Better

We study preferences over menus which can be represented as if the agent selects an alternative from a menu and experiences regret if her choice is ex post inferior. Since regret arises from comparisons between the alternative selected and the other available alternatives, our axioms reflect the agent's desire to limit her options. We prove that our representation is essentially unique. We also introduce two measures of comparative regret attitudes and relate them to our representation. Finally, we explore the formal connection between the present work and the literature on temptation.     

„Karriere nicht um jeden Preis“ — der Weg einer Coching-Klientin

?Career not at any price“ — the way of a female coachee This case study involves typical female topics: (1) the wish to please everybody in the role of a female management consultant, and as a result a professional life with permanent contradictions; (2) the question, at which price a woman will have her career. In the coaching sessions, the client was able to become clearer about her role and her behavior, to try out new behaviors, to imagine different ways of her career and finally to make conscious decisions.     

‘It is not fair that you do not know we have problems’: Perceptual distance and the consequences of male leaders' conflict avoidance behaviours

This study investigates perceptual distance in terms of managers' conflict avoidance behaviour and its consequences for subordinates. We argue that perceptual distance, or the disagreement between a manager's perception and that of his or her subordinates of his or her conflict avoidance, is a genuine phenomenon. We examine the extent to which the perceptual distance regarding managers' avoidance behaviour influences a team's justice climate as well as the role of gender. The data collected from three multinational companies in China show that the perceptual distance of a male manager's avoidance behaviour exists and that it is associated with a negative justice climate within the team. These findings provide evidence of gender's effect on leadership and highlight the benefits of female leadership.     

End-of-life care around the world: achievements to date and challenges remaining

From the moment her interest in terminal care was awakened, Cicely Saunders was alert to the international dimensions of the subject. Her first patient in the late 1940s was an emigré Polish Jew dying alone and in isolation in a busy London hospital. Her letters from the 1950s onwards show an unquenchable thirst for new knowledge and a span of contacts and communications that was global in its reach. By the early 1960s, she was making fact-finding visits to the United States and Europe. Even before it opened to patients, St Christopher's Hospice was a beacon of inspiration to like-minded colleagues from many countries, eager to see how the model of practice was being operationalized and--more important still--how it could be adapted and modified in other settings. In the later years of her life, Cicely Saunders remained in contact with colleagues all over the world. She wrote introductions to numerous textbooks and collections; recorded interviews that were broadcast at international conferences; harnessed her name and energies to major efforts to promote palliative care globally; and, to the very end, served as a source of inspiration to palliative care activists, policy makers, educators, and researchers. As this special issue of the journal demonstrates so eloquently, that legacy lives on.     

On the Effects of Capacity Agent on Market Equilibrium

We consider a setting of two firms and one capacity agent. Each firm serves a primary market, and the capacity agent sustains a common market to draw demand for capacity from the external firms. The firms can partner with the capacity agent under her contract to serve the common market. When they use the common market mainly as an outlet for their unused capacities, the capacity agent will only specify a variable fee for each capacity unit deployed through her, and prefer to partner with one firm in most circumstances. When the firms adjust capacities to accommodate the businesses created by serving the common market, the capacity agent will specify a lump‐sum payment and a variable fee, and will be more likely to incentivize only one firm to partner with her, when the common market is sufficiently large or the demands in the common and primary markets are strongly correlated. She will always use a fixed fee to extract, while not necessarily all, the profit gains to the firms serving the common market, but will use a variable fee only when partnering with both firms. The key results are robust with respect to market configuration and contract type.     

The Sublime Object of Desire (for Knowledge): Sexuality at Work in Business and Management Schools in England

This paper explores why and how sexuality intertwines with gender in the organizational context of academic institutions. Drawing on insights from the work of psychoanalyst post‐structuralist feminists Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, we explore the institutionalized abjection of the real and imagined (woman's) body as the root cause of her relative exclusion from knowledge (creation) and her subordinate position in it. The project is analytical as well as political: it both unravels and opposes the ways gender is superimposed on sexuality and how we as academics might collude, legitimize and perpetuate and gendered sexualized (and therefore exclusionary) ways of organizing in/of society. The findings of an empirical study of a sample of women academics in management and business schools in England are discussed in the light of the proposed theory.     

Supplier Selection via Tournaments

In this paper, we study the performance of a sourcing mechanism gaining popularity in industrial procurement environments; a tournament. Under a tournament, a buyer initially procures her parts from two suppliers with possibly different quality levels, for T time periods, i.e., she parallel sources. During this time, the buyer is able to observe noisy signals about the suppliers' quality. At time T, she selects the supplier with the highest observed performance and awards it the remainder of her business. We characterize the optimal duration of the tournament as a function of various market parameters, including information and investment costs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a tournament can be more profitable for the buyer than selecting the highest quality supplier at time T = 0 and sole sourcing entirely.     

Manufacturing productivity

The general theory of engineering systems suggests that to produce desired order (to make a machine that works, to reduce the entropy, or even to improve productivity) the agent needs access to sources of (i) information, or useful messages; (ii) energy, or motivation; (iii) resources, including skills. A manufacturing economy, being an engineering system, obeys the same rules, so that an objective examination of 11 of them may be instructive. Since Belgium has no native energy and very few native resources, her post-1968 success in raising her productivity suggests significant improvement in her information systems. The author suggests what this improvement may have been.     

Insider Trading With a Random Deadline

We consider a model of strategic trading with asymmetric information of an asset whose value follows a Brownian motion. An insider continuously observes a signal that tracks the evolution of the asset's fundamental value. The value of the asset is publicly revealed at a random time. The equilibrium has two regimes separated by an endogenously determined time T. In [0, T), the insider gradually transfers her information to the market. By time T, all her information has been transferred and the price agrees with the market value of the asset. In the interval [T, ∞), the insider trades large volumes and reveals her information immediately, so market prices track the market value perfectly. Despite this market efficiency, the insider is able to collect strictly positive rents after T.     

Umgang mit der individuellen Krise einer Coaching-Klientin im Rahmen eines Job-Coaching

Handling a coachees individual crisis in the setting of a job-coachingThe author reports about an individual crisis in the setting of a job-coaching. The job-coaching is successful, so that after three sittings the coachee has achieved a job-contract. Three months later she asks for a follow-up-coaching, and it is becoming obvious that the coachee finds herself in a crisis. She feels socially isolated in the new city, she recognizes that she is less and less able to function and she suffers from feeling deficitary. By telling her concrete situation and by working on her resources within the crisis-coaching she is able to clarify her new situation, to see abilities to act and enlarge and strengthen them.     

Stimulating high performance in frontline staff

When the author of this article found herself in need of emergency medical help, her role reversed from physician to patient. Unlike many patients who are traumatized by an emergency department visit, Dr. Blumberg was pleased with her treatment. However, in later reviewing the experience with her nonphysician husband, she was amazed to learn that he was left with negative feelings about how he was treated by the frontline staff and about the appearance of the facility. As a result, Dr. Blumberg wrote this article detailing the importance of frontline staff performance and exploring ways staff can be motivated to gain maximum job and patient satisfaction.     

Generalized Utilitarianism and Harsanyi's Impartial Observer Theorem

Harsanyi's impartial observer must consider two types of lotteries: imaginary identity lotteries (“accidents of birth”) that she faces as herself and the real outcome lotteries (“life chances”) to be faced by the individuals she imagines becoming. If we maintain a distinction between identity and outcome lotteries, then Harsanyi‐like axioms yield generalized utilitarianism, and allow us to accommodate concerns about different individuals' risk attitudes and concerns about fairness. Requiring an impartial observer to be indifferent as to which individual should face similar risks restricts her social welfare function, but still allows her to accommodate fairness. Requiring an impartial observer to be indifferent between identity and outcome lotteries, however, forces her to ignore both fairness and different risk attitudes, and yields a new axiomatization of Harsanyi's utilitarianism.     

LEARNING TO REOPTIMIZE CONSUMPTION AT NEW INCOME LEVELS: A RATIONALE FOR PROSPECT THEORY

This paper provides a theoretical rationale for three experimental results of Prospect Theory: risk preferences are over gains and losses, loss aversion, and diminishing sensitivity. We consider a (boundedly rational) decision maker who does not find her new optimal consumption bundle with certainty when she is faced with a new income level. This alters her indirect utility function and makes her more risk averse at her current reference income level and less risk averse for a range of incomes below her reference income level. (JEL: D11)     

Penrose's The Theory of the Growth of the Firm: An Exemplar of Engaged Scholarship

Edith Penrose's (1959) classic book, The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, made a substantial impact on strategic management research, especially in the context of the resource‐based view of the firm, and the ripple effects of her impact continue to unfold today in various disciplines. The book serves as a remarkably rich source of inspiration for scholarly research and a generative source of ideas, which are poised to be further developed. In this study, we examine Penrose's (1959) classic and provide: (1) the process by which this book came about; (2) a summary of its key ideas; (3) some implications for operations management research; (4) the subsequent impact of the book, in which we focus on mathematical models; and (5) a discussion of some of the research lessons learned from this exemplar of engaged scholarship. We invite management science and operations scholars to discover the rich scientific world of Edith Penrose and experience the product and process of her research creativity.     

Theory as Fantasy: Emotional Dimensions to Grounded Theory

In this paper we discuss emotions and fantasies that inform and influence the project of theory building. Our argument is that theory building can be improved by engaging directly with emotions and with fantasies that are defensively and creatively generated by the researcher. Once acknowledged, these can be transformed into ideas and insights. We provide an example of the emotional dynamics surrounding a novice researcher's use of grounded theory within her doctoral research. We highlight three distinctive researcher fantasies of containment, coherence and purity associated with her experience of the method. We discuss how engagement with these fantasies deepened the researcher's analysis and thereby enhanced the process of building theory from the data. Therefore, our paper contributes to an understanding of how fantasies mobilized by such an open‐ended research method can help to refine our thinking about emerging theory.     

网络外部性对双渠道供应链信息分享的影响

研究了网络外部性对双渠道供应链信息分享的影响。分别建立了存在网络外部性和不存在网络外部性下的双渠道供应链模型,通过比较零售商信息分享和不分享下其与制造商的期望利润。研究发现：当未考虑产品的网络外部性时,零售商不与制造商分享其市场需求信息,与已有研究一致。当考虑了产品网络外部性且网络外部性较小时,零售商仍不与制造商分享市场需求信息;然而,当网络外部性较大时,零售商与制造商分享其市场需求信息。此外,零售商与制造商共享其市场需求信息有助于增加制造商和供应链利润。     

Should an OEM Retain Component Procurement when the CM Produces Competing Products?

We consider a large original equipment manufacturer (OEM) who relies on a contract manufacturer (CM) to produce her product. In addition to the OEM's product, the CM also produces for a smaller OEM. Both the larger OEM and the CM can purchase the component from the supplier, but their purchase prices may differ and remain unknown to each other. The main question we address is whether the larger OEM should retain component procurement by purchasing components from the supplier and reselling to the CM (buy–sell), or outsource component procurement by letting the CM purchase directly from the supplier (turnkey). We show that, under buy–sell, the larger OEM's optimal strategy is to resell components at the highest possible component purchase price of the CM (i.e., the street price). By comparing buy–sell and turnkey, we find that a CM with low component price is better off under turnkey, even though under buy–sell he receives more profits through the products sold to the smaller OEM. Furthermore, the larger OEM's preference between buy–sell and turnkey depends on her component price, the volatility of the CM's component price and substitutability between the two products.     

A Unique Costly Contemplation Representation

We study preferences over menus which can be represented as if the individual is uncertain of her tastes, but is able to engage in costly contemplation before selecting an alternative from a menu. Since contemplation is costly, our key axiom, aversion to contingent planning, reflects the individual's preference to learn the menu from which she will be choosing prior to engaging in contemplation about her tastes for the alternatives. Our representation models contemplation strategies as subjective signals over a subjective state space. The subjectivity of the state space and the information structure in our representation makes it difficult to identify them from the preference. To overcome this issue, we show that each signal can be modeled in reduced form as a measure over ex post utility functions without reference to a state space. We show that in this reduced‐form representation, the set of measures and their costs are uniquely identified. Finally, we provide a measure of comparative contemplation costs and characterize the special case of our representation where contemplation is costless.