The Effects of Marital Culture and Social Structure on Marital Aspirations and Attitudes in “Fragile Families”

This research brings together insights from the fields of sociology and social work, providing an integrated study of marriage as a cultural and structural institution. The goals of the study are twofold: first, to empirically assess the predictive power of cultural versus structural elements of marital aspirations and attitudes among “fragile families”; second, to determine if the aforementioned relationship and outcomes differ by immigrant status. The results offer more support for the role of structure than the function of culture, suggesting that rather than demonizing disadvantaged families for having “defective” cultural values, policy planners and human service providers should recognize the importance of educational attainment and economic productivity in fragile families. Even populations most disposed to hold more “traditional” views of marriage and family life are constrained by the realities of structural disadvantage.     

Determinants of Educational Attainment in Rural Thailand: A Life Course Approach

Using data from rural Thailand, we examine the determinants of educational attainment of school-age children. We organize our analysis around three central principles of the life course perspective: the embeddedness of lives in historical time and place, linked or interconnected lives, and the timing of lives. We examine these principles using comparisons within cohorts and between cohorts. We find that educational attainment is related to a combination of factors related to each of these principles. Specifically, despite a serious economic downturn occurring midway through our study, we nonetheless found that educational levels were higher following the downturn than preceding it. Interconnections to parents and siblings also affected educational outcomes, as did the timing of life events such as migration, marriage, and childbearing. For the latter, mother??s education and migration both positively affected educational attainment. For the former, having more siblings, both those in the household and those migrating, reduced education.     

Assortment Optimization under the Multinomial Logit Model with Random Choice Parameters

We consider assortment optimization problems under the multinomial logit model, where the parameters of the choice model are random. The randomness in the choice model parameters is motivated by the fact that there are multiple customer segments, each with different preferences for the products, and the segment of each customer is unknown to the firm when the customer makes a purchase. This choice model is also called the mixture‐of‐logits model. The goal of the firm is to choose an assortment of products to offer that maximizes the expected revenue per customer, across all customer segments. We establish that the problem is NP complete even when there are just two customer segments. Motivated by this complexity result, we focus on assortments consisting of products with the highest revenues, which we refer to as revenue‐ordered assortments. We identify specially structured cases of the problem where revenue‐ordered assortments are optimal. When the randomness in the choice model parameters does not follow a special structure, we derive tight approximation guarantees for revenue‐ordered assortments. We extend our model to the multi‐period capacity allocation problem, and prove that, when restricted to the revenue‐ordered assortments, the mixture‐of‐logits model possesses the nesting‐by‐fare‐order property. This result implies that revenue‐ordered assortments can be incorporated into existing revenue management systems through nested protection levels. Numerical experiments show that revenue‐ordered assortments perform remarkably well, generally yielding profits that are within a fraction of a percent of the optimal.