Marital relationships and purchasing decisions — to buy or not to buy,that is the question

Wives and husbands from 47 households rated their wellbeing in situations, where they imagined either to buy or not to buy a desired product, with their spouse either agreeing or disagreeing with the purchase. The product was female-specific for wives and male-specific for husbands. For 23 households the product was relatively cheap, for 24 households the subjects imagined to desire an expensive commodity. The approach was similar to Kelley and Thibaut's (1978) analysis of interdependence matrices. The data, in general, support the following hypotheses: (a) When the partner objects the purchase, the utility of the product will outweigh the perceived social costs more for husbands than for wives, especially in male-dominated families; (b) the wife's wellbeing with purchase decisions will depend more than her husband's wellbeing upon the partner's agreement, especially in male-dominated families, (c) the husband's wellbeing in conflict (buying a product despite the partner's objection) will be positively related with his dominance and vice versa; (d) mutual appraisal of situations will correspond higher in happy than in unhappy couples.The results are discussed with respect to differences in male and female strategies to cope with authority and social emotions in buying decisions. Shortcomings of economic theories on determinants of family consumer decisions are pointed out.     

Charakterisierungen der exponential-und der geometrischen verteilung

A charecterization of the exponential distribution and of the geometrical distribution by means of independence of min (X, Y), max (0, X - Y) is given.     

Aus Fehlern Iernen

Learning from blunders. Experiences of an executive coach with problems and solutionsNot too often, even rarely, we are in a situation to talk about blunders or shortcomings within our coaching community. That really is a pity, because a discussion like this combined with reflection and feed back is the best and only way for a coach to avoid professional mistakes in his future. So this article is “somehow another kind” of contribution. The author reports his own 18 years of “blunder-experience” as well as professional mistakes of other coaches which he observed in mentor coachings and supervisions, he suggests outcomes, consequences and solutions. Topics are: Anger, aggression and “struggles of power” within the coaching process; dependence versus (internal) independence of a coach; transference and counter-transference within the coaching process; peanut politics within a coaching process. Result: the coach himself, his core values, his boldness directed to social risks and to natural consequences — combined with appreciative conversation and respecting clients — makes out the core dissolving capacity. Without mentor coaching and professional supervision every coach would be trapped into his personal “trap of mistakes” — and even worse: without recognizing this dilemma.     

Paradox Research in Management Science: Looking Back to Move Forward

Paradox studies offer vital and timely insights into an array of organizational tensions. Yet this field stands at a critical juncture. Over the past 25 years, management scholars have drawn foundational insights from philosophy and psychology to apply a paradox lens to organizational phenomena. Yet extant studies selectively leverage ancient wisdom, adopting some key insights while abandoning others. Using a structured content analysis to review the burgeoning management literature, we surface six key themes, which represent the building blocks of a meta-theory of paradox. These six themes received varying attention in extant studies: paradox scholars emphasize types of paradoxes, collective approaches, and outcomes, but pay less attention to relationships within paradoxes, individual approaches, and dynamics. As this analysis suggests, management scholars have increasingly simplified the intricate, often messy phenomena of paradox. Greater simplicity renders phenomena understandable and testable, however, oversimplifying complex realities can foster reductionist and incomplete theories. We therefore propose a future research agenda targeted at enriching a meta-theory of paradox by reengaging these less developed themes. Doing so can sharpen the focus of this field, while revisiting its rich conceptual roots to capture the intricacies of paradox. This future research agenda leverages the potential of paradox across diverse streams of management science.     

Coordinating Service‐Sensitive Demand and Capacity by Adaptive Decision Making: An Application of Case‐Based Decision Theory*

The subject of this article is the simultaneous choice of product price and manufacturing capacity if demand is stochastic and service‐level sensitive. In this setting, capacity as well as price have an impact on demand because several aspects of service level depend on capacity. For example, delivery time will be reduced if capacity is increased given a constant demand rate. We illustrate the relationship between service level, capacity, and demand reaction by a stylized application problem from the after‐sales services industry. The reaction of customers to variations in service level and price is represented by a kinked price‐demand‐rate function. We first derive the optimal price‐capacity combination for the resulting decision problem under full information. Subsequently, we focus on a decision maker (DM) who lacks complete knowledge of the demand function. Hence the DM is unable to anticipate the service level and consequently cannot identify the optimal solution. However, the DM will acquire additional information during the sales process and use it in subsequent revisions of the price‐capacity decision. Thus, this decision making is adaptive and based on experience. In contrast to the literature, which assumes certain repetitive procedures somewhat ad hoc, we develop an adaptive decision process based on case‐based decision theory (CBDT) for the price‐capacity problem. Finally, we show that a CBDT DM in our setting eventually finds the optimal solution, if the DM sets the price based on absorption costs and adequately adjusts the capacity with respect to the observed demand.     

Importance sampling for Kolmogorov backward equations

The solution of the Kolmogorov backward equation is expressed as a functional integral by means of the Feynman–Kac formula. The expectation value is approximated as a mean over trajectories. In order to reduce the variance of the estimate, importance sampling is utilized. From the optimal importance density, a modified drift function is derived which is used to simulate optimal trajectories from an Itô equation. The method is applied to option pricing and the simulation of transition densities and likelihoods for diffusion processes. The results are compared to known exact solutions and results obtained by numerical integration of the path integral using Euler transition kernels. The importance sampling leads to strong variance reduction, even if the unknown solution appearing in the drift is replaced by known reference solutions. In models with low-dimensional state space, the numerical integration method is more efficient, but in higher dimensions it soon becomes infeasible, whereas the Monte Carlo method still works.     

Infants’ learning of non-adjacent regularities from visual sequences

Tracking adjacent (AD) and non-adjacent (NAD) dependencies in a sequence of elements is critical for the development of many complex abilities, such as language acquisition and social interaction. While learning of AD in infancy is a domain-general ability that is functioning across different domains, infants’ processing of NAD has been reported only for speech sequences. Here, we tested 9- to 12- and 13- to 15-month-olds’ ability to extract AxB grammars in visual sequences of unfamiliar elements. Infants were habituated to a series of 3-visual arrays following an AxB grammar in which the first element (A) predicted the third element (B), while intervening X elements changed continuously. Following habituation, infants were tested with 3-item arrays in which initial and final positions were switched (novel) or kept consistent with the habituation phase (familiar). Older infants successfully recognized the familiar AxB grammar at test, whereas the younger group showed some sensitivity to extract to NAD, albeit in a less robust form. This finding provides the first evidence that the ability to track NAD is a domain-general ability that is present also in the visual domain and that the sensitivity to such dependencies is related to developmental changes, as demonstrated in the auditory domain.