Organizational Structure and Managerial Decisions

We investigate how the organizational structure of a firm influences the decision making of its top management. Different organizational structures lead information to be processed in different ways by the individual decision makers, potentially creating an informational cascade within the organization. We analyze two organizational structures: the first inducing sequential information processing, the second inducing batch information processing. In particular, we characterize the optimal organizational structure using the signal precision of the top manager, i.e., the value of his private information.     

Adam Smith's use of multiple references for his pin making example∗

Abstract

At the beginning of The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith describes a pin factory. It is widely accepted that this example comes from Diderot's Encyclopaedia, published in France in the 18th century. The details in the text together with the conferences previously given in Glasgow clearly show that this one reference cannot be the only source. Three other French publications on pin making may also have been used as references for Adam Smith's text. Phrase by phrase these texts are compared to Smith's to support the assertion that he based his work on four previous French publications. The Wealth of Nations unites and synthesizes these different sources and excerpts those parts that confirm his theory. Smith should have listed his sources.     

Finite-dimensional utilities

Summary. Sufficient axioms are identified for the existence of a finite- dimensional quasilinear utility function whose lexicographically ordered vectors preserve a decision maker's preference order on a mixture set . It is shown that those axioms are also necessary for the linear lexicographic representation when the underlying set is a mixture space. Received: August 20, 1998; revised version: December 14, 1998     

基于可得性和消耗率的备件订货策略研究

对机器维修保养所需备件的订货策略进行了研究,基于备件的可得性和消耗率,将备件分为四类:关键备件、重要备件、一般备件和特殊备件,针对不同的备件,给出了不同的订货策略。     

Role thinking: Standing in other people’s shoes to forecast decisions in conflicts

When forecasting decisions in conflict situations, experts are often advised to figuratively stand in the other person’s shoes. We refer to this as “role thinking”, because, in practice, the advice is to think about how other protagonists will view the situation in order to predict their decisions. We tested the effect of role thinking on forecast accuracy. We obtained 101 role-thinking forecasts of the decisions that would be made in nine diverse conflicts from 27 Naval postgraduate students (experts) and 107 role-thinking forecasts from 103 second-year organizational behavior students (novices). The accuracy of the novices’ forecasts was 33% and that of the experts’ was 31%; both were little different from chance (guessing), which was 28%. The small improvement in accuracy from role-thinking strengthens the finding from earlier research that it is not sufficient to think hard about a situation in order to predict the decisions which groups of people will make when they are in conflict. Instead, it is useful to ask groups of role players to simulate the situation. When groups of novice participants adopted the roles of protagonists in the aforementioned nine conflicts and interacted with each other, their group decisions predicted the actual decisions with an accuracy of 60%.