Each year, multi-stage auctions of one form or another sell or let billions of dollars worth of goods and contracts. Yet despite the significance of such auctions, the existing theory of auctions and competitive bidding fails to explain why a bid taker might prefer a multi-stage auction to a,...

This paper presents a critical reflection on dynamic consistency as commonly used in economics and decision theory, and on the difficulty to test it experimentally. It distinguishes between the uses of the term dynamic consistency in order to characterize two different properties: the first...

This paper studies markets, such as Internet marketplaces for used cars or mortgages, in which consumers engage in sequential search. In particular, we consider the impact of information-brokers (experts) who can, for a fee, provide better information on true values of opportunities. We...

Risk aversion is a prevalent phenomenon when sufficiently large amounts are at risk. In this paper, we introduce a new prescriptive approach for coping with risk in sequential decision problems with discrete scenario space. We use Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) risk measure as optimization...

This article uses data from NASCAR to examine strategic decision making with professional players and high stakes. The authors look at driver decisions to pit, enabling car performance to be improved at the cost of track position. Unlike other sports choices that have been used to test...

We deal with the multi-attribute decision problem with sequentially presented decision alternatives. Our decision model is based on the assumption that the decision-maker has a major attribute that must be “optimized” and minor attributes that must be “satisficed”. In the vendor...

This experimental study investigates the inuence of irrelevant or phantom al- ternatives on subjects' choices in sequential decision making. Using experimental data from 45 subjects, we found that irrelevant alternatives bear significant rele- vance for decision making. We observe that only 38%...

This paper investigates the existence of an editing phase and studies the com- pliance of subjects' behaviour with the most popular multiattribute decision rules. We observed that our data comply well with the existence of an editing phase, at least if we allow for a natural error rate of some...

In this paper, we analyze a variety of approaches to obtain lower bounds for multi-level production planning problems with big bucket capacities, i.e., problems in which multiple items compete for the same resources. We give an extensive survey of both known and new methods, and also establish...