Several writers have attempted to explain why the analytical approaches of economics and operations research do not seem to have been widely adopted by companies. This paper is an attempt to explain a particular example of this general phenomenon; it was stimulated by recent research at...

In this paper we study "investment tournaments," a class of decision problems that involve gradual allocation of investment among several alternatives whose values are subject to exogenous shocks. The decision-maker's payoff is determined by the final values of the alternatives. An important...

Revealed preferences are tastes that rationalize an economic agent's observed actions. Normative preferences represent the agent's actual interests. It sometimes makes sense to assume that revealed preferences are identical to normative preferences. But there are many cases where this assumption...