Limited information about the demand for some of the resources needed to produce goods and services (e.g., incomplete and imperfect bills of materials) forces firms to use heuristics when planning resource capacity. We examine the performance of five heuristics: two drawn from practice, two that...

Matching talents to tasks is an important part of job design. Organizations routinely use performance thresholds to group agents by talent. We see thresholds defined both in terms of an individual's own performance (absolute value) and in terms of peer performance (percentile). Intuition...

Opportunity cost is a central concept in decision making. It is difficult to measure because it is the value associated with opportunities foregone. In this paper, we characterize three time-based dimensions of resources to help understand and estimate opportunity costs. These dimensions capture...

The academic and practitioner literature justifies firms' use of product costs in product pricing and capacity planning decisions as heuristics to address an otherwise intractable problem. However, product costs are the output of a cost reporting system, which itself is the outcome of heuristic...

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>Drawing on transaction cost economics and institutional theory we argue that the effects of institutional constraints on the transaction costs of outsourcing vary systematically with the type of service outsourced and the ownership structure of the outsourcing firm. Using data from...

Intuition tends to guide model formulation, as it is generally impossible to consider all dimensions of a problem. The ability to surprise, heightening the focus on paradox and the contradiction of reality, is therefore more useful than a literal representation of reality. While numerical...