The dissertation addresses optimization problems related to the management of product variety with inventory considerations. The objective is to provide insights and tools to help companies determine the optimal level of product variety they should produce/stock and maximize revenues by...

Since the cognitive ability to process information is limited, people often rely on stereotypes to help them make sense of their social environment. These knowledge structures allow people to utilize past experiences and social learning to infer the characteristics and behaviors of individual...

Central to the explosive growth of the Internet has been the desire of dispersed buyers and sellers to interact readily and in a manner hitherto impossible. Underpinning these interactions, auction pricing mechanisms have enabled Internet transactions in novel ways. Despite this massive...

I develop an empirical model that estimates a firm-specific accrual noise ratio (ANR), an operational and statistically grounded measure of accrual reliability, and test the measure's construct validity. The model allows accrual reliability to vary across firms, which is particularly important...

This dissertation focuses on managerial decision making, and specifically explores conditions wherein managers may increase their propensity to escalate commitment towards a failing project. Escalation researchers (e.g. Schmidt and Calantone, 2002) have listed four classes of factors that may...

The ability to digitize information goods such as music and movies and the growing accessibility of the Internet has led to online piracy and the emergence of a new class of retailers that specialize in digital downloads. Both online piracy and digital retailers have changed the dynamics of the...

Probability forecasts play an important role in many decision and risk analysis applications. Research and practice over the years have shown that the shift towards distributional forecasts provides a more accurate and appropriate means of capturing risk in models for these applications. This...

Organizational Capital Budgeting Model (OCBM) is a general theory of capital budgeting that incorporates traditional capital budgeting theories and the consideration about firm's information/ organization structure. The traditional financial capital budgeting model is a special case of OCBM....

Although many studies have documented that in-store displays and feature advertising can significantly increase brand choice probabilities, the mechanism through which they affect the choice decision process is not well understood. The marketing literature has suggested two prominent decision...

People are inaccurate judges of how their abilities compare to others’. Kruger and Dunning (1999; 2002) argue that most inaccuracy is attributable to unskilled performers’ lack of metacognitive skill to evaluate their performance. They overestimate their standing, whereas skilled performers...