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The recent influx of migrants and refugees into Europe and elsewhere raises questions as to whether migrant behavior reflects cultural predispositions and whether assimilation through exposure to host institutions can be expected. The paper focuses on financial behavior and uses high-quality administrative data on migrants and refugees to Sweden. It uncovers differences across cultural groups in how behavior relates to household characteristics, and shows that differences diminish with exposure to host country institutions, even for large cultural distances. Interestingly, robust cultural classification of European countries based on genetic distance or on Hofstede's cultural dimensions fails to identify a single 'southern' culture but points to a 'northern' culture. Our results also have implications for the potential of European institutional harmonization, exogenously imposed during the fiscal crisis, to alleviate cultural differences in financial behavior. This paper was accepted by Lauren Cohen, finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospect Theory's value function suggests that investors would be risk averse in the gain domain and risk seeking in the loss domain—that is, the reflection effect. However, most of the experimental evidence relies on choice tasks in the gain domain between prospects marked in dollar amounts and considering non-mixed lotteries. There is not much work that examines environments with properties typical in investment decisions where the task is fund allocation involving mixed lotteries with outcomes being rate of return. The recent negative deposit rates in Europe demonstrate the importance of this question and, in particular, understanding investment decisions in the loss domain. This paper fills this gap by using a series of laboratory experiments mimicking these properties of investment decisions with a range of investment amounts and with the money to invest either being earned and literally on the table or not. Yet, no matter the settings, we find no evidence for the reflection effect in investment, and behavior is most consistent with maximizing expected return. This holds regardless of the language used (abstract or not), whether we use a two- or a three-state lottery, whether the task is continuous rather than discrete, or the risky portfolio is a mixed lottery. This paper was accepted by Chen Yan, decision analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a new framework to identify demand elasticities in markets where managers rely on algorithmic recommendations for price setting and apply it to a data set containing bookings for a sample of midsized hotels in Europe. Using nonbinding algorithmic price recommendations and observed delay in price adjustments by decision makers, we demonstrate that a control-function approach, combined with state-of-the-art model-selection techniques, can be used to isolate exogenous price variation and identify demand elasticities across hotel room types and over time. We confirm these elasticity estimates with a difference-in-differences approach that leverages the same delays in price adjustments by decision makers. However, the difference-in-differences estimates are more noisy and only yield consistent estimates if data are pooled across hotels. We then apply our control-function approach to two classic questions in the dynamic pricing literature: the evolution of price elasticity of demand over and the effects of a transitory price change on future demand due to the presence of strategic buyers. Finally, we discuss how our empirical framework can be applied directly to other decision-making situations in which recommendation systems are used. This paper was accepted by Omar Besbes, revenue management and market analytics. Funding: D. Garcia acknowledges financial support from the Austrian Science Fund [Single Project "Understanding Consumer Search" FWF-P 30922]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4261. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect on product development of project scope: the extent to which a new product is based on unique parts developed in-house. Using data from a larger study of product development in the world auto industry, the paper presents evidence on the impact of scope on lead time and engineering productivity. Studies of the automotive supplier industry suggest that very different structures and relationships exist in Japan, the U.S., and Europe. Yet there has been little study of the impact of these differences on development performance. Further, little is known about the effects of different parts strategies (i.e. unique versus common or carryover parts) on development. The evidence presented here suggests that project scope differs significantly in the industry, even for comparable products. These differences in strategy, in turn, explain an important part of differences in performance. In particular, it appears that a distinctive approach to scope among Japanese firms--high levels of unique parts, intensive supplier involvement in engineering--accounts for a significant fraction of their advantage in lead time and cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The general data protection regulation (GDPR) represents a dramatic shift in global privacy regulation. We focus on GDPR's enhanced consumer consent requirements that aim to provide transparent and active elicitation of data allowances. We evaluate the effect of enhanced consent on consumer opt-in behavior and on firm behavior and outcomes after consent is solicited. Utilizing an experiment at a large telecommunications provider with operations in Europe, we find that opt-in for different data types and uses increased once GDPR-compliant consent was elicited. However, consumers did not uniformly increase data allowances and continued to generally restrict permissions for more sensitive or tangential uses of their personal information. We also find that sales, the efficacy of marketing communications, and contractual lock-in increased after consumers provided new data allowances. Additional analysis suggests that these gains to the firm emerged because new data allowances enabled them to increase their use of targeted marketing for households that were amenable to these marketing efforts. These results have significant implications for firms and policymakers and suggest that enhanced consent provided via GDPR may be effective for increasing consumer privacy protection while also allowing firms reliant on consumers' personal information to improve outcomes. This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides management science related news from Europe. British members of The Institute of Management Science should note that application has been made to the Chief Inspector of Taxes for full exemption of membership dues as a tax deductible item. A symposium on simulation will be held at Brunel College on May 10-11, 1966. Symposium details are presented. An operations research conference is scheduled for April 12-14, 1966 at the University of Lancaster.

We develop a multistakeholder, multicriteria decision-making framework for Eurocontrol, the European air traffic management organization, for evaluating and selecting operational improvement to the air traffic management system. The selected set of improvements will form the master plan of the Single European Sky initiative for harmonizing air traffic, in an effort to cope with the forecasted increase in air traffic, while maintaining safety, protecting the environment, and improving predictability and efficiency. The challenge is to select the set of enhancements such that the required performance targets are met and all key stakeholders are committed to the decisions. In this paper, we develop and implement a model to identify a preferred set of improvements to the arrival and departure procedures to and from airports. We provide an integrated approach for valuing a large number of alternatives, while considering interactions among them. The model combines quantitative and qualitative expert assessments of the possible enhancements and identifies commonalities and differences in the stakeholders' perspectives, ultimately recommending a preferred course of action. The model is currently being adopted by Eurocontrol as the formal trade-off analysis methodology supporting all enhancements' decision-making discussions throughout the construction of the master plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a direct empirical examination of the fundamental claim that use of templates enhances the effectiveness of knowledge transfer. We explore the effect of template use through an eight-year, in-depth field investigation of Rank Xerox (now Xerox Europe). The field investigation covers three sequential transfer efforts in 15 western European countries. The investigation reveals a naturally occurring, repeated-treatment quasi experiment that allows us to test the hypothesis that the use of templates enhances the effectiveness of knowledge transfer. "Observations" in this experiment measure the extent of adoption and performance of the practice at the recipient units. The "treatment" is the use of a template during the transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents news briefs from Europe relative to management science. British members of The Institute of Management Science (TIMS) will be granted full exemption for their membership dues, as confirmed by the Principal Inspector of Taxes, Inland Revenue. Antonio Valero has been named president of the Administrative Council of the European Association of Management Training Centers. The Operational Research Society will hold its annual conference in England from September 20-22, 1966.

Path dependent securities depend on current and past values of underlying state variables. Consequently, the usual backward evaluation technique is difficult to apply since state variable values existing earlier in real time are unknown. This paper develops a series of propositions which makes possible the pricing of a certain class of both American and European versions of these path dependent securities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the rate of diffusion of flexible manufacturing systems, one of the most important industrial applications of information technology. Using data from about 175 firms, I analyze diffusion rates in Japan, Western Europe and the United States, a major purpose being to determine whether, as is often claimed, U.S. firms have been relatively slow to introduce this innovation, and if so, why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We draw on diverse data sets to compare the institutional organization of upstream life science research across the United States and Europe. Understanding cross-national differences in the organization of innovative labor in the life sciences requires attention to the structure and evolution of biomedical networks involving public research organizations (universities, government laboratories, nonprofit research institutes, and research hospitals), science-based biotechnology firms, and multinational pharmaceutical corporations. We use network visualization methods and correspondence analyses to demonstrate that innovative research in biomedicine has its origins in regional clusters in the United States and in European nations. But the scientific and organizational composition of these regions varies in consequential ways. In the United States, public research organizations and small firms conduct R&D across multiple therapeutic areas and stages of the development process. Ties within and across these regions link small firms and diverse public institutions, contributing to the development of a robust national network. In contrast, the European story is one of regional specialization with a less diverse group of public research organizations working in a smaller number of therapeutic areas. European institutes develop local connections to small firms working on similar scientific problems, while cross-national linkages of European regional clusters typically involve large pharmaceutical corporations. We show that the roles of large and small firms differ in the United States and Europe, arguing that the greater heterogeneity of the U.S. system is based on much closer integration of basic science and clinical development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides management science related news from Europe. L'Association Francaise d'Informatique et de Reserche Operationelle is developing a seminar on "l'Information Documentaire." An International Symposium on Mathematical & Computational Methods in Social Sciences will be held in Rome from July 4-8, 1966 under the auspices of the International Computation Centre in Rome. A seminar on Graph Theory will also follow the Symposium in Rome from July 8-12, 1966.