Search

In this issue, we reproduce 10 of the most important papers published in Management Science from 1954 to 2003. Each paper is followed by a commentary by the author(s) and other scholars that offers insights into the background, creation, or subsequent impact of the paper. Key words: history of Management Science; 50th anniversary, During the past year, the editors of Management Science have commemorated the journal's 50th anniversary in a variety of ways. In each issue, we have published a retrospective article on [...]

The introduction of a new editorial board is a unique opportunity to evaluate the reputation, stature, and health of the journal. It is also an opportunity to examine its mission, [...]

The department invites submissions that advance knowledge of how to better organize and manage the delivery of healthcare services in developed, emerging, or developing economies. Papers will offer rigorously evaluated [...]

The Decision Analysis Department seeks papers that promote the understanding of how decisions are and should be made. Thus, the scope of the department includes topics that are traditional Decision [...]

The Operations Management department publishes research in established areas of operations management such as supply chain management, production planning, service operations, revenue management, quality management, behavioral operations, workforce staffing, and [...]

In this paper we explore the degree to which patents are representative of the magnitude, direction, and impact of the knowledge spilling out of the university by focusing on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and in particular, on the Departments of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, we show that patenting is a minority activity: a majority of the faculty in our sample never patent, and publication rates far outstrip patenting rates. Most faculty members estimate that patents account for less than 10% of the knowledge that transfers from their labs. Our results also suggest that in two important ways patenting is not representative of the patterns of knowledge generation and transfer from MIT: patent volume does not predict publication volume, and those firms that cite MIT papers are in general not the same firms as those that cite MIT patents. However, patent volume is positively correlated with paper citations, suggesting that patent counts may be reasonable measures of research impact. We close by speculating on the implications of our results for the difficult but important question of whether, in this setting, patenting acts as a substitute or a complement to the process of fundamental research., 1. Introduction While there is a widespread belief that publicly funded research conducted at universities has a significant impact on the rate of economic growth, estimating the magnitude and describing [...]

This department considers research on entrepreneurship and innovation. Entrepreneurship includes new business creation as well as entrepreneurial activities undertaken within existing businesses or through new market mechanisms. Innovation includes novel [...]

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Management Science. We take this opportunity to trace the history of the Marketing Department in Management Science, outline the role that the Marketing Department has played in supporting management science research in Marketing, its impact on the field, and its plans for the future. Key words: marketing, The Marketing Department in Management Science was initiated in 1969 when the Editor-in-Chief Martin Starr of Columbia University created the first departmental structure. As such, Marketing was one of the [...]

When do scientists and other innovators organize into collaborative teams, and why do they do so for some projects and not others? At the core of this important organizational choice is, we argue, a trade-off scientists make between the productive efficiency of collaboration and the credit allocation that arises after the completion of collaborative work. In this paper, we explore this trade-off by developing a model to structure our understanding of the factors shaping researcher collaborative choices, in particular the implicit allocation of credit among participants in scientific projects. We then use the annual research activity of 661 faculty scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over a 31-year period to explore the trade-off between collaboration and reward at the individual faculty level and to infer critical parameters in the collaborative organization of scientific work. Keywords: science; collaboration; academic science; productivity; scientific credit History: Received September 19, 2011; accepted June 25, 2014, by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation. Published online in Articles in Advance February 27, 2015., 1. Introduction In 2008, the Journal of Instrumentation published a paper entitled 'The ATLAS Experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider,' documenting the installation and expected performance of the ATLAS [...]

This article is an introduction to the focused issue on entrepreneurship. It provides motivation for greater scholarly investigation of the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, explains the evolution of the focused issue, offers an overview of the seven papers in the issue, and offers the editor's thoughts on the relationship of the papers in the focused issue to research on entrepreneurship in general., Introduction Entrepreneurship is an important part of the world economic system. In most capitalist economies, large numbers of people engage in entrepreneurial activity, whether by founding new firms; creating new [...]

This paper reconsiders the wide agreement that females are more risk averse than males. We survey the existing experimental literature, finding that significance and magnitude of gender differences are task specific. We gather data from 54 replications of the Holt and Laury risk elicitation method, involving about 7,000 subjects. Gender differences appear in less than 10% of the studies and are significant but negligible in magnitude once all the data are pooled. Results are confirmed by structural estimations, which also support a constant relative risk aversion representation of preferences. Gender differences correlate with the presence of a safe option and fixed probabilities in the elicitation method. Keywords: gender; risk; survey; meta-analysis History. Received November 25, 2014; accepted July 10, 2015, by John List, behavioral economics. Published online in Articles in Advance February 16, 2016., 1. Introduction Gender differences in risk preferences are often regarded as a stylised fact in the economics and psychology literature. Many studies as well as the available meta-analyses find that [...]

It is truly an honor to be named Editor of Management Science, and I eagerly look forward to serving this distinguished journal. This letter outlines my strategy for further enhancing [...]

The Operations Management Department publishes research in established areas of operations management such as inventory management, process design and improvement, production planning, quality management, service operations, supply chain management, and [...]

The Optimization Department seeks contributions on all aspects of optimization and its applications, especially papers that bridge the gap between different fields and connect the dots to bring new tools [...]

Stiving (2000) proposes an interesting model to explain price-endings. His analysis shows that even when customer demand increases at 9-ending price points, certain firms that use high prices to signal quality are more likely to set those prices at round numbers. This comment raises two issues about the model. First, it appears that the original paper imposes a condition that has the effect of eliminating a broad range of legitimate separating equilibria from the analyses. Second, it appears that the original model does not include constraints to ensure that the demand for each market segment will be nonnegative. When these constraints on demand are included, one obtains different aggregate demand curves, which leads to different equilibrium prices. Using the revised model and analysis, we find that 71% of the prices end in 9 and only 12% in 0. This contrasts with only 3% ending in 9 and 58% ending in 0 for the original study. Therefore, 9-endings still prevail even though high prices can be used by firms to signal high quality. (Pricing; Price-Ending; Signaling; Game Theory), 1. Introduction In a recent paper, Stiving (2000) presents an interesting model to predict or explain why many prices end in a 9 or a 0. The paper proposes that [...]

Management Science is a scholarly journal that publishes scientific research on the practice of management. Therefore, papers published in Management Science should deal with issues and problems important to managers [...]

When the simulation department of Management Science was created in 1978 it ushered in an era of significant methodological advances in stochastic simulation. However, the foundation for the field--not just the work that has been published in Management Science--was provided by two papers published long before simulation had its own department in the journal. We will review the seminal papers of Conway, Johnson, and Maxwell (1959) and Conway (1963), and then trace their impact through eight award-winning papers that appeared much later in Management Science. Key words: simulation; experiment design; output analysis; variance reduction; regenerative model, 1. Two Seminal Papers Our objective is to discuss the technique of digital system simulation. This procedure has already achieved a considerable stature in industrial and research organizations and promises [...]

The Finance Department seeks papers on topics that deal with the finance area broadly defined. We are looking for work that is creative, insightful, and significant. Papers must be technically [...]

This concludes a two-part commentary on management science and e-business, the theme of this two-part special issue. After reviewing the topical clusters that give organization to both parts, we sketch the papers appearing in this second part from the perspective of two key questions concerning the impact of the emerging digital economy on management science research: What fundamentally new research questions arise, and what kind of research enables progress on them. We then offer summary comments on the second question based on the papers in both parts. The principal conclusions are that, in meeting the challenges posed by the digital economy, management science researchers are (a) making greater use of parts of economics and computer science/information technology, and (b) exploiting the improving productivity advantages of empirical and methodological work in comparison with theoretical work. (E-Business; Information Infrastructure; Online Markets; Management Science), 1. Introduction This continues our commentary on management science and e-business, the subject of this two-part special issue. As explained in the first part of this commentary (Geoffrion and Krishnan [...]

What makes a decision strategic? When is strategy most important? This paper formally studies these questions, starting from a (functional) definition of strategy as the smallest set of choices to optimally guide (or force) other choices. The paper shows that this definition coincides with the equilibrium outcome of a "strategy formulation game," in which such strategy endogenously creates a hierarchy among decisions. With respect to what makes a decision strategic and what makes strategy valuable, the paper considers the effect of commitment, reliability, and irreversibility of a decision; the presence of uncertainty (and the type of uncertainty); the number and strength of its interactions and the centrality of a decision; its level and importance; the development of capabilities; and competition. History: Accepted by Bruno Cassiman, business strategy. Keywords: firm strategy * competitive strategy * coordination * capabilities * commitment * leadership * group decisions, 1. Introduction Judging from the more than 70,000 management books on the topic (Kiechel 2010), strategy is an issue of great interest to business. But the importance of strategy--in its [...]

We are thrilled to introduce the special issue of Management Science, titled "Behavioral Economics and Finance." The theories underlying finance and economics have long relied on behavioral assumptions. After all, [...]

My interest in jobshop manufacturing led me to the basic subject matter of this paper. It was the second of two closely related papers; the first was 'Networks of Queues,' [...]

Interest in the issues of organizational learning and knowledge management on the part of academics and practitioners increased dramatically in recent years. On the practical side, changes in technology and [...]

There has been recent debate about whether prospect theory can explain the disposition effect. Using both theory and simulation, this paper shows that prospect theory often predicts the disposition effect when lagged expected final wealth is the reference point under the principle of preferred personal equilibrium, regardless of whether the reference point is updated or not. When initial wealth is the reference point, however, there is often no disposition effect. Models that use a reference point with no lag under the principle of preferred personal equilibrium or that determine the reference point using the principle of disappointment aversion cannot explain why the investor bought a stock in the first place. Reference point adjustment weakens the disposition effect, leads to more aggressive initial stock purchase strategies, and predicts history dependence in stock holding. History: Accepted by John List, behavioral economics. Funding: J. Meng acknowledges financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 71103003 and 71471004] and the Beijing Higher Education Young Elite Teacher Project [Grant YETP0040], X. Weng acknowledges financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 71303014] and the Guanghua Leadership Institute [Grant 12-02]. Keywords: disposition effect * prospect theory * loss aversion * reference point * expectations, 1. Introduction The disposition effect refers to the propensity of certain investors to sell stocks that have risen in value rather than stocks that have fallen in value since purchase [...]

In this paper, we propose a diffusion model for a subscription service. The evolution over time of the number of subscribers is governed by a differential equation combining two processes--namely, a customer acquisition process and a customer attrition process. Assuming profit-maximization behavior of the firm, we use dynamic programming to optimize the customer equity and determine optimal customer relationship marketing expenditures. We implement an augmented Kalman filter with continuous state and discrete observations to estimate the model's parameters using market data of two well-known companies in the telecommunications sector. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to model acquisition and retention efforts in the context of a diffusion model. By doing so, we extend the literature on product diffusion to services--that is, beyond its traditional area of durable (and occasionally nondurable) products. By the same token, we contribute to the literature on customer relationship marketing (CRM), where social interactions have been overlooked. Our analytical and numerical results provide a better understanding of the relationships among the optimal customer equity, the customer lifetime value, the prospect lifetime value, and the optimal acquisition and retention spending. Our model and estimation approach give the tools for assessing empirically the role of CRM spending, social interactions, and other factors in the service subscription dynamics. Our main empirical results are as follows: (i) CRM spending and external incentives have indeed a significant effect on acquisition and retention processes; (ii) the impact of CRM is market specific; (iii) compared with optimal levels, both firms underinvest in retention; and (iv) whereas we observe increasing spending in acquisition over time, the derived optimal policy recommends a decreasing level of spending over time. History: Accepted by Eric Anderson, marketing. Funding: Research supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [Grant RGPIN-2016-04975], Keywords: diffusion models * subscription service * customer retention * customer acquisition * optimal spending * dynamic programming, 1. Introduction With the sustained improvement in information and communication technologies (ICT), subscription-based services have experienced rapid growth in recent years. In 2013, the International Telecommunications Union estimates the number [...]

This paper studies the supply management of a primary input, where this input gives rise to multiple products in fixed proportions. My objective is twofold. First, I study fixed proportions technology under demand uncertainty in comparison with the flexible and dedicated technologies. I show that fixed proportions technology has a cost-pooling value over dedicated technology, which is larger than the capacity-pooling value of flexible technology over dedicated technology. I identify the critical role that demand correlation plays with the fixed proportions technology: in contrast to the capacity-pooling value, which decreases in demand correlation, the cost-pooling value increases in demand correlation. Second, focusing on the fixed proportions technology, I study supply management in the presence of contract and spot markets. I investigate how the optimal supply management strategy should respond to changing market uncertainties, and the differences in this response based on the contract type. I find that when the exercise price of the contract is high, a higher contract market dependence is the best response to the increasing demand correlation or spot price variability. However, a lower contract market dependence is the best response to the same when the exercise price is low. Managerially, these results are important because they imply that the supply management strategy adopted as a response to a change in the business environment should differ depending on the contract type. My results have implications about the new product strategy and the procurement contract choice of the processors in the agricultural industries. Keywords: contracting; risk management; multiproduct newsvendor; flexibility; spot market; agriculture; coproduction History: Received August 11, 2011; accepted August 4, 2014, by Yossi Aviv, operations management. Published online in Articles in Advance January 27, 2015., 1. Introduction This paper develops a theoretical basis for understanding the trade-offs facing a processor in the supply management of a primary input, where this input gives rise to multiple [...]

This paper considers the effect of firms sending advertising messages to consumers based on their past purchase behavior. If past purchase behavior on a product category is positively correlated with a consumer having high preferences in another category, a firm may want to advertise more intensively to those consumers that purchased the former category, if possible. This paper finds that this can lead to lower prices in the initial category if the annoyance of receiving advertising is large, and to higher prices if the annoyance of receiving advertising is not too large, as consumers expect a possible additional surplus from the category affected by behavior-based advertising. If receiving advertising does not yield too much annoyance to consumers, firms end up better off due to both higher prices and the increased demand of better matching of advertising. Behavior-based advertising may also lead firms to sell less in the initial category than without behavior-based advertising, as a way to be able to better target the most valuable consumers. If the consumer annoyance of receiving advertising is large, firms may end up serving only a few consumers initially, as attracting more consumers requires prices that are too low, and the initial consumers are attracted because of the possibility of lower prices in the following period. The paper also investigates the effects of joint behavior-based pricing and advertising, and of different firms benefiting from the purchase information. History: Accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing. Keywords: advertising * behavior-based marketing * customer relationship management * behavior-based pricing * marketing * promotion advertising and media * marketing analytics, 1. Introduction One major result of firms being able to keep track of individual consumer purchases is that firms can now, in some cases, advertise differently to consumers with different [...]

This paper studies the strategy of sharing inventory information for a Arm that sells two vertically differentiated products. The seller has private information on the aggregate inventory level and the inventory composition of two product variants. The seller credibly and discretionarily discloses inventory information to customers either fully or partially, i.e., disclosing the exact inventory of each product variant, the aggregate inventory level, or no information to customers. Customers form expectations of future availability and make rational purchasing decisions accordingly. In the disclosure literature, discretion usually leads to an unraveling result: sellers who learn favorable market information opt to disclose it, making full disclosure the equilibrium. This paper shows that aggregate inventory disclosure, i.e., partial disclosure, can be instead sustained as an ex post equilibrium. We demonstrate that inventory information aggregation arises when there is an ex post desire to reduce supply-demand mismatches in all inventory scenarios. Specifically, when customers' preferred products are more likely to stock out, the seller could entice more incoming consumers who hope that their desired products are in stock by withholding product composition but disclosing the aggregate inventory level. If customers' desired products are sold out, the seller can benefit from upselling or cross-selling customers' less preferred products. Alternatively, when the seller stocks more desired products, aggregate disclosure can dampen the flow of incoming customers and reduce the shortage penalty cost. This result is robust under various settings: risk-averse customers, heterogeneous customers, and horizontally differentiated products. History: Accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management. Keywords: information aggregation * inventory information disclosure * cross-selling * product variety, 1. Introduction The advent of the Internet and information system technologies has enabled companies to share various kinds of information with customers at a much lower cost, e.g., inventory information [...]

No-arbitrage models are extremely flexible modelling tools but often lack economic motivation. This paper describes an equilibrium consumption-based CAPM framework based on Epstein-Zin preferences, which produces analytic pricing formulas for stocks and bonds under the assumption that macro growth rates follow affine processes. This allows the construction of equilibrium pricing formulas while maintaining the same flexibility of state dynamics as in no-arbitrage models. In demonstrating the approach, the paper presents a model that incorporates inflation such that asset prices are nominal. The model takes advantage of the possibility of non-Gaussian shocks and model macroeconomic uncertainty as a jump-diffusion process. This leads to endogenous stock market crashes as stock prices drop to reflect a higher expected rate of return in response to sudden increases in risk. The nominal yield curve in this model has a positive slope if expected inflation growth negatively impacts real growth. This model also produces asset prices that are consistent with observed data, including a substantial equity premium at moderate levels of risk aversion. Key words: finance; investment; asset pricing; probability; diffusion; stochastic model applications History: Accepted by David A. Hsieh, finance; received August 14, 2006. This paper was with the author 5 months for 2 revisions. Published online in Articles in Advance September 11, 2008., 1. Introduction Traditional models of financial market equilibrium, such as the Sharpe-Linter-Mossin CAPM and Lucas' consumption C-CAPM, are well known to fail in explaining essential stylized facts of asset market [...]

This paper estimates the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption ([sigma]) by exploiting a natural experiment provided by a change in the Indian banking legislation. The new legislation authorized banks to offer higher interest rates on deposits to citizens above 60 years of age. We find evidence that households exhibit inertia in reoptimization and are sensitive to the timing of the actual change in the interest rate. Households do not respond to the predictable changes in future interest rates induced by the change in the legislation. We incorporate this and estimate the a to be approximately equal to 2.2. History: Accepted by Amit Seru, finance. Keywords: intertemporal substitution in consumption * expected changes in interest rate * inertia, 1. Introduction In this paper, we estimate the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption ([sigma]), a crucial parameter for evaluating standard models of consumption behavior and macroeconomic policy. Despite the [...]

This paper provides a tractable continuous-time, constant absolute risk aversion--Gaussian framework to explore how the interactions of fundamental uncertainty, model uncertainty due to a preference for robustness, and state uncertainty due to information-processing constraints (rational inattention) affect strategic consumption--portfolio rules and precautionary savings in the presence of uninsurable labor income. Specifically, after solving the model explicitly, I compute and compare the elasticities of strategic asset allocation and precautionary savings to risk aversion, robustness, and inattention. Furthermore, for plausibly estimated and calibrated model parameters, I quantitatively analyze how the interactions of model uncertainty and state uncertainty affect the optimal share invested in the risky asset and show that they can provide a potential explanation for the observed stockholding behavior of households with different education and income levels. History: Accepted by Neng Wang, finance. Funding: Financial support from the General Research Fund [Grants HKU791913 and HKU17500515] of Hong Kong is acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2553 Keywords: robustness * model uncertainty * rational inattention * uninsurable labor income * strategic asset allocation * precautionary savings, 1. Introduction Intertemporal consumption/saving and portfolio choice is a fundamental topic in modern economics. In the real world, ordinary investors face pervasive uncertainty and have to make consumption/saving investment decisions [...]

This paper develops and estimates a structural model of two-sided markets with durable platform intermediaries and affiliated products. It models buyers' purchase decisions of platforms and affiliated products and sellers' decisions of price setting and entry, accounting for the dynamic interaction between the two distinct groups of platform participants. To estimate the proposed model, this paper develops a Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation approach that incorporates nonparametric approximation and interpolation methods. The proposed model and estimation method are applied to the 32/64-bit generation of the U.S. video game industry. The results of counterfactual experiments show that the dynamic behavior of platform participants has significant impacts on platform adoption and the affiliated product market, and that a failed platform could have survived if it had priced the two sides properly in a dynamic two- sided market environment. History: Accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing. Funding: The author is grateful for financial support from the University of Virginia's Bankard Fund for Political Economy. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2529. Keywords: two-sided market * indirect network effect * Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation * video game market, 1. Introduction In many two-sided or "platform" markets, platforms serve two distinct categories of customers, called buyers and sellers: they can interact only if they have joined the same platform. [...]

This paper studies the effects of unemployment benefit schemes on individual productivity. We created employment and unemployment in the field and compared workers' productivity under no unemployment benefits to productivity under two different unemployment schemes. In one scheme, the unemployed received an unconditional monetary transfer. In the other, the monetary transfer was obtained conditional on the unemployed spending some time on an ancillary activity. Our results challenge the standard economic theory prediction that unemployment benefits, especially unconditional compensations, hinder workers' effort. We find that workers employed under the unconditional scheme are more productive than workers under the conditional one, and both schemes make workers more productive than having no unemployment benefit. We discuss two possible explanations for our results based on reciprocity and differential psychological costs of unemployment across unemployment benefit schemes. History: Accepted by John List, behavioral economics. Funding: Financial support from the University of Rosario is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ mnsc.2016.2511. Keywords: unemployment benefits * productivity * psychological cost of unemployment * reciprocity, 1. Introduction This paper uses data from a novel empirical design to investigate whether and how the type of unemployment benefit system affects the productivity of workers. According to the [...]

We examine the effect of unionization on firm innovation, using a regression discontinuity design that relies on "locally" exogenous variation generated by elections that pass or fail by a small margin of votes. Passing a union election results in an 8.7% (12.5%) decline in patent quantity (quality) three years after the election. A reduction in R&D expenditures, reduced productivity of inventors, and departures of innovative inventors appear to be plausible underlying mechanisms through which unionization impedes firm innovation. In response to unionization, firms move their innovation activities away from states where union elections win. Our paper provides new insights into the real effects of unionization. History: Accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance. Keywords: innovation * labor unions * hold-up * shirking * inventor departures, 1. Introduction In this paper, we study the effect of labor unions on firm innovation. The impact of unions on innovation is of particular interest to policy makers and firm [...]

This paper studies the efficiency and distributive effects of three prominent accounting methods in auction settings when bidders' incentives are linked to accounting income. The purchase price method (PP) requires the acquirer to book the acquisition at historical cost, thereby underestimating the asset value by the amount of the acquirer's surplus in the transaction. The exit value method (EV) is downward biased and forces the acquirer to book an accounting loss on the date of acquisition. EV connects otherwise independent valuations inducing a reporting-based winner's curse and can even lead to fire-sale-like values. Relative to PP, EV implies lower asset prices, a decrease (increase) in the surplus of the seller (acquirer), and an increase in the probability that the asset attains its best use when the market is sufficiently competitive. Finally, I examine an alternative method in which the asset is valued at its perceived value-in-use (VU). Under this method, the acquirer bids more aggressively to increase perceived value-in-use, leading to a shift of surplus from the acquirer to the seller. Yet VU is unbiased and always maximizes the probability that the asset attains its best use. History: Accepted by Gerard Cachon, accounting. Keywords: auctions * fair value * fire sale, 1. Introduction This paper studies the efficiency and wealth distribution properties of accounting methods in a bidding setting. Standard economic principles point to three alternative valuation methods. First, the purchase [...]

Managerial models for practice have undergone remarkable growth in the past 50 years. My paper on decision calculus, published in 1970, was both a progress report and a prescription for improvement. This commentary describes why I wrote the paper, my perception of why it has been considered influential, and a brief overview of what has happened since. The overview starts by tracing the trends and ideas of the 1960s into the 1970s. The 1970s blend easily into the era of decision support systems (DSS). Starting late in the decade and still continuing, DSSs have evolved rapidly due to an explosion of data, increased computer power, and advances in modeling methods. I review highlights of this evolution from the point of view of managerial models, giving special emphasis to marketing, since that has been my window on this world. The good news is that more managers than ever are using models. The bad news is that many managers do not even realize they are using models! (But we should ask whether this is really bad.) The commentary concludes with thoughts about the future of managerial models. The selection of my paper as one of the most influential in the first 50 years of Management Science was a significant honor for which I am grateful. I take it as an indication by the members of INFORMS of the importance to our field of the issues addressed. Key words: decision calculus; managerial models; decision support; DSS; marketing models, 1. Why I Wrote the Paper This was a protest paper. The first sentence put the problem on the table: The big problem with management science models is that managers [...]

The paper that I authored and that was published in Management Science in 1969 (Bass 1969) has become widely known as the 'Bass Model' (see Morrison and Raju 2004). The model of the diffusion of new products and technologies developed in the paper is one of the most widely applied models in management science. It was especially gratifying for me to learn that INFORMS members have voted the 'Bass Model' paper as one of the Top 10 Most Influential Papers published in the 50-year history of Management Science in connection with the 50th anniversary of the journal. In this commentary on the paper I shall discuss some background and history of the development of the paper, the reasons why the model has been influential, some important extensions of the model, some examples of applications, and some examples of the frontiers of research involving the Bass Model. In the current period, in which there is much discussion about the marketing of applications of management science methods and practice, I hope that this commentary will be useful in providing insights about some of the properties of models that will be applied. Key words: Bass Model; diffusion of innovations; forecasting; generations of technology, 1. Introduction Perhaps the first thing to notice about the paper that has come to be known as the 'Bass Model' (Bass 1969) is the title. It contains a typo. [...]

This issue marks the start of the 50th volume of Management Science. As is customary on such 'round number' occasions, we will be taking time for a bit of retrospective review and soul-searching speculation. We begin here with an overall assessment of the journal's performance relative to its original mission. In subsequent articles, which will appear in issues throughout Volume 50, we will take more detailed disciplinary looks at the past, present, and future of Management Science and the management subfields it represents. Key words: management science; history; TIMS; anniversary, 1. An Optimistic Beginning On the evening of December 1, 1953, a group of 57 individuals met at the instigation of Melvin Salveson at Columbia University and voted The Institute [...]

Congratulations to Wally Hopp and our society for conceiving this idea. What a wonderful way to take stock of what we have accomplished in the last 50 years and to [...]