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Drawing from stewardship theory, we investigated corporate entrepreneurship in family firms. We argued that stewardship culture determinants--comprehensive strategic decision making, participative governance, long-term orientation, and human capital--differentiate the most entrepreneurial [...]

We present a general equilibrium model of the response of firms' decisions to operate, innovate, and engage in international trade to a change in the marginal cost of international trade. We find that, although a change in trade costs can have a substantial impact on heterogeneous firms' exit, export, and process innovation decisions, the impact of changes in these decisions on welfare is largely offset by the response of product innovation. Our results suggest that microeconomic evidence on firms' responses to changes in international trade costs may not be informative about the implications of changes in these trade costs for aggregate welfare.

Experiments were conducted to determine the effect of deliberation on the preference consistency of consumers. It was hypothesized that deliberation leads to the inconsistent weighing of information. Findings indicate that the extent to which deliberation decreases preference consistency depends upon the complexity of information.

The effects of the regulatory orientation and decision making strategies of consumers on brand judgments are studied. These judgments are influenced by feelings on the processing of information independent of the message content.

The study hypothesizes that sleep deprivation has a negative monotonic, although nonlinear, effect on a team's decision-making accuracy and problem solving ability. It is then proposed that task, structural and social factors intensify or lessen the effect of sleep deprivation on decision-making accuracy and problem-solving ability.

Much of the debate over the underlying causes of discrimination centers on file rationality of employer decision making. Economic models of statistical discrimination emphasize the cognitive utility of group estimates as a means of dealing with the problems of uncertainty. Sociological and social-psychological models, by contrast, question the accuracy of group-level attributions. Although mean differences may exist between groups on productivity-related characteristics, these differences are often inflated in their application, leading to much larger differences in individual evaluations than would be warranted by actual group-level trait distributions. In this study, the authors examine the nature of employer attitudes about black and white workers and the extent to which these views are calibrated against their direct experiences with workers from each group. They use data from fifty-five in-depth interviews with hiring managers to explore employers' group-level attributions and their direct observations to develop a model of attitude formation and employer learning. Keywords: racial discrimination; employment; employer interviews; African Americans; stereotypes

It is shown how factors that are unique to an organizational level can interact with the individual-level tendencies by means of prospect theory and organization--level behavioral theory. It was noticed that divestitute decisions were influenced by both individual and organization level factors.

The relation between affective experience and decision-making performance is studied.

This article examines the role of TV coverage in voter decision making during the 2001 Australian federal election campaign, called just weeks after a major asylum seeker incident and the September 11 terrorist attacks. It does so by exploring voters' differential reliance on two distinct, high profile sets of issues that dominated media election campaign coverage: the domestic issues that had been the focus throughout the election year (especially health, education, and taxes) and the international issues that assumed centre stage just before the election was called (refugees and asylum seekers, terrorism, and defence and national security). Using an original content analysis of TV coverage and the 2001 Australian election survey, interaction effects models yield significantly different patterns of reliance on international and domestic for groups of voters. These effects are distinguished by the timing of individuals' vote choice, and the level of their existing political interest and information. Moderately interested voters, who largely decided their vote choice about the time the election was called, were the most likely to cite international issues as the key to their vote choice. Voters with lower levels of political interest, deciding just before or on election day, were significantly more reliant on domestic issues. These patterns represent a variant on Zaller's (1989) model of campaign information flow, and suggest a single, high-intensity campaign--especially in Australia's compulsory voting system, which forces the participation of the country's least interested and informed individuals--can sustain within it two distinct issue agendas which voters with different cognitive skills and responsiveness to TV cues differentially utilize to inform their vote choice.

When dealing with many-objectives optimization problems, the concepts of Pareto-optimality and Pareto-dominance are often inefficient in modeling and simulating human decision making. This leads to an unpractical size for the set of Pareto-optimal (PO) solutions, and an additional selection criteria among solutions is usually arbitrarily considered. In the paper, different fuzzy-based definitions of optimality and dominated solutions, being nonpreference based, are introduced and tested on analytical test cases, in order to show their validity and nearness to human decision making. Based on this definitions, different subsets of PO solution set can be computed using simple and clear information provided by the decision maker and using a parameter value ranging from zero to one. When the value of the above parameter is zero, the introduced definitions coincide with classical Pareto-optimality and dominance. When the parameter value is increased, different subset of PO solutions can be obtained corresponding to higher degrees of optimality. Index Terms--Design problems with several criteria, fuzzy optimality definition, multiobjective optimization, limitations of Pareto-optimality.

Influence diagrams have been important models for decision problems because of their ability to both model a problem rigorously at its mathematical level and depict its high-level structure graphically. Once the structure and numerical details of an influence diagram have been specified, it can be evaluated to determine the optimal decision policy. However, when evaluating multiple objectives, in the past this determination was based on the assumption that utility functions that commensurate the objectives are available. This paper extends the structure and solution algorithm for influence diagrams to allow for the inclusion of noncommensurate objectives using multiobjective tradeoff analysis instead of utility theory. This eliminates the need to specify any preference information before the influence diagram is solved. The proposed multiobjective-based methodology is also useful for decisionmakers who either do not want to accept the assumptions of utility theory for a particular problem, or are confronted with a problem in which it is neither practical nor viable to construct a utility function. Additionally, this paper establishes the relationship between multiobjective influence diagrams and multiobjective decision trees. This relationship is important because it allows a decisionmaker to utilize the advantages of both representations. An example problem is presented to introduce both the extended multiobjective influence diagram methodology and the relationship linking multiobjective decision trees to multiobjective influence diagrams. Index Terms--Decision trees, influence diagrams, multiple objectives, risk analysis.

The tension between allocative efficiency and information aggregation is explored in the context of an auction: k identical objects of unknown quality are auctioned off to n bidders whose tastes affect their valuation of an object of given quality. Bidders receive a signal about the quality of the objects. The k highest bidders get an object and pay a price equal to the k + 1st highest bid. We find conditions under which, in the limit, objects are allocated efficiently to those with the highest tastes, and price converges in probability to the value of an object to the marginal taste type.

Joseph Schumpeter's and Frank Knight's theories on political and economic decision-making are analyzed to show a difference in the theorists' perceptions on rationality. The comparative analysis indicated that individual rationality is affected by institutional changes and that the perception development process has significant bearing on decisions. These suggest that information processing and decision-making are not independent of other factors. The theories should be a major part of future studies on individual decisions to effect positive economic and political changes.

The study examines market turbulence caused by core business decisions in competing niche markets. The automotive leasing niche market is presented and findings show how strategic choices can lead to financial losses and niche market exit. Other details on the study are presented.

A two-stage study on the impact of strategic decision-making process dimensions on strategic decision effectiveness reveals that both rational and political processes appear to have more influence on strategic decision effectiveness than intuition.

The role of a qualitative approach to the examination of complex capital investment projects is demonstrated. The affects of risk and uncertainty on the de cision-making process and the current quantitative decision-making tools in accounting in complex capital projects are discussed.

Throughout 93 percent of the range of uncertainty, uncertainty has a negative effect on entry, implying that the option to defer dominates growth options in most contexts. The influence of industry uncertainty on the decision by established firms to enter a new industry is discussed.

The impact of entrepreneurial decision making, on business success of firms of developing countries in international markets, is examined.

Managers take more risk in decision making in a loss situation than in a profit situation.