This paper develops a framework to link the expected utility analysis to real options models in order to capture the joint effects of risk aversion and irreversibility associated with real investments. It aims at modifying the theory of investment under uncertainty by incorporating decision makers’ risk preferences and allows explicitly analyzing the impacts of risk aversion, uncertainty and ir...

IT productivity paradox is one of the biggest debates in the IS literature. Even though, recent studies have identified the theoretical and methodological errors that cause this paradox, we still don’t fully understand how IT investment influences overall firm performance. This paper presents an empirical study that examines the influences of IT investment on firm performance. More importantly,...

To avoid a possible cost to their future survival and/or reproduction, individuals must balance their somatic and reproductive investments. The van Noordwijk and De Jong model of resource investment predicts that investments into reproduction and soma can vary among individuals of a population based on the variation in the total amount of energy that individuals acquire. With principal componen...

Chinese resource-exhausted cities face more severe environmental pollution problems than other cities. In addressing these problems, the way local officials (usually senior party and government leaders) operate is very important, as their focus on political achievements may complicate how they manage environmental pollution in these cities. On the one hand, the traditional Gross Domestic Produc...

Sexual signals are considered costly to produce and maintain under the handicap paradigm, and the reliability of signals is in turn thought to be maintained by these costs. Although previous studies have investigated the costly nature of signal production, few have considered whether honesty might be maintained not by the costliness of the signal itself, but by the costs involved in producing t...

How do a leader and a follower use marketing and R&D differently for resource accumulation, and why? To address the question, we investigate asymmetric incentive structures with respect to marketing and R&D for a leader vs. a follower. In particular, we analyze the resource accumulation paths of Intel and AMD by utilizing 28-year quarterly time series data (1972-1999). In so doing, we adopt Str...

Neonatal reproductive failure should occur when energetic costs of parental investment outweigh fitness benefits. However, little is known about the drivers of neonatal reproductive failure in free-ranging species experiencing continuous natural variation in predator abundance and in the energetic and fitness costs and benefits associated with parental investment. Long-term comprehensive studie...

Background: Explaining public-goods cooperation is a challenge for evolutionary biology. However, cooperation is expected to more readily evolve if it imposes a smaller cost. Such costs of cooperation are expected to decline with increasing resource supply, an ecological parameter that varies widely in nature. We experimentally tested the effect of resource supply on the evolution of cooperatio...

The best known of the conflicts occurring in eusocial Hymenoptera is queen-worker conflict over sex ratio. So far, sex ratio theory has mostly focused on optimal investment in the production of male versus female sexuals, neglecting the investment in workers. Increased investment in workers decreases immediate sexual productivity but increases expected future colony productivity. Thus, an impor...