User interfaces to expert systems represent a bottleneck since consultation time is proportional to the amount of information the system asks the user to supply. An efficient, rather than exhaustive, strategy to direct user questioning will reduce consultation time and effort. An intelligent strategy to minimize questioning, the merit system, has been successfully implemented in Battle, an expe...

We are interested in mechanisms that maximize social welfare. In [2] this problem was studied for multi-unit auctions and for public project problems, and in each case social welfare undominated mechanisms were identified. One way to improve upon these optimality results is by allowing the players to move sequentially. With this in mind, we study here a sequential version of the Bailey-Cavallo ...

The field of Strategic Management has matured in the West over the past 50 years but there is still no widely accepted, coherent and pragmatic theory of strategy. As the world struggles to achieve ecological, social and economic sustainability, “strategy”, as a concept and as a practice, is becoming even more vital for our collective success. In this paper, we address the gap surrounding sustai...

We study three corporate nonmarket strategies designed to influence the lobbying behavior of other special interest groups: (1) astroturf, in which the firm covertly subsidizes a group with similar views to lobby when it normally would not; (2) the bear hug, in which the firm overtly pays a group to alter its lobbying activities; and (3) self-regulation, in which the firm voluntarily limits the...

This work develops a new framework for a class of stochastic control problems with optimal stopping. One of our main motivations stems from dealing with the option pricing of American type. The value function is characterized as the unique solution of a partial differential equation in a Sobolev space. Together with certain regularities and estimates of the value function, the existence of the ...

Given the sizeable savings, many disputes are resolved via arbitration. Numerous studies have considered the strategic incentives of various forms of arbitration, most notably Final Offer Arbitration (FOA). While previous work focused exclusively on optimal offers, in reality disputants make a series of perhaps interrelated choices. This paper considers FOA disputants making an additional inves...

We consider a problem that combines impulse control with absolutely continuous control of the drift of a general one-dimensional Itô diffusion. The objective of the control problem is to minimise an ergodic or long-term average criterion that penalises both deviations of the state process from a given nominal point and the use of control effort. Our analysis completely characterises the optimal...

This study focuses on the relationship between business strategy, organization structure, and diagnostic control systems. The project analyzes data from 75 field studies to illustrate how managers adjust span of accountability and span of control to motivate different levels of innovation and entrepreneurial behavior. Six propositions are derived inductively about when, why, and how managers ma...

We introduce a theoretical model of information acquisition under resource limitations in a noisy environment. An agent must guess the truth value of a given Boolean formula φ after performing a bounded number of noisy tests of the truth values of variables in the formula. We observe that, in general, the problem of finding an optimal testing strategy for φ is hard, but we suggest a useful heur...

Many network systems secure their resources using a defense in depth strategy, which can result in complex policies being distributed on the many access control points of a network. These policies are subject to frequent changes to deal with different factors such as change in security situation or change in resources. Moreover, while we have a vague intuitive understanding of the defense in de...