The activity based cost (ABC) approach has been used to relate costs and benefits to various cost pools that drive product profitability within an organization, so that relationships can be established between investments and product profitability. In this paper, using a particular case, we demonstrate the value of the ABC approach for IT investment justification under certain conditions, and d...

The U.S. presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016 was interpreted by many as a repudiation of the social and economic status quo. Others suggested that support for Trump reflected opposition to social change, as exemplified by the nostalgic slogan “Make America Great Again.” We consider the possibility that many American voters were indeed frustrated by the consequences of global competiti...

People are motivated to defend and rationalize the status quo, a phenomenon known as system justification. We propose the existence of a second, countervailing system-level motivation: system-change motivation, which is concerned with bettering the status quo over time. The opportunity to receive diagnostic information about the status quo pits the two system-level motives against each other. W...

Reuse metrics must accurately reflect the amount of effort saved. We must have realistic measures to ensure the credibility of the value we place on reuse and to separate reuse benefits from those of other technologies also competing for limited investment dollars. This paper defines a reuse metrics and Return On Investment (ROI) model at IBM that distinguishes reuse savings and benefits from t...

Are hiring decisions affected by knowledge that a job applicant was previously laid off? We expected decisional biases to be linked with the motivational tendency to believe that society is fair and outcomes are just and deserved (hereafter, system justifying beliefs [SJBs]). Indeed, hiring decisions were more likely to disadvantage a laid off applicant as SJBs increased both when detailed job ...

Characterizing the instantaneous investment opportunity set by the real interest rate and the maximum Sharpe ratio, a simple model of time varying investment opportunities is posited in which these two variables follow correlated Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes, and the implications for stock and bond valuation are developed. The model suggests that the prices of certain portfolios that are relate...

The acquisition case was built around an ambitious business plan that called for rapid growth of SSB’s business over the next three years, accompanied by cost reductions and efficiency improvements. Specifically, the business plan relied on the winning of five new large private banks as justification for a €40 million IT investment directed at improving service quality and lowering IT maintenan...

Characterizing the instantaneous investment opportunity set by the real interest rate and the maximum Sharpe ratio, a simple model of time varying investment opportunities is posited in which these two variables follow correlated Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes, and the implications for stock and bond valuation are developed. The model suggests that the prices of certain portfolios that are relate...

The study of memory for event duration in pigeons has, for the most part, centered on an unusual behavioral phenomenon and an interesting theoretical explanation for it. A typical experiment on memory for event duration involves trials initiated by a sample stimulus that is either short or long in duration (e.g., 2 vs. 10 sec of houselight) and that is later followed by the simultaneous present...