Faculty Research

Changeover minimization in the production of metal parts for car seats

Erik William Jeffries — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 02:35:54 +0000

Changeover minimization in the production of metal parts for car seats Erik William J… Tue, 12/10/2024 - 19:35

We tackle a capacitated lot-sizing and scheduling problem (CLSP) with the main objective of minimizing changeover time in the production of metal parts for car seats. Changeovers occur when a machine (or production line) is reconfigured to produce a different product or part, leading to production downtime and loss of efficiency. In this study, we first provide a mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulation of the problem. We test the limits of solving the problem with commercial mathematical programming software. We also propose two approaches to tackle instances found in practice for which the mathematical programming model is not a viable solution method. Both approaches are based on partitioning the entire production of a part into production runs (or work slots). In the first approach, the work slots are assigned to machines and sequenced by a metaheuristic that follows the search principles of the GRASP (greedy randomized adaptive procedure) and VNS (variable neighborhood search) methodologies. In the second approach, we develop a Hexaly Optimizer (formerly known as LocalSolver) model to assign and sequence work slots. The study provides insights into how to minimize changeovers and improve production efficiency in metal parts manufacturing for car seats. The findings of this study have practical implications for the auto-part manufacturing industry, where efficient and cost-effective production is critical to meet the demands of the market. • Mathematical model for a real-world industrial optimization problem. • Effective metaheuristic approach based on Variable Neighborhood Search. • Experiments include comparison with a model for general-purpose commercial optimizer. • Computational efficiency achieved with partial computation of the objective function.

Colmenar, J. Manuel; Laguna, Manuel; Martín-Santamaría, Raúl. Changeover minimization in the production of metal parts for car seats. Computers & Industrial Engineering. Dec2024, Vol. 198, pN.PAG-N.PAG.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360835224007563

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Large language models present new questions for decision support.

Erik William Jeffries — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 02:34:13 +0000

Large language models present new questions for decision support. Erik William J… Tue, 12/10/2024 - 19:34

Large language models (LLMs) have proven capable of assisting with many aspects of organizational decision making, such as helping to collect information from databases and helping to brainstorm possible courses of action ahead of making a choice. We propose that broad adoption of these technologies introduces new questions in the study of decision support systems, which assist people with complex and open-ended choices in business. Where traditional study of decision support has focused on bespoke tools to solve narrow problems in specific domains, LLMs offer a general-purpose decision support technology which can be applied in many contexts. To organize the wealth of new questions which result from this shift, we turn to a classic framework from Herbert Simon, which proposes that decision making requires collecting evidence, considering alternatives, and finally making a choice. Working from Simon's framework, we describe how LLMs introduce new questions at each stage of this decision-making process. We then group new questions into three overarching themes for future research, centered on how LLMs will change individual decision making, how LLMs will change organizational decision making, and how to design new decision support technologies which make use of the new capabilities of LLMs. • We discuss how language models might change decision support systems. • We argue large language models are more versatile than prior decision support tools. • We propose that such versatility introduces new questions during decision making. • We organize new questions using a classic three-stage model of decision making. • We also propose three future directions for research in decision support.

Handler, Abram; Larsen, Kai R.; Hackathorn, Richard. Large language models present new questions for decision support. International Journal of Information Management. Dec2024, Vol. 79, pN.PAG-N.PAG.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0268401224000598

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Broken promises, competition, and capital allocation in the mutual fund industry

Erik William Jeffries — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 02:03:03 +0000

Broken promises, competition, and capital allocation in the mutual fund industry Erik William J… Tue, 12/10/2024 - 19:03

What characteristics of mutual funds do investors care about? In addition to performance and fees, we show that investors exhibit a clear preference for managers who adhere to the strategies they describe in their prospectuses. Capital flows respond negatively when funds diverge from the average holdings of their text-based strategy peer groups, but positively when they outperform those peer averages. We identify this effect using a novel instrumental variables approach, and show that funds face a delicate trade-off between keeping their promises and outperforming their peers who make similar promises."

Abis, Simona; Lines, Anton. Broken promises, competition, and capital allocation in the mutual fund industry. Journal of Financial Economics. Dec2024, Vol. 162, pN.PAG-N.PAG.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X24001715

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Specialization and performance in private equity: Evidence from the hotel industry

Erik William Jeffries — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 02:00:44 +0000

Specialization and performance in private equity: Evidence from the hotel industry Erik William J… Tue, 12/10/2024 - 19:00

Using granular data on U.S. hotel investments over the past two decades, we show that industry-specialist PE firms achieve higher net income from operations and higher capital gains from sale than generalist PE firms for comparable properties. Those results are driven by specialists implementing more and larger cost savings without compromising revenues. Fundamentally, specialists utilize their hotel-specific operating expertise to produce superior performance outcomes. We show that specialists across investment sectors possess deeper industry-specific operating expertise. Our results suggest that specialist PE firms can compete with their generalist rivals by leveraging such expertise in a chosen market niche.

Spaenjers, Christophe; Steiner, Eva. Specialization and performance in private equity: Evidence from the hotel industry. Journal of Financial Economics. Dec2024, Vol. 162, pN.PAG-N.PAG.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X24001533

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Gendered implications of organizational gender diversity for voluntary turnover: human resource practices as strategic levers

Erik William Jeffries — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 01:47:27 +0000

Gendered implications of organizational gender diversity for voluntary turnover: human resource practices as strategic levers Erik William J… Tue, 12/10/2024 - 18:47

Organizational gender diversity may not be as well received among male employees as among female employees, particularly in countries characterized by gender inequality. Through the lens of intergroup threat theory (intergroup threat is experienced when members of one group perceive that another group is in a position to cause them actual or symbolic harm), we conceptualize organizational gender diversity as a threat to male employees, which evokes male employees' voluntary turnover, but as a support (threat mitigation) to female employees, which reduces female employees' voluntary turnover. We also investigate whether certain types of human resource (HR) practices can moderate the gendered implication of organizational gender diversity for voluntary turnover. By analyzing data from South Korea, we found that while collective incentives negatively moderated the positive relationship between organizational gender diversity and male employees' voluntary turnover, childcare benefits strengthened the negative relationship between organizational gender diversity and female employees' voluntary turnover.

Joo, Min-Kyu; Kong, Dejun Tony; Atwater, Leanne. Gendered implications of organizational gender diversity for voluntary turnover: human resource practices as strategic levers. International Journal of Human Resource Management. Dec2024, Vol. 35 Issue 21, p3672-3714.

https://www.tandfonline.com

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Consumers' minimum time investments in meaningful consumption.

Erik William Jeffries — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 22:33:27 +0000

Consumers' minimum time investments in meaningful consumption. Erik William J… Tue, 12/10/2024 - 15:33

Consumer well-being involves not only the pursuit of pleasure, but also the pursuit of meaning. However, little is known about how people perceive the costs and benefits of meaning- versus pleasure-oriented experiences. We find that compared to pleasure-oriented experiences, people expect meaning-oriented experiences to be more satisfying after meeting a minimum time investment (i.e., the perceived minimum amount of time needed to derive benefits from consumption; study 1). As a consequence, people choose to prolong their exposure to meaningful (vs. pleasurable) experiences following interruptions (study 2). We discuss the implications of minimum time investments for firms' relationships with consumers and marketing communication design.

Carter, Erin Percival; Williams, Lawrence E.; Light, Nicholas. Consumers' minimum time investments in meaningful consumption. Marketing Letters. Dec2024, Vol. 35 Issue 4, p561-573.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11002-023-09709-z

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Keep It Simple? Consumer Perceptions of Brand Simplicity and Risk.

Erik William Jeffries — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 20:12:39 +0000

Keep It Simple? Consumer Perceptions of Brand Simplicity and Risk. Erik William J… Tue, 12/10/2024 - 13:12

Evoking simplicity in marketing communications has become popular among marketing practitioners, but little is known about its effects on consumers and firms. The current work focuses on consumers' perceptions of the simplicity or complexity of brands and a previously overlooked consequence of those perceptions. Results from six experiments and analysis of a proprietary customer satisfaction dataset from Consumer Reports (N = 147,600) show that when consumers think brands are simple, they judge them to be less likely to experience product or service failures. Although these lower risk judgments could be positive for brands, they can also lead consumers to punish simpler brands more in the event of failures. Results also suggest that consumers' simplicity/complexity perceptions reflect the dimensionality of their mental representations of brands, and the relationship between simplicity and lower risk is attenuated when additional brand dimensionality is framed in terms of redundancy. The findings cast doubt on the degree to which evoking simplicity is a uniformly positive marketing strategy and encourage practitioners to more thoughtfully consider simplicity's implications for consumer and firm welfare.

Light, Nicholas; Fernbach, Philip M. Keep It Simple? Consumer Perceptions of Brand Simplicity and Risk. Journal of Marketing Research (JMR). Dec2024, Vol. 61 Issue 6, p1152-1170.

Read the Full Article Here.

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Pre-Registered Interim Analysis Designs (PRIADs): Increasing the Cost-Effectiveness of Hypothesis Testing.

Erik William Jeffries — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 20:08:40 +0000

Pre-Registered Interim Analysis Designs (PRIADs): Increasing the Cost-Effectiveness of Hypothesis Testing. Erik William J… Tue, 12/10/2024 - 13:08

The difficulty of determining how many observations to collect is a source of inefficiency in consumer behavior research. Group sequential designs, which allow researchers to perform interim analyses while data collection is ongoing, could offer a remedy. However, they are scarcely used in consumer behavior research, probably owing to low awareness, perceived complexity, or concerns about the validity of this approach. This article offers a tutorial on group sequential designs and introduces Pre-Registered Interim Analysis Designs (PRIADs): A practical five-step procedure to facilitate the adoption of these designs in marketing. We show that group sequential designs can be easily adopted by marketing researchers, and introduce a companion app to help researchers implement them. We demonstrate multiple benefits of PRIADs for researchers engaged in confirmatory hypothesis testing: They facilitate sample size decisions, allow researchers to achieve a desired level of statistical power with a smaller number of observations, and help conduct more efficient pilot studies. We validate this cost-saving potential through a comprehensive re-analysis of 212 studies published in the Journal of Consumer Research , which shows that using PRIADs would have reduced participant costs by 20–29%. We conclude with a discussion of limitations and possible alternatives to PRIADs.

André, Quentin; Reinholtz, Nicholas. Pre-Registered Interim Analysis Designs (PRIADs): Increasing the Cost-Effectiveness of Hypothesis Testing. Journal of Consumer Research. Dec2024, Vol. 51 Issue 4, p845-865.

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Probabilistic Outcomes Are Valued Less in Expectation, Even Conditional on Their Realization

Erik William Jeffries — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 01:39:12 +0000

Probabilistic Outcomes Are Valued Less in Expectation, Even Conditional on Their Realization Erik William J… Sun, 11/10/2024 - 18:39

Most theories of decision making under risk assume that payoffs and probabilities are separable. In the context of a lottery, the subjective value of a prospective outcome (the payoff) is assumed to be independent of the likelihood that the outcome will occur (the probability). In violation of this assumption, we present eight experiments showing that people anticipate less utility from uncertain outcomes than from certain outcomes, even conditional on their realization. The devaluation of uncertain outcomes is observed across different measures of utility (willingness to spend money or time; choice between different options), different populations (student and online samples), and different manipulations of uncertainty. We show that this result does not simply reflect a misunderstanding of the instructions or people's aversion toward a "weird" transaction with unexplained features. We highlight the implications of this phenomenon for empirical investigations of risk preferences and conclude with a discussion of the psychological mechanisms that might drive the devaluation of probabilistic outcomes.

Paolacci, Gabriele; André, Quentin. Probabilistic Outcomes Are Valued Less in Expectation, Even Conditional on Their Realization. Management Science. Nov2024, Vol. 70 Issue 11, p7524-7536.

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2021.02284

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The Effect of Algorithmic Trading on Management Guidance

Erik William Jeffries — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 20:36:29 +0000

The Effect of Algorithmic Trading on Management Guidance Erik William J… Sun, 11/10/2024 - 13:36

I investigate whether algorithmic trading (AT) affects the provision of management guidance. Existing research finds that AT decreases fundamental information acquisition before earnings announcements and consequently reduces the informativeness of prices. To compensate for reduced information acquisition, I predict and find that managers at firms with more AT activity increase the quantity and quality of guidance issued at earnings announcements. Evidence is consistent with managers responding to reduced information acquisition, as opposed to changes in liquidity, and results suggest guidance in response to AT is effective at reducing information asymmetry. These findings identify a new channel through which AT affects stock price informativeness by documenting a link to managers' disclosure decisions.

Stephan, Andrew. The Effect of Algorithmic Trading on Management Guidance. Accounting Review. Nov2024, Vol. 99 Issue 6, p421-449.

Read the Full Article Here.

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Faculty Research

Changeover minimization in the production of metal parts for car seats

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Large language models present new questions for decision support.

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Broken promises, competition, and capital allocation in the mutual fund industry

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Gendered implications of organizational gender diversity for voluntary turnover: human resource practices as strategic levers

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Consumers' minimum time investments in meaningful consumption.

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Keep It Simple? Consumer Perceptions of Brand Simplicity and Risk.

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Pre-Registered Interim Analysis Designs (PRIADs): Increasing the Cost-Effectiveness of Hypothesis Testing.

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Probabilistic Outcomes Are Valued Less in Expectation, Even Conditional on Their Realization

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