In business environments characterized by technological change and rapid imitation, firms must continually innovate and identify new opportunities in order to remain competitive. This study investigates how external actors provide firms with innovative opportunities, ideas, and solutions. Specifically, it examines how firms are influenced by being approached by external innovators who “pitch” ideas for new products that they want to commercialize in cooperation with the firm. Conceptually, the study analyzes firms as magnets to which ideas and resources from outside the firm are attracted.Employing a multiple case study design of Swedish and U.S.companies, the thesis reveals that a firm’s capacity for innovation and exploration of new opportunities is partly shaped by its ability to attract ideas and inventions from the outside environment. It also demonstrates that firms that are particularly attractive to external innovators are in a favorable position to identify and act on strategic opportunities and threats that emerge in their competitive environments. The findings of the study suggest that in order to support their innovation and strategy creation processes, firms should work to stimulate inflows of externally developed ideas and inventions. This involves building a reputation of being trustworthy and receptive to external ideas, as well as broadcasting innovation projects and strategies so that external actors can easily understand how their ideas and inventions might fit in to the firm’s innovation projects and strategies.

This study was carried out to determine whether or not attachment would enhance our ability to predict the breakup of nonmarital romantic relationships. In phase one of the study, 217 introductory psychology students completed measures of attachment, satisfaction, investments, alternatives, commitment, length of current relationship, and asserts that commitment to a relationship will be greater to hundred thirteen of these individuals were contacted seven weeks later to follow-up on the status of their relationships. Fifty-four of these relationships had ended at follow-up. Through regression analyses, only moderate support was found for the investment model. This model the extent that an individual is highly satisfied, has invested heavily in it, and does not see his/her alternatives as particularly attractive. Contrary to predictions, than it was to the length of the of time spent associating with the attachment was found to be more strongly related to investments and commitment relationship or the amount partner. Whatever contribution attachment may have made to the prediction of breakup appears to have been suppressed by commitment, which was found to be the best single predictor of breakup. Finally, more women than men were found to be the initiators of the breakup of their relationships, but these differences were only marginally significant. / Department of Psychological Science

This study examined the effect of colors and typography on attraction towards a product, tones evoked by the product, and likelihood that a participant would buy a product. Prior research has addressed how color and type influence visual design and those who come in contact with it in a multifaceted way. To measure this, participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk were asked to take part in an online survey on Surveymonkey.com. Assigned to one of four conditions of color and font combinations, Black or Purple paired with Modern or Script, participants answered questions about a sample product, a soda can. The study examined the combined and individual effects of the colors Black and Purple and the font types Modern and Script on the participants’ likelihood to purchase the product, their attraction toward it, and the perceived tone the product gives off. A 2x2 ANOVA was run to measure likelihood of purchase and attraction and a Pearson’s Chi-Squared test was used to measure both tonal questions. It was found that attraction to product was 1.19 times more likely with the product displaying Script font regardless of color and likelihood of purchase was 1.15 times higher with Script font regardless of color. Purple and Modern were most highly associated with the tonal word “Modern” for tonal question number one and for Black, the overall largest tonal association term was “Traditional,” for tonal question number. The finding for the color Purple approached significance and the other two of these findings were consistent with the hypothesis.

The marketing literature so far only considers attraction models with strict functional forms. Greater exibility can be achieved by the neural net based approach introduced which assesses brands' attraction values by means of a perceptron with one hidden layer. Using log-ratio transformed market shares as dependent variables stochastic gradient descent followed by a quasi-Newton method estimates parameters. For store-level data the neural net model performs better and implies a price response qualitatively different from the well-known MNL attraction model. Price elasticities of these competing models also lead to specific managerial implications. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers SFB "Adaptive Information Systems and Modelling in Economics and Management Science"

Powerful people perform observable agentic behaviors (e.g., directing tasks), and people expect powerful people to act in these agentic ways. Furthermore, Role Congruity Theory predicts that people are disliked when their behavior contradicts such expectations. To this end, we examined perceivers’ romantic liking for opposite-sex targets depending on whether or not the targets conformed to a powerful role. Participants interacted with two opposite-sex partners in brief, recorded sessions. We manipulated (a) which of the opposite-sex partners was actually given power and (b) participants’ perceptions of which opposite-sex partners was given power. Participants reported the most romantic liking for partners who actually were given power, but only when this reality matched participants’ perceptions of who had power. This interaction effect on liking was mediated by the time the opposite-sex partner directed the conversation; that is, when perceptions of power were shared, the powerful partner behaved more agentically and was better liked.

人們如何在重覆的囚犯困境賽局選擇策略是本文探討的議題，其中的賽局學習理論就是預測賽局的參與者(player)會選擇何種策略。本文使用的資料包括3個囚犯困境的實驗，各自有不同的實驗設定及配對程序，參加者都是政治大學的大學部學生，我們將使用這些資料比較不同的學習模型。除了常見的3個學習模型：增強學習模型(Reinforcement Learning model)、信念學習模型(Belief Learning model)及加權經驗吸引模型(Experience-Weighted Attraction model)，本文也提出一個延伸的增強學習模型(Extended reinforcement learning model)。接著將分析劃為Training (in-sample)及Testing (out-sample)，並比較各實驗間或模型間的結果。 　　雖然延伸增強學習模型(Extended reinforcement learning model)較原始的增強學習模型(Reinforcement learning model)多了一個參數，該模型(Extended reinforcement learning model)在Training(in-sample)及Testing(out-sample)表現多較之前的模型來得些許的好。 / How people choose strategies in a finite repeated prisoners’ dilemma game is of interest in Game Theory. The way to predict which strategies the people choose in a game is so-called game learning theory. The objective of this study is to find a proper learning model for the prisoners’ dilemma game data collected in National Cheng-Chi University. The game data consist of three experiments with different game and matching rules. Four learning models are considered, including Reinforcement learning model, Belief learning model, Experience Weighted Attraction learning model and a proposed model modified from reinforcement learning model. The data analysis was divided into 2 parts: training (in-sample) and testing (out-sample). The proposed learning model is slightly better than the original reinforcement learning model no matter when in training or testing prediction although one more parameter is added. The performances of prediction by model fitting are all better than guessing the decisions with equal chance.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2007. / "May, 2007." Includes bibliographical references. Online version available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2008. / "May 2008." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 134-140). Online version available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1998. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-143). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1998. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-143). Also available on the Internet.