M.Comm. (Business Management) / The aim of a service organisation functioning in the maintenance or repair market is the repair of components and products. Every contract quoted for is unique. Different procedures and processes must be followed before the repair is successfully completed. Due to this fact, the forecasting of costs to be incurred is made most difficult. The proportion of material costs to labour costs is generally low in this industry and if the labour force is permanently employed, the rued costs to variable costs ratio is high. It is thus difficult to obtain accurate costing information before a contract has been completed. Management have to, on a daily basis, make short term operational decisions and the cost information obtained from the company's costing system, is important in the making of these decisions. At present, there is no costing system that takes into account the unique circumstances of an organisation operating within the maintenance environment and at the same time provides enough relevant costing information for the organisation to recover its costs and quote on a competitive basis. Rotek Engineering, a service organisation that undertakes service, repairs and maintenance in the heavy engineering market, is used as a representative model in this research. The literature study undertaken, investigated which costs and costing systems, from an academic point of view, could provide management with the most relevant and accurate costing information in a service organisation. Rotek Engineering was investigated in order to determine to what extent their current costing system meets their costing information needs in terms of short term decision making and quoting. Shortcomings of the current costing system were also investigated. Rotek Engineering's competitors in the maintenance market were also interviewed in order to get some insight into how their costing systems have been adopted in their ongoing struggle to gain market share. As a result of the information obtained from the research and also the literature study, it is recommended that a marginal costing system be implemented in order to provide cost information for short term operational decision making. The recommendation involves a warning that the bookkeeping and productivity problems will not necessarily be solved as a result of the implementation of a marginal costing system. The company must urgently focus attention on solving these problems and also on phasing out the permanent labour force.

Enrollment in online courses within colleges and universities is growing at a rate far exceeding that of enrollment in classroom-delivered, face-to-face courses. Given this growth, it is important that administrators understand the costs required to deliver online courses. A frequently asked question by policy-makers is whether online instruction is more or less expensive to deliver than comparable face-to-face, classroom-delivered instruction. The objectives of this study were to 1) develop a exploratory model for deriving a cost measure for classroom-delivered instruction and an analogous model for deriving a cost measure for delivering online instruction, 2) perform an interinstitutional comparison of both classroom-delivered and online-delivered courses, 3) identify the opinions and assumptions of various campus administrators regarding online courses, and 4) identify the role of costs in the academic decision-making process regarding offering online courses. The study employed a mixed-methods research methodology. The quantitative analysis was performed using publicly available data from seven public institutions. The qualitative analysis entailed directed interviews with 12 preidentified campus decision makers from those institutions: six chief business officers and six chief academic officers. The study found that, for the organizations studied, online courses are delivered at a lower unit cost than face-to-face courses. In addition, the study determined that as an academic decision factor, cost is overwhelmed by other factors such as enrollment growth, campus space constraints, and broadening access. / text

This thesis concerns three important issues related to the problem of time-inconsistency in decision-making and revealed preference analysis. The first chapter focuses on the welfare properties of equilibria in exchange economies with time-dependent preferences. We reintroduce the notion of time-consistent overall Pareto efficiency proposed by Herings and Rohde (2006) and show that, whenever the agents are sophisticated, any equilibrium allocation is efficient in this sense. Thereby, we present a version of the First Fundamental Welfare Theorem for this class of economies. Moreover, we present a social welfare function with maximisers that coincide with the efficient allocations and prove that every equilibrium can be represented by a solution to the social welfare optimisation problem. In the second chapter we concentrate on the observable implications of various models of time-preference. We consider a framework in which subjects are asked to choose between pairs consisting of a monetary payment and a time-delay at which the payment is delivered. Given a finite set of observations, we are interested under what conditions the choices of an individual agent can be rationalised by a discounted utility function. We develop an axiomatic characterisation of time-preference with various forms of discounting, including weakly present-biased, quasi-hyperbolic, and exponential, and determine the testable restrictions for each specification. Moreover, we discuss possible identification issues that may arise in this class of tests. Finally, in the third chapter, we discuss the testable restrictions for production technologies that exhibit complementarities. Suppose that we observe a finite number of choices of input factors made by a single firm, as well as the prices at which they were acquired. Under what conditions imposed on the set of observations is it possible to justify the decisions of the firm by profit-maximisation with production complementarities? In this chapter, we develop an axiomatic characterisation of such behaviour and provide an easy-to-apply test for the hypothesis which can be employed in an empirical analysis.

The general topic of our thesis is forward looking behavior in strategic situations. Mixing theoretical and experimental analysis, we document how strategic thinking is affected by the specific features of a dynamic interaction. The overarching result is that the information regarding decisions that are close to the current one, receive a qualitatively different consideration, with respect to distant ones. That is, the actual decisions are based on reasoning over a limited number of steps, close to actual decison node. We capture this feature of behavior both in a strategic (limited backward induction) and in a non-strategic (limited farsightedness) set up, and we identify relevant consequences on the outcome of the interaction, which powerfullly explain many observed experimental regularities.<p>In the first essay, we present a general out-of-equilibrium framework for strategic thinking in sequential games. It assumes the agents to take decisions on restricted game trees, according to their (limited) foresight level, following backward induction. Therefore we talk of limited backward induction (LBI). We test for LBI using a variant of the race game. Our design allows to identify restricted game trees and backward reasoning, thus properly disentangling LBI behavior. The results provide strong support in favor of LBI. Most players solve intermediate tasks - i.e. restricted games - without reasoning on the terminal histories. Only a small fraction of subjects play close to equilibrium, and (slow) convergence toward it appears, though only in the base game. An intermediate task keeps the subjects off the equilibrium path longer than in the base game. The results cannot be rationalized using the most popular models of strategic reasoning, let alone equilibrium analysis.<p>In the second essay, a subtle implication of the model is investigated: the sensitivity of the players’ foresight to the accessibility and completeness of the information they have, using a Centipede game. By manipulating the way in which information is provided to subjects, we show that reduced availability of information is sufficient to shift the distribution of take-nodes further from the equilibrium prediction. On the other hand, similar results are obtained in a treatment where reduced availability of information is combined with an attempt to elicit preferences for reciprocity, through the presentation of the centipede as a repeated trust game. Our results could be interpreted as cognitive limitations being more effective than preferences in determining (shifts in) behavior in our experimental centipede. Furthermore our results are at odds with the recent ones in Cox [2012], suggesting caution in generalizing their results. Reducing the availability of information may hamper backward induction or induce myopic behavior, depending on the strategic environment.<p>The third essay consists of an experimental investigation of farsighted versus myopic behavior in network formation. Pairwise stability Jackson and Wolinsky [1996] is the standard stability concept in network formation. It assumes myopic behavior of the agents in the sense that they do not forecast how others might react to their actions. Assuming that agents are perfectly farsighted, related stability concepts have been proposed. We design a simple network formation experiment to test these extreme theories, but find evidence against both of them: the subjects are consistent with an intermediate rule of behavior, which we interpret as a form of limited farsightedness. On aggregate, the selection among multiple pairwise stable networks (and the performance of farsighted stability) crucially depends on the level of farsightedness needed to sustain them, and not on efficiency or cooperative considerations. Individual behavior analysis corroborates this interpretation, and suggests, in general, a low level of farsightedness (around two steps) on the part of the agents. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished