The Optimal Reservation Utility in Models of Decision Making in Arranged Marriages

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amitrajeet A. Batabyal
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Arranged Marriages ◽  
Reservation Utility

Managing operations in customer-intensive services with forward-looking customers

Kybernetes ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (10) ◽  
pp. 1941-1955 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chengzhang Li ◽  
Minghui Jiang ◽  
Xuchuan Yuan
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Service Operations ◽  
Purchase Decision ◽  
Service Rate ◽  
Optimal Price ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Reservation Utility ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Forward Looking

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the optimal price and service rate decisions in a customer-intensive service, where customers’ perceived service quality decreases in the service speed. Customers are assumed to be forward-looking in purchase decision-making and heterogeneous in their reservation utilities. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of customers’ forward-looking behavior and the heterogeneity on the operational decisions in a customer-intensive context. Design/methodology/approach The service is delivered through an M/M/1 queue system with unobservable queues. Customers are forward-looking in queue joining decisions, where the purchase decisions are made when the expected utility is greater than the reservation utility. The optimal price and service rate decisions are analyzed with both homogeneous and heterogeneous customers, where homogenous customers have the same reservation utility in purchase decision-making, while heterogeneous customers have different reservation utilities, which are captured by a random variable. Findings The optimal price and service rate decisions with forward-looking customers depend on the customer intensity, potential market size and customers’ reservation utility distribution. The results suggest that customers’ heterogeneity in terms of their reservation utilities affects the optimal decisions, market coverage and the expected revenue. Service providers need to take customers’ heterogeneity and the forward-looking behavior into operational decision-making. Originality/value This paper extends previous studies in customer-intensive service and contribute to the service operations management area by explicitly incorporating customers’ forward-looking behavior and heterogeneity in purchase decision-making. Assuming customers are forward-looking and heterogeneous is more realistic and practical. The results highlight that knowing customers’ behavioral characteristics can better improve decision-making in service operations, which is critical for enhancing customers’ satisfaction and loyalty, thus critical to a firm’s success in the market with intensive competition.

scholarly journals The Uneasy Gaze – Appearing for Interviews to get Married – An Empirical Investigation into the Pre-marital Arranged Marriage Negotiations in Urban Kolkata

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sucharita Sen ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Arranged Marriage ◽  
Freedom Of Choice ◽  
Arranged Marriages ◽  
Individual Behaviour ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Empirical Framework

Indian society, when viewed from a Foucauldian feminist perspective offers a curious and unique example of societal scrutiny over its members. This overt exercise of power influences individual behaviour, attitudes and has a profound influence on decision making. In this context, this paper argues, within an empirical framework, the limitations of freedom of choice for women in pre-marital arranged marriage negotiations. Women find themselves coercively thrust into uneasy situations of objectification, forced to mould themselves to fit into hegemonic patriarchal parameters. They are lambasted if they fail to fulfil the required expectations. Based on a survey of 250 young brides and prospective brides of upper-caste, middle-class background in urban Kolkata, I argue that the pre-marital negotiations in arranged marriages systematically subjugate the women. Faced with societal and familial pressure, the women often find themselves marginalised and subjugated in the process of arranged marriage.

Search and Satisficing

2011 ◽  
Vol 101 (7) ◽  
pp. 2899-2922 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Caplin ◽  
Mark Dean ◽  
Daniel Martin
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Choice Experiment ◽  
Herbert Simon ◽  
Search Order ◽  
Reservation Utility ◽  
The Impact

Many everyday decisions are made without full examination of all available options, and, as a result, the best available option may be missed. We develop a search-theoretic choice experiment to study the impact of incomplete consideration on the quality of choices. We find that many decisions can be understood using the satisficing model of Herbert Simon (1955): most subjects search sequentially, stopping when a “satisficing” level of reservation utility is realized. We find that reservation utilities and search order respond systematically to changes in the decision making environment. (JEL D03, D12, D83)

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