Cognitive styles measured by the Myers-Briggs indicator were studied to isolate how style influences decision behavior. An experiment was conducted in which experienced decision makers from hospitals and firms were asked to assess several capital expansion projects. To control for environmental factors, the project summaries were tailored to be compatible or incompatible with each individual's cognitive style. Risk and information sources were also controlled in the summary by using two levels of risk, defined by the spread of the return on investment (ROI) projections, and by using personal judgements or a computer-based model to provide the ROI estimates. The decision makers assessed each project, indicating their likelihood of adopting it and their perception of its risk. The impact of style, setting (hospital or firm), and the control factors (environment, information source, and risk) were related to a decision to adopt and assessments of risk by ANOVA techniques. Cognitive style was found to be an important factor in the decision to adopt and the assessment of risk. ST (sensation-thinking) styles saw the highest risk and were reluctant to adopt the projects, while SF (sensation-feeling) styles were risk tolerant and more likely to adopt the same projects. Our results support the views of cognitive theorists, who argue that decision style is an important determinant of behavior. Decisions seem to be a function of the decision maker's cognitive makeup which differs for different psychological types.

Since the early 1970s, it has been realized that rapid economic development in developing countries leads to an acute inequality in income distribution. To prevent massive dissatisfaction among their citizens, developing countries were urged to achieve economic growth (particularly industrial growth) with distribution of income as their development goal. A good way of promoting growth and dispersal of industrial activities is the establishment of industrial estates in the locations where such activities are desired. This paper formulates the problem of optimal development of industrial estates, with the incorporation of specified minimum levels of development in poverty (priority) sites as distributive targets, as encountered by a Malaysian state government. The linear programming problem so formulated is then shown to be equivalent to a transportation problem, enabling it to be solved and parametically analyzed efficiently. Computational results, obtained using real-life data, show that the subsidy incurred in fulfilling the distributive targets is small compared to the total revenue generated. This justifies the imposition of the distributive targets on the development process. Further, the optimal policy was found to involve decisions to be taken in the initial years of the planning horizon that are fairly insensitive to variation in demand and cost parameters, thereby demonstrating the relative “goodness” of the optimal policy for industrial estate development in the state.

Several papers have been published which present simplified models for the aggregate planning problem which do not yield optimal schedules. They are typically supported with computations that suggest that the resulting schedules produce costs within a few percent of optimum. This note suggests that those cost comparisons have been made against inappropriate base costs which include a large fixed cost element. When these models are compared using only the controllable variable costs, costs that appeared to be only one or two percent over minimum turn out to be as much as twenty to thirty percent over the costs resulting from optimal solutions.

The recruitment of enlisted men and officers under the All-Volunteer Force concept costs approximately $620 million per year; of this amount approximately $100 million are in advertising expenditures. However, recently Congress and the General Accounting Office have expressed considerable concern over the lack of justification for such expenditures. The issue is further complicated by the recent recruiting shortfalls by all the services and the debate surrounding registration and a possible return to the draft. Finally, results of most profit-oriented sales research are difficult to apply to improving military recruiting efficiency due to the difference in the levels of rapport and credibility necessary to convince a potential recruit to invest several years of his life. This paper reports on modeling and implementation experience geared towards determining the proper allocation of resources between advertising and recruiters. This mix is especially crucial since Congress does not permit funds appropriated for advertising to be used for manpower or vice versa. The study consists of two parts: generation of response functions to estimate the number and mix of enlistments over time and geographically as a function of the various demographics, advertising expenditures and the number of recruiters; a nonlinear programming resource allocation model to improve the budget generation and budget execution capabilities in meeting and assessing the impact of the various multi-faceted quantity and quality goals. The basic model, with updating of the response function parameters, is being used by the Navy to aid in the generation and defense of its annual budget appropriations. Numerical results are given which are compared to the past allocations of the Navy and to results observed in industrial product marketing.

A logistics management game was modified to provide an information/decision system that would serve as a framework for experimentally investigating the impact of the mode of information presentation. Subjects played the game by making a series of weekly decisions during each of two playing sessions. The experimental treatments were varied between sessions to permit the testing of a set of hypotheses pertaining to the impact that information and its mode of presentation might have upon performance and the rate of performance change. Data on player decisions and simulated results (performance) were collected automatically by the modified gaming system while data on player backgrounds were collected via questionnaires. The experimental data provide some support for hypotheses relating to the superiority of display terminals and the influence of user background on exhibited learning. The data does not, however, provide solid support for hypotheses relating to the impact of additional information or of graphical forms of information presentation. Analysis of the experimental data suggests the need to consider individual and user-group differences in systems design. User background differences may also considerably complicate the design of graphical output for information systems. Experimental research involving human interaction with information systems is a very difficult undertaking. The experiences gained from this project and reported in this paper should aid other researchers in designing effective experiments. The findings discussed also point toward several areas offering potential for further research. Many different variables influence the development and use of computer-based information systems. This paper presents the results of an experiment designed to examine the impact of the amount of information provided, the mode of presentation of that information, and the differences in personal backgrounds on the performance and rate of performance change for users of a computer-based system.

This paper reports on a diagnostic study completed by a large firm in the consumer goods sector. This study is aimed at evaluating the production and distribution planning system, the quality of the forecasting system, and the existing levels of inventory. Aggregate models are presented to assess opportunities for improvements in those areas. A proposal for the design of a new production and distribution system, that follows a hierarchical approach, is reviewed. Recommendations for managerial actions are discussed.

In this note, a node elimination procedure has been suggested in case the two sequences obtained by using Townsend's (Townsend, W. 1978. The single machine problem with quadratic penalty function of completion times: A branch and bound solution. Management Sci. 24 (5) 530–534.) sufficient conditions for solving the single machine quadratic penalty function scheduling problem contain a subset J r of r jobs in the first r positions. Numerical illustrations and computational experience has been given in the end.

A model is formulated for optimizing multi-item inventories for repair of field equipment based on holding costs and the probability of job completion without stockout. This results in a different type of objective function from those found in most inventory problems in that the contributions of different line items are not separable. It is shown, however, that the optimal policy has the same form as the one that results from standard marginal analysis solutions in which the objective function is separable.