Calling the shots in negotiations : the effects of self-efficacy, cognitive style, goal orientation, information about past performance, and opponents' behavior on negotiators' risk taking

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on Feb 17, 2010).The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file.Dissertation advisor: Dr. James A. Wall Jr.Vita.Ph. D. University of Missouri--Columbia 2009.Risk taking is a central element in negotiations. Currently, a significant amount of information exists as to different negotiators' techniques, behaviors, and styles. However, very little is known about their risk taking behaviors and about the determinants of these behaviors. The purpose of this study is to investigate six factors affecting risk taking behaviors in negotiations. In this study I focus on three risk taking behaviors that serve as the dependent variables: (1) revealing one's best alternative to a negotiated agreement (known as BATNA), (2) revealing one's payoffs, and (3) making high demands (or low offers). The six independent variables I examine are: self-efficacy, cognitive style, goal orientation, information about negotiators' past performance, opponent's call for risk taking, and opponent's risk taking. Drawing from the current negotiation literature, I developed hypotheses as to the relationships among the independent and dependent variables. Subsequently, in order to test these hypotheses, I conducted a controlled experiment, in which confederates and subjects engaged in a negotiation role play over three separate issues. As for the manipulated variables, the results indicate that negotiators take more risks (reveal information about BATNA and about payoffs) when their opponents ask them to do so and when their opponents take risks themselves. Negotiators take more risks when their opponents both called for risk taking and engaged in risk taking. Negotiators also take more risks when presented with information that in past similar scenarios negotiators did either well or either poorly, than when presented with information about average past performance. As for the measured variables, contrary to the respective hypotheses, the results indicate that individuals with low negotiation self-efficacy engage in more risk taking than negotiators with high self-efficacy; that cognitive style is not related to risk taking; and that the performance approach goal orientation rather than the learning approach goal orientation is related to risk taking. These findings contribute to our understanding of risk taking, which is central to negotiation and has not been investigated systematically thus far. Finally, I discuss the implications of this study for both research and practice, and suggest avenues for further study .Includes bibliographical reference

Colleagues and Friends: A Theoretical Framework of Workplace Friendship

Friendships in general, and workplace friendships in particular, are among the most valued interpersonal relationships for individuals. Despite the prevalence and great importance of workplace friendships, there isn’t much research about the theoretical underpinnings of this phenomenon. In this paper we suggest a typology for workplace friendships. We propose looking at this construct as a function of two factors: The Quality of the friendship and its Scope. Consequently, we propose four types of workplace friendships and discuss their likely antecedents and outcomes. Finally, we discuss avenues for future research in this area

Functional interpretation of single cell similarity maps.

We present Vision, a tool for annotating the sources of variation in single cell RNA-seq data in an automated and scalable manner. Vision operates directly on the manifold of cell-cell similarity and employs a flexible annotation approach that can operate either with or without preconceived stratification of the cells into groups or along a continuum. We demonstrate the utility of Vision in several case studies and show that it can derive important sources of cellular variation and link them to experimental meta-data even with relatively homogeneous sets of cells. Vision produces an interactive, low latency and feature rich web-based report that can be easily shared among researchers, thus facilitating data dissemination and collaboration

Finite element simulation of a perturbed axial-symmetric whispering-gallery mode and its use for intensity enhancement with a nanoparticle coupled to a microtoroid

We present an optical mode solver for a whispering gallery resonator coupled to an adjacent arbitrary shaped nano-particle that breaks the axial symmetry of the resonator. Such a hybrid resonator-nanoparticle is similar to what was recently used for bio-detection and for field enhancement. We demonstrate our solver by parametrically studying a toroid-nanoplasmonic device and get the optimal nano-plasmonic size for maximal enhancement. We investigate cases near a plasmonic resonance as well as far from a plasmonic resonance. Unlike common plasmons that typically benefit from working near their resonance, here working far from plasmonic resonance provides comparable performance. This is because the plasmonic resonance enhancement is accompanied by cavity quality degradation through plasmonic absorption.Comment: Supplementary COMSOL script, see http://www.quantumchaos.de/Media/comsol2013/Supplement_Script_for_Fig.3_Comsol_4.3a.mp

Can Long-Range Nuclear Properties Be Influenced By Short Range Interactions? A chiral dynamics estimate

Recent experiments and many-body calculations indicate that approximately 20\% of the nucleons in medium and heavy nuclei ($A\geq12$) are part of short-range correlated (SRC) primarily neutron-proton ($np$) pairs. We find that using chiral dynamics to account for the formation of $np$ pairs due to the effects of iterated and irreducible two-pion exchange leads to values consistent with the 20\% level. We further apply chiral dynamics to study how these correlations influence the calculations of nuclear charge radii, that traditionally truncate their effect, to find that they are capable of introducing non-negligible effects.Comment: 6 pages, 0 figures. This version includes many improvement

Robust Solutions of Optimization Problems Affected by Uncertain Probabilities

In this paper we focus on robust linear optimization problems with uncertainty regions defined by ø-divergences (for example, chi-squared, Hellinger, Kullback-Leibler). We show how uncertainty regions based on ø-divergences arise in a natural way as confidence sets if the uncertain parameters contain elements of a probability vector. Such problems frequently occur in, for example, optimization problems in inventory control or finance that involve terms containing moments of random variables, expected utility, etc. We show that the robust counterpart of a linear optimization problem with ø-divergence uncertainty is tractable for most of the choices of ø typically considered in the literature. We extend the results to problems that are nonlinear in the optimization variables. Several applications, including an asset pricing example and a numerical multi-item newsvendor example, illustrate the relevance of the proposed approach.robust optimization;ø-divergence;goodness-of-fit statistics

Static Envelope Patterns in Composite Resonances Generated by Level Crossing in Optical Toroidal Microcavities

We study level crossing in the optical whispering-gallery (WG) modes by using toroidal microcavities. Experimentally, we image the stationary envelope patterns of the composite optical modes that arise when WG modes of different wavelengths coincide in frequency. Numerically, we calculate crossings of levels that correspond with the observed degenerate modes, where our method takes into account the not perfectly transverse nature of their field polarizations. In addition, we analyze anticrossing with a large avoidance gap between modes of the same azimuthal number

Separable Multipartite Mixed States - Operational Asymptotically Necessary and Sufficient Conditions

We introduce an operational procedure to determine, with arbitrary probability and accuracy, optimal entanglement witness for every multipartite entangled state. This method provides an operational criterion for separability which is asymptotically necessary and sufficient. Our results are also generalized to detect all different types of multipartite entanglement.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Physical Review Letters. Revised version with new calculation

Massive perturbers and the efficient merger of binary massive black holes

We show that dynamical relaxation in the aftermath of a galactic merger and the ensuing formation and decay of a binary massive black hole (MBH), are dominated by massive perturbers (MPs) such as giant molecular clouds or clusters. MPs accelerate relaxation by orders of magnitude relative to 2-body stellar relaxation alone, and efficiently scatter stars into the binary MBH's orbit. The 3-body star-binary MBH interactions shrink the binary MBH to the point where energy losses from the emission of gravitational waves (GW) lead to rapid coalescence. We model this process based on observed and simulated MP distributions and take into account the decreased efficiency of the star-binary MBH interaction due to acceleration in the galactic potential. We show that mergers of gas-rich galactic nuclei lead to binary MBH coalescence well within the Hubble time. Moreover, lower-mass binary MBHs (<10^8 Msun) require only a few percent of the typical gas mass in a post-merger nucleus to coalesce in a Hubble time. The fate of a binary MBH in a gas poor galactic merger is less certain, although massive stellar structures (e.g. clusters, stellar rings) could likewise lead to efficient coalescence. These coalescence events are observable by their strong GW emission. MPs thus increase the cosmic rate of such GW events, lead to a higher mass deficit in the merged galactic core and suppress the formation of triple MBH systems and the resulting ejection of MBHs into intergalactic space.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables. More detailed explanations and changes in structure. Section on hypervelocity stars moved to another paper (in preparation). Results and conclusions unchanged. Accepted to Ap