Publication records

The Gazi B case focuses on two issues: First, it provides a bottom-up perspective on each of Gazi’s main lines of business, namely, the Avis/Budget car rental and other vehicle and leasing businesses; in-bound tourism; outbound tourism and ticketing; conference and event business; and cruise ship landings. Detailed plans are presented for each of these business lines and can be contrasted with plans and figures presented in the A case which provided a top-down perspective. The two perspectives remain far apart! Gazi’s top-down vision is to have overall company revenues of €100 million within five years; bottom-up estimates range from €50 million overall downwards. The case invites a debate of how to reconcile these two disparate perspectives. It allows students to understand that the real issue behind these disparate growth goals is to decide first and foremost on the overall corporate business definition and scope, and whether the previous pattern of continuous diversification is sustainable in the long run. Also worth debating is whether Gazi’s focus on “top” line revenue growth, and on employee projections, should not be tempered by a parallel concern for the bottom line, for example profitability. The second in the B case is to decide on a possible brand name to replace Albanian Experience for the incoming tourism and conference business. This existing brand’s credibility and utility has been overtaken by a substantial de-facto expansion of tourism destinations to include virtually all of the Balkan area, Greece to the South and parts of Italy to the North, as well as destinations in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Although the corporate scope and focus issue and the branding issue appear to be separate, they are of course related. A new brand name must be found which if possible reflects the overall business scope as well as the new tourist sources, destinations, and USPs.

The question that the A case ostensibly poses, namely to what degree Gazi and his team should now scale up the overall business, and in which areas, is best left to the B case discussion for reasons outlined in the abstract. The A case discussion should therefore be mainly backward-looking focusing on Gazi as an individual, as an entrepreneur and as a leader. The A case discussion should also include a critical analysis of the strategy that Gazi has employed so far to grow the business—essentially diversification by pursuing new market opportunities.

Ostensibly there are two issues to be resolved: How to organize for the future; and the future roles and responsibilities of Gazi himself as the organization embarks on its next step of substantial growth. The larger issue behind these apparent issues is how to find the right balance in the future between the two extremes of a top-down strongly led, fast, entrepreneurial organization (as at present), and the growing need to institutionalize and decentralize the organization with both strategy and leadership pushed to levels below Gazi—all the while retaining an entrepreneurial culture and speed. Such new balances go beyond organizational structure and involve processes, systems, culture, people, and leadership. All are open for discussion in the C case.

The question that the A case ostensibly poses, namely to what degree Gazi and his team should now scale up the overall business, and in which areas, is best left to the B case discussion for reasons outlined in the abstract. The A case discussion should therefore be mainly backward-looking focusing on Gazi as an individual, as an entrepreneur and as a leader. The A case discussion should also include a critical analysis of the strategy that Gazi has employed so far to grow the business—essentially diversification by pursuing new market opportunities.

“The kitchen purchase” is a simulation of bargaining over the price of a fitted kitchen. The case study consists of a briefing for the sellers (the Hase family) and a briefing for the buyers (the Stulle family). On the basis of these briefings the course participants negotiate individually or in teams of two. The case study has been kept simple so that the negotiations can be conducted with very little preparation time needed. At the same time the case study presents a few “stumbling blocks” and permits a profound discussion on the distributive and integrative conduct of negotiations, handling bargaining power, and the ethics of bargaining. The case study is therefore especially well-suited for course participants with intermediate to advanced negotiating experience.

The case study aims at developing course participants' negotiation skills. Specifically, participants learn how to systematically prepare negotiations, how to determine and exploit bargaining power, how to tap into integrative potentials in distributive negotiations, and, optionally, how to negotiate in teams.

“The kitchen purchase” is a simulation of bargaining over the price of a fitted kitchen. The case study consists of a briefing for the sellers (the Hase family) and a briefing for the buyers (the Stulle family). On the basis of these briefings the course participants negotiate individually or in teams of two. The case study has been kept simple so that the negotiations can be conducted with very little preparation time needed. At the same time the case study presents a few “stumbling blocks” and permits a profound discussion on the distributive and integrative conduct of negotiations, handling bargaining power, and the ethics of bargaining. The case study is therefore especially well-suited for course participants with intermediate to advanced negotiating experience.

The case study aims at developing course participants' negotiation skills. Specifically, participants learn how to systematically prepare negotiations, how to determine and exploit bargaining power, how to tap into integrative potentials in distributive negotiations, and, optionally, how to negotiate in teams.

We consider two players facing identical discrete-time bandit problems with a safe and a risky arm. In any period, the risky arm yields either a success or a failure, and the first success reveals the risky arm to dominate the safe one. When payoffs are public information, the ensuing free-rider problem is so severe that the equilibrium number of experiments is at most one plus the number of experiments that a single agent would perform. When payoffs are private information and players can communicate via cheap talk, the socially optimal symmetric experimentation profile can be supported as a perfect Bayesian equilibrium for sufficiently optimistic prior beliefs. These results generalize to more than two players whenever the success probability per period is not too high. In particular, this is the case when successes occur at the jump times of a Poisson process and the period length is sufficiently small.

With permission of Elsevier

We provide new formulae for the potential of the Shapley value that use the multilinear extension of coalitional games with transferable utility.

With permission of Elsevier