The Beer Distribution Game (The Beer Game) is a simulation game created by a group of professors at MIT Sloan School of management in early 1960s to demonstrate a number of key principles of supply chain management. The game is played by teams of at least four players, often in heated competition, and takes from one to one and a half hours to complete. A debriefing session of roughly equivalent length typically follows to review the results of each team and discuss the lessons involved.
University scientists released the results of a recent analysis that revealed the presence of female hormones in beer. Men should take a concerned look at their beer consumption. The theory is that beer contains female hormones (hops contain phytoeostrogens) and that by drinking enough beer, men turn into women.
To test the theory, 100 men were fed 8 pints of beer each, within 1 hour period. It was then observed that 100% of the test subjects:
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In science and engineering, a black box is a device, system or object which can be viewed solely in terms of its input, output and transfer characteristics without any knowledge of its internal workings, that is, its implementation is “opaque” (black). Almost anything might be referred to as a black box: a transistor, an algorithm, or the human mind.
New types of retailing frequently start off with crude facilities, little prestige, and a reputation for cutting prices and margins. As they mature, they often acquire more expensive buildings, provide more elaborate services, impose higher margins, and become vulnerable to new competition. The author examines the history of numerous retail institutions to determine if this process really constitutes a “natural law of retailing.”
This book aims to present an account of rational choice from a non-Bayesian point of view. Rational agents maximize subjective expected utility, but contrary to what is claimed by Bayesians, the author argues that utility and subjective probability should not be defined in terms of preferences over uncertain prospects. To some extent, the author’s non-Bayesian view gives a modern account of what decision theory could have been like, had decision theorists not entered the Bayesian path discovered by Ramsey, Savage, and Jeffrey. The author argues that traditional Bayesian decision theory is unavailing from an action-guiding perspective. For the deliberating Bayesian agent, the output of decision theory is not a set of preferences over alternative acts – these preferences are on the contrary used as input to the theory. Instead, the output is a (set of) utility function(s) that can be used for describing the agent as an expected utility maximizer, which are of limited normative relevance.