Faison P. Gibson

When threats and encouragements are effective in bargaining: The case of credit collectors

We hypothesise that the effectiveness of threats and encouragements is contingent on the intended recipients level of negative affect, as evidenced by his/her negative affective display. Therefore, bargainers can be more effective if, as they make offers, they condition any threats or encouragements on the recipients affective display. We test this hypothesis using 5561 verbal exchanges that occurred during 192 telephone conversations between credit collectors and debtors. Collectors were most effective in motivating debtors to discuss terms to resolve their debt if they: (1) threatened recipients who were nonresponsive and did not show any negative affect; and (2) encouraged recipients who displayed negative affect. This result suggests that making threats and encouragements contingent on a recipients displays of negative affect may be an important but frequently overlooked component of bargaining.

Examining animated algorithms: the role of problem domain experience and problem representation in rule development

One of the key activities in designing software is developing explicit rules or theories about the problem domain. We investigated two factors expected to influence rule development the designer’s level of prior experience in the problem domain and the designer’s problem representation. Our experimental results indicate that higher problem domain experience enhances subjects’ ability to effectively consider multiple problem domain constraints and improves the likelihood of writing correct rules. Alternative problem representations focused subjects’ attention toward or away fmm tractable units of analysis for writing rules. However, our problem representation manipulation did not affect the success rate for writing correct rules.