We can always count on Dan Ariely to help us view situations from a different perspective. Election day is no exception, and today the New York Times featured Dan’s study of how liberals and conservatives react to jokes. The results? People who describe themselves as conservative enjoyed all varieties of jokes more than liberals.

Here’s one of the jokes from the study:

Husband: When I get mad at you, you never fight back. How do you control your anger?
Wife: I clean the toilet bowl.
Husband: How does that help?

Wife: I use your toothbrush.

Visit Dan’s blog for more information about the research and a spirited debate about the findings.

Allowing joint bidding (where consumers can bid on a number of products together as a package) helps reduce potential mismatch between an e-tailer’s costs and the consumer’s bids on name-your-own-price websites like Priceline, according to new research by Duke Professor Wilfred Amaldoss and Sanjay Jain of the Mays Business School, Texas A&M University.

Their study, featured in the current issue of Management Science, examines joint bidding on sites such as Priceline where, for example, a consumer might bid on all elements of a vacation (airplane travel, rental car, and hotel) as a package. Amaldoss and Jain studied whether it would be better for consumers if they could place joint bids for all these separate items at a name-your-own-price (NYOP) retailer like Priceline, and if it would be profitable for the e-tailer to allow such joint bids.

The authors considered two possible outcomes: consumers seeking savings could drive down prices when bidding on packages, giving them a bargain but costing the retailer. Alternately, consumers might hope that by bidding on a package, they could obtain all the items in the package and offer more.

Amaldoss and Jain conclude that in many cases, joint bidding benefits both consumer and retailer, even though consumers may indeed bid more for the very same products when asked to place a joint bid rather than a separate bid for each product.