Notes on contributors

Abstract

Today, many public professionals feel estranged from the policy programmes they implement; that is, they experience ‘policy alienation’. This is of concern as, for satisfactory implementation, some identification with the policy is required. We conceptualize policy alienation based on the sociological concept of work alienation, and show how this can be used in policy implementation research. Studying a Dutch case of professionals implementing a new work disability decree, we observe how NPM practices increase policy alienation because of a perceived dysfunctional focus on efficiency and results. A large number of policy changes and stricter implementation rules further increased policy alienation.     

Strategy-Proof Probabilistic Decision Schemes for One-Dimensional Single-Peaked Preferences

Collective decision problems are considered with a finite number of agents who have single-peaked preferences on the real line. A probabilistic decision scheme assigns a probability distribution over the real line to every profile of reported preferences. The main result of the paper is a characterization of the class of unanimous and strategy-proof probabilistic schemes with the aid of fixed probability distributions that play a role similar to that of the phantom voters in H. Moulin (Public Choice35 (1980), 437-455). Thereby, the work of Moulin (1980) is extended to the probabilistic framework. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D71, D81.     

Contents Volume 22, 2002

Volume Contents

Contents Volume 22, 2002     

Knowledge Disclosure and Transmission in Buyer–Supplier Relationships

A buyer’s technical knowledge may increase the efficiency of its supplier. Suppliers, however, frequently maintain relationships with additional buyers. Knowledge disclosure then bears the risk of benefiting one’s own rival due to opportunistic knowledge transmission through the common supplier. We show that in one-shot relationships no knowledge disclosure takes place because the supplier has an incentive to transmit and, anticipating that, buyers refuse to disclose any of their knowledge. In repeated relationships knowledge disclosure is stabilized by larger technological proximity between buyers and suppliers and destabilized by the absolute value of the knowledge.      

Interpretation problems of the partial correlation with nonnormally distributed variables

The partial correlation is a commonly used measure for assessing the bivariate correlation of two quantitative variables after eliminating the influence of one or more other variables. The partial correlation is generally interpreted as the correlation that would result if the variables to be eliminated were fixed (not allowed to vary and influence the other variables), which is referred to in the statistical literature as conditional correlation. The present paper demonstrates, by means of theoretical derivations and practical examples, that when the assumption of multivariate normality is violated (e.g., as a result of nonlinear relationships among the variables investigated) the usual interpretation of the partial correlation coefficient will be basically incorrect. In extreme cases the value of the partial correlation coefficient may be strongly positive, close to 1, whereas the conditional correlation may have a large negative value. To solve this problem the paper suggests to partial out a certain function (in most cases the square) of the variables whose effects are to be eliminated if nonlinear relationships are likely to occur.     

Second‐Generation Immigrants in the Swedish Labour Market

This study focuses on the labour market performance among second‐generation immigrants in Sweden. One motivation behind the analysis is that it gives insight into the long‐term consequences of immigration. Labour market performance relates the probability of having a job, referred to here as a threshold effect and to the differences in income from work, given that a person is in the market and is referred to as an income from work effect. We have shown that a clear threshold effect of being a second‐generation immigrant exists and that different groups of second‐generation immigrants perform differently in the Swedish labour market.     

利用生产停顿机会进行维修以提高产量

介绍Statoil公司提出的机会维修概念和它对生产所起的重要作用,举例说明机会维修的可行性,并对机会维修进行优化使它更好地为生产服务.