The coordination roles of relief organisations in humanitarian logistics

The number of organisations involved in relief work in general and humanitarian logistics specifically is large and increasing, creating new complexity. In this paper we analyse different types of coordination and roles in two case studies of the humanitarian cluster system based on its initial development and the Kenyan Post-election crisis. The different and unclear roles of the organisations create significant problems before and after cluster activation and deactivation. Individual organisations take on many roles in the cluster system and beyond it in terms of coordination. The clarity of the roles affects the need for and ease of coordination. We suggest a simple basic categorisation of roles as a starting point for developing this concept in the field of humanitarian logistics and connect this to coordination.     

Monroe Friedman: Consumer Boycotts: Effecting Change Through the Marketplace and the Media

Journal of Consumer Policy -     

Institutional checks and balances and the political control of the money supply

The Nordhaus hypothesis about the political business cycle assertsthat elected politicians have incentives to expand the moneysupply prior to elections to stimulate the economy and therebyengineer their re-election. Central bank independence is widelyregarded as an institutional solution to this problem. However,this solution works only if central bankers are not perfectagents of their political principals, perhaps because they areconservative (more inflation-averse). This artide proposes analternative solution: political business cycles may be obstructedby institutional checks and balances. The analysis applies tothe Deutsche Bundesbank and has implications for the institutionalstructure of the future European Central Bank.     

Collective Action Cascades: An Informational Rationale for the Power in Numbers

Self-interested individuals pursue their goals rationally taking into account the constraints imposed by their environment and best-responding to the strategic behavior of other individuals: when applied to collective action, economic theory predicts undersupply.
Meanwhile, the behavior of masses of people is described as excitable, emotional, irrational, suggestible, hypnotic, disorderly, and unpredictable: in practice, it seems, collective action is oversupplied, and erratically so. The contagious and volatile dynamics of collective action appear to defy rationalization.
I conceptualize a social movement as a dynamic informational cascade. Turbulencies emerge endogenously from rational individual behavior. Disorderly mass behavior is a by-product of a powerful decentralized mechanism of information aggregation.     

REPEATED MORAL HAZARD AND CONTRACTS WITH MEMORY: THE CASE OF RISK‐NEUTRALITY*

We consider a repeated moral hazard problem where both the principal and the wealth‐constrained agent are risk‐neutral. In each of two periods, the agent can exert unobservable effort, leading to success or failure. Incentives provided in the second period act as carrot and stick for the first period, so that the effort level induced in the second period is higher after a first‐period success than after a failure. If renegotiation cannot be prevented, the principal may prefer a project with lower returns; i.e., a project may be “too good” to be financed or, similarly, an agent can be “overqualified.”     

Bank capital regulation, asset risk, and subordinated uninsured debt

Whether more stringent capital requirements lead to reduced or to increased bank risk-taking has been discussed intensively in the academic literature. In this paper we drop the common but unrealistic assumptions that banks only issue deposits whose returns are guaranteed by a subsidised deposit insurance and that deposit insurance is free. We prove that with uninsured debt and a flat-rate deposit insurance premium the reaction of a bank to a higher capital requirement may change substantially. In some scenarios banks increase asset risk due to the enforcement of a more stringent capital requirement.     

Hat sich der Risikostrukturausgleich in der GKV bewährt?

Seit zw?lf Jahren geh?rt der Risikostrukturausgleich zu den Grundlagen eines auf Kassenwahlfreiheit gestützten Systems der Gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung (GKV). Der Mechanismus ist nicht zielgenau und daher einem st?ndigen Reformprozess ausgesetzt. Der Nutzen der Einnahmenreallokation wird aber auch grunds?tzlich in Frage gestellt. Welche Wirkungen hatte der Risikostrukturausgleich auf Beitragss?tze und Kassensystem? Welche Reformen wurden vorgeschlagen? Gibt es Gründe, seine Abschaffung zu befürworten? Susanne Erbe, 50, Dipl.-Volkswirtin, ist Mitarbeiterin in der Redaktion des Hamburgischen Welt-Wirtschafts-Archivs (HWWA).