Virtual Community Use for Packaged Software Maintenance

In this study, we investigated the use of virtual communities for involving distributed customers in the maintenance of packaged software. On the basis of an empirical study, we suggest that virtual communities can be usefully leveraged for corrective, adaptive, and perfective software maintenance. Specifically, the virtual community allowed for quick discovery of bugs and a rich interaction between developers and customers in the categories of corrective and adaptive software maintenance. However, although contributing also to the perfective category of software maintenance, this was the category in which several customer suggestions for modification were actually ignored by the developers. This implies that community use is indeed beneficial for maintenance related to coding and design errors as well as for maintenance of an adaptive character. However, it has limitations when associated with major changes such as software functionality addition or modification as those experienced in the category of perfective maintenance.     

Differentiable von Neumann-Morgenstern utility

Summary. Differentiability is a convenient property of von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions which is almost always imposed but has not been translated into behavioral terms. In applications, expected utility is usually maximized subject to a constraint, and the maximization is carried out by differentiating the utility function. This paper presents two sets of necessary and sufficient conditions for a risk averse von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function to be differentiable. The first of them is formulated in terms of the equivalent risk premia of small gambles. It says, in brief, that the equivalent risk premium is of a smaller order of magnitude than the risk itself, as measured by the expectation of the absolute value of the risk. The second set of necessary and sufficient conditions is formulated in terms of the probability premium of small lotteries. It says, essentially, that the probability premium for small binary lotteries goes to zero as the size of the lottery goes to zero. Received: May 11, 1997; revised version: May 14, 1998     

Trade effects of the Europe agreements: A theory-based gravity approach

We analyze normalized productivity differences for 15 developing Latin American countries and four firm types: National Domestic, National Exporter, Foreign Domestic, and Foreign Exporter. There are no productivity thresholds for viability, export activity, or multinational activity, but we do find a clear size productivity premium and development productivity premium in the manufacturing sectors. We also find a clear foreign-ownership productivity premium, both for domestic firms and for exporting firms and both for manufacturing sectors and services sectors. In contrast, we only find an export productivity premium for national firms in the manufacturing sectors.     

The Outlook for the Euro Changeover: A Summary and General Analysis

In this paper, the procedures and problems of the changeover to the euro are reviewed. The legal elements involved are discussed as are the psychological aspects. Various practical problems and proposed solutions are described. The possibility of resistance from the consumers in certain segments of the Member State populations is also addressed. One reason for any such resistance might be that for many citizens, the change of currency appears to have little bearing on their everyday concerns.Particular attention is devoted to the scenario for the period 1 January to 1 July 2002, during which coins and notes in euros and national monetary units can be in circulation at the same time.     

Mixed Causal–Noncausal Autoregressions: Bimodality Issues in Estimation and Unit Root Testing1

This paper stresses the bimodality of the likelihood function of the Mixed causal–noncausal AutoRegressions (MAR), and it is shown that the bimodality issue becomes more salient as the causal root approaches unity from below. The consequences are important as the roots of the local maxima are typically interchanged, attributing the noncausal component to the causal one and vice‐versa. This severely changes the interpretation of the results, and the properties of unit root tests of the backward root are adversely affected. To circumvent the bimodality issue, this paper proposes an estimation strategy which (i) increases noticeably the probability of attaining the global MLE; and (ii) selects carefully the maximum used for the unit root test against a MAR stationary alternative.     

Interdependence between consumption in the North and sustainable communities in the South

The issues we want to address and discuss in this article are related to the interdependence between consumption in households in high‐income countries and life in the low‐income countries, seen in a sustainable perspective. In the consumer society the underlying premise is that ever‐escalating consumption is accepted, even desirable. During the past decade, an increasing critique of consumer lifestyle has come from environmentalists, who argue that the resource use to maintain a consumer lifestyle is putting too hard a burden on the ecosystems. We give examples of the abundant evidence of interdependence between North and South at global levels, such as climate change and appropriation of ecosystem capacities, and related to specific types of consumption such as clothing, flowers, food and cosmetics. We argue that the loss of feedback to individual households in the North is a serious barrier for change towards more sustainable consumption habits, and raise a question about how impacts of production and consumption can be communicated to consumers. On the basis of previous and ongoing research, we highlight some impacts of positive and negative labelling schemes as well as extended environmental information.