How deficiencies in motivation to manage contribute to the United States' competitiveness problem (and what can be done about it)

Data are presented to support the argument that motivation to manage is a major cause of managerial effectiveness, that it declined sharply in the college population during the activism of the 1960s and early 1970s, and that it is now severely lacking in the United States relative to many other countries. Thus America's competitiveness problems appear to be largely motivational in nature. Possible solutions are discussed, including recruiting and selecting for managerial motivation, increasing motivation to manage using training and development techniques, and changing organizational designs (telescoping the scalar chain, moving managerial tasks into non-managerial positions, resorting to professional forms, and expanding venture structures). © 1995 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Budget share and optimal commodity taxes without computation

This paper shows for the linear expenditure system that the optimal tax rates increase across commodities in the ratio of the respective budget shares of the rich to those of the poor—i.e., the more luxurious good has a higher tax. These budget shares can be calculated either at pre-tax or post-tax price levels, thus can be expressed directly in terms of the basic parameters of the linear expenditure system.     

Groups Formation and Operations in the Web 2.0 Environment and Social Networks

The Internet and the Web are evolving to a platform for collaboration, sharing, innovation and user-created content—the so-called Web 2.0 environment. This environment includes social and business networks, and it is influencing what people do on the Web and intranets, individually and in groups. This paper describes the Web 2.0 environment, its tools, applications, characteristics. It also describes various types of online groups, especially social networks, and how they operate in the Web 2.0 environment. Of special interest is the way organization members communicate and collaborate mainly via wikis and blogs. In addition, the paper includes a proposed triad relational model (Technology–People–Community) of social/work life on the Internet. Particularly, social/work groups are becoming sustainable because of the incentives for participants to connect and network with other users. A discussion of group dynamics that is based on the human needs for trust, support, and sharing, regardless if the setting is a physical or virtual one, follows. Finally, future research directions are outlined.     

A Framework for Adopting Collaboration 2.0 Tools for Virtual Group Decision Making

Decision making in virtual teams is gaining momentum due to globalization, mobility of employees, and the need for collective and rapid decision making by members who are in different locations. These factors resulted in a proliferation of virtual team software support tools for decision making, the latest of which is social software (also known as collaboration 2.0), which includes tools such as wikis, blogs, microblogs, discussion forums, and social networking platforms. This paper describes the potential use of collaboration 2.0 software for improving the process and the specific tasks in virtual group decision making. The paper proposes a framework for exploring the fitness between social software and the major activities in the group decision making process and how such tools can be successfully adopted. Specifically, we use a fit-viability model to help assessing whether social software fit a decision task and what organizational factors are important for such tools to be effective. Representative research issues related to the use of such tools are also presented.     

Rising UI benefits over time

We re-examine a key result in the optimal UI literature that benefits should decline over time. We show that when the population is heterogeneous, Pareto-efficiency may call for multiple payment schedules, some with benefits that fall over time and some with benefits that rise over time.     

Welfare Migration: Is the Net Fiscal Burden a Good Measure of its Economic Impact on the Welfare of the Native-Born Population?

Migration of young workers (as distinct from retirees), evenwhen driven in by the generosity of the welfare state, slowsdown the trend of increasing dependency ratio. But, even thoughlow-skill migration improves the dependency ratio, it neverthelessburdens the welfare state. Recent studies by Smith and Edmonston(1977), and Sinn et al. (2003) comprehensively estimate thefiscal burden that low-skill migration imposes on the fiscalsystem. However an important message of this paper is that inan infinite-horizon set-up, one cannot fully grasp the implicationsof migration for the welfare state, just by looking at the netfiscal burden that migrants impose on the fiscal system. Inan infinite-horizon, overlapping generations economy, this netburden, could change to net gain to the native born population.(JEL F22, H3, J10)