Advertising to the masses: the effects of crowding on the attention to place-based advertising

Advertising situated in environments where people congregate or pass through on their way to somewhere else benefit from being placed in such high traffic areas. However, these strategically placed ads also suffer from conditions of human crowding that prevents them from being noticed and processed. We undertake a study of place-based advertising in a shopping mall using facial recognition software to determine the effect of human density on the attention directed to advertising. We find that as human density increases, attention to advertising decreases, but only to a point where it begins to increase again. Our research also finds that human density plays a moderating role on the motivation to process advertising.     

Many roads to flexibility: how large firms built autarchic regional production systems in France

This article discusses the adjustment of large firms in France, in particular how they regionalized their production structures in the 1980s. Throughout the ‘Golden Age’, large firms had geographically reorganized their activities: strategic planning remained in Paris, while the actual production was decentralized into the provinces, primarily to address cost and labour conflict issues. When the large firms faced a profitability crisis in the 1980s, and the traditional state‐financed way out of the problems was no longer available, they saw in these proto‐regional production systems a chance to become more competitive. They relied on the decentralization policies of the governments in the 1980s, and used the second‐order effects of the new policies as a means to modernize their own operations. L'article examine l'adaptation des grandes entreprises françaises, notamment la régionalisation de leurs structures de production dans les années 1980. Durant ‘l'Age d'Or’, les grosses entreprises avaient réorganisé géographiquement leurs activités: la planification stratégique restait à Paris, tandis que la production réelle se décentralisait en province, principalement pour résoudre des problémes de couûts et de conflits sociaux. Lorsque ces grandes entreprises se heurtèrent à la crise de rentabilité des années 1980, alors que la solution traditionnelle de financement étatique n'existait plus, elles virent dans ces systèmes de production proto‐régionaux une chance d'améliorer leur compétitivité. Elles s'appuyèrent donc sur les politiques de décentralisation des gouvernements de l'époque, profitant des effets secondaires de ces initiatives pour moderniser leur propre fonctionnement.     

中国"以电子政务拉动信息产业发展"政策的再评估

电子政务是中国信息化战略的重中之重，但其实际发展与预期间存在着明显差距。本文以中国“以电子政务拉动信息产业发展”政策为研究重点，把这一政策放在中国信息化历史中加以考察，分析中国信息化新阶段ICT市场的新变化和新挑战，针对电子政务实践与预期间的差距，对该政策提出我们的看法。     

Measuring Employment Security in Europe Using Surveys of Employers

Using results from surveys in which employers were questioned about their freedom to shed staff, we develop a measure of employment security in Europe. We seek to identify which institutional factors are correlated with the responses of employers and find that they appear to reflect the strength of legal restrictions and trade unions and the prevalence of atypical employment. Our results are used to compile an index of employment security that has both a temporal and a cross‐country dimension.     

The proletarianisation of academic labour

This article looks at industrial relations changes, conflict and control in higher education, particularly among university academics. It suggests a tendency towards proletarianisation, and a focus on the academic labour process is useful in explaining growing conflict. An apparent HRM agenda and (reluctantly) increasing managerialism are forms, not causes, of change which is driven by funding pressures similar to those affecting other HE systems.     

passive drinking

The threat to health from passive smoking is now well understood. Andrew Wilson, a freelance healthcare journalist, reveals the alarming results of recent research into ‘passive drinking’. Without wishing to cause alarm Economic Affairs wonders how seriously we should treat these new findings?     

Management and the Professions: How Cracked is That Glass Ceiling?

All prestigious or highly-paid occupations in Britain are dominated by men: this is as true of the public sector as it is of industry. This article examines the evidence for discrimination in the public sector. It deals with both the situation at work and the one at home. It looks at various explanations as to why this is the case, as well as the evidence on how men and women deal with the inequality. The author concludes that there are good reasons why men and women do not see or confront the issues discussed in her article. Unless men and women wake up to the fact that we live in an unequal society and wish to see the glass ceiling well and truly broken, little is likely to change.     

Preventing HIV in injection drug users: exploring the tradeoffs between interventions

Injection drug users (IDUs) transmit the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) via both needle sharing and sex. Available interventions for this population have varying costs and effectiveness and focus on different risk behaviors. In this analysis, we look at two interventions. One is inexpensive, broad-based and provides modest risk reductions (street outreach (SO)); the other is narrowly focused, expensive and relatively effective (methadone maintenance). This analysis explores the effects of population risk behavior, intervention effectiveness, intervention costs, and decision constraints when allocating funds between these two interventions to maximize effectiveness. We develop a model of the spread of HIV, dividing IDUs into susceptibles (uninfected) and infectives, and separately portraying sex and injection risk. We simulate the epidemic in New York City for time periods from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, and incorporate the behavioral effects of two interventions performed singly or in combination to find the allocation that maximizes the number of infections averted in the IDUs and their noninjecting sex partners, assuming interventions have increasing marginal costs. We find that the optimal allocation nearly always involves spending the maximum allowable amount on SO. This result is largely insensitive to variations in risk parameters, intervention efficacy, or cost. The model's structure, however, makes clear that many factors contribute to this insensitivity, namely the scope of the interventions, the dual drug/sex nature of HIV risk in the population, the asymmetry of sexual risk for men and women, and the potential benefits to nonIDUs.