《廊桥遗梦》中弗朗西斯卡的选择

普通的家庭主妇弗朗西斯卡在一次偶然的邂逅和一位摄影师陷入了爱河。但是他们之间的爱情是与世俗的道德相违背的,因为弗朗西斯卡是有丈夫的。虽然她的婚姻生活并不愉快,然而她对于家庭的责任却驱使她放弃这段感情。在爱情和责任的冲突之间,最终她选择了回归家庭,其中闪现出了弗朗西斯卡身上散发出的真爱无私的光辉。     

Expensing Versus Capitalization

We develop a theoretical framework to study the effects of expensing versus capitalization of investment expenditures on capital market asset prices, corporate investment, and investment efficiency. We use a two‐period model in which the financial reports at the end of the first period influence the price of the firm. In the first period, the current owner makes an investment decision that yields returns during the first and the second periods. We highlight the benefits and costs of the matching principle in GAAP and identify conditions under which less disclosure improves investment efficiency. We find that, in terms of investment efficiency, expensing beats capitalization if and only if the expected growth rate is high, the growth volatility is large, or the earnings persistence is small. We also offer testable empirical implications for accounting choice and for real earnings management.     

Evidence of Choice Avoidance in Capital‐Investment Judgements*

Evaluating capital‐investment decisions is an important function of managerial accountants. There is anecdotal evidence, however, that managers avoid making decisions or delay decisions, which is costly in terms of time, effort, and lost opportunities. Prior research has shown that choice avoidance among nonprofessionals making personal decisions is associated with having to choose between alternatives with very different features or that require trade‐offs of very important goals (choice difficulty). It is unclear, however, whether experienced managers, using the analytical decision tools at their disposal, respond in the same way as nonprofessionals when making accounting decisions. Hence, this study examines whether increased choice difficulty increases negative affect in the capital‐investment decision‐making process and, as a result, the tendency of managers to avoid choice even when analytical decision tools are used. In an experiment with 120 executives, participants facing more difficult decisions reported they felt more worried, nervous, uneasy, and anxious and had a greater desire to postpone making the decision than participants in a control group. Participants provided with a decision aid designed to help them focus their cognitive effort reported a lower desire to postpone making the decision than participants in the choice‐difficulty conditions without the decision aid. I conclude by discussing the result's implications for managers and accountants.     

The relationship between cattle and savings: A cattle‐owner perspective

Using data from the Dryharts area in the Taung district of Bophuthatswana, the advantages and disadvantages of keeping cattle are explored using a cattle‐owner perspective. It is argued that storing wealth in the form of cattle is a rational investment decision. This has certain implications for strategies aimed at conservation of grazing resources. While providing rural inhabitants with alternative forms of storing wealth and helping towards alleviating the pressure on grazing land. It is at best a partial solution. Policy measures addressing the land question and rural‐urban balance could have a bigger impact.     

关于老年旅游决策过程的分析——基于理性选择理论的视角

老龄化社会的来临,为老年旅游市场的发展带来了空前的机遇。然而,老年人属于一个特殊群体,他们对旅游地、旅游方式、旅游成本及服务等都有较高的要求,同时,在进行旅游决策时,也会受到更多因素的影响和限制。从社会学的理性选择理论来看,老年人的旅游决策过程也是一种理性选择的过程。     

The Logit Equilibrium: A Perspective on Intuitive Behavioral Anomalies

This paper considers a class of models in which rank-based payoffs are sensitive to “noise” in decision making. Examples include auctions, price competition, coordination, and location games. Observed laboratory behavior in these games is often responsive to the asymmetric costs associated with deviations from the Nash equilibrium. These payoff-asymmetry effects are incorporated in an approach that introduces noisy behavior via a logit probabilistic choice function. In the resulting logit equilibrium, behavior is characterized by a probability distribution that satisfies a “rational expectations” consistency condition: The beliefs that determine players' expected payoffs match the decision distributions that arise from applying the logit rule to those expected payoffs. We prove existence of a unique, symmetric logit equilibrium and derive comparative statics results. The paper provides a unified perspective on many recent laboratory studies of games in which Nash equilibrium predictions are inconsistent with both intuition and experimental evidence.     

多属性决策法及其应用

考虑多个属性或指标选择最佳备选方案或对有限备选方案进行排序的问题属多属性决策。对AHP、TOPSIS等七种多属性决策方法的原理、评价步骤及应用进行研究,并指出了各种方法的优缺点。讨论了多属性决策法在材料选择领域的应用。     

Effort and Performance: What Distinguishes Interacting and Noninteracting Groups from Individuals?

We study how group membership affects behavior both when group members can and cannot interact with each other. Our goal is to isolate the contrasting forces that spring from group membership: a free‐riding incentive leading to reduced effort and a sense of social responsibility that increases effort. In an environment with varying task difficulty and individual decision making as the benchmark, we show that the free‐riding effect is stronger. Group members significantly reduce their effort in situations where they share the outcome but are unable to communicate. When group members share outcomes and can interact, they outperform groups without communication and individuals. We show that these groups do as well as the best constituent member would have done on his or her own.     

Optimal economic institutions under rational overconfidence,with applications to the choice of exchange rate regime

We study the optimal choice of exchange rate regime when agents have beliefs that are mutually inconsistent. A general framework for identifying optimal policies in such situations is proposed and then used to compare fixed and floating exchange rate regimes. Agents are assumed to have diverse rational beliefs (rather than rational expectations), implying the prevalence of (rational) overconfidence. We argue that in such a situation, in comparing economic institutions, one should employ the concept of ex‐post optimality rather than that of Pareto optimality. Fixing the exchange rate is ex‐post optimal because it eliminates mistaken actions (based on mistaken beliefs).     

Duality In Catherine' s Personality In Wuthering Heights

The heroine Catherine's personality is filled with contradictions in Wuthering Heights.On the one hand,she represents a girl of simple nature and free mind without any worldly sophistication.On the other hand,she is worldly in her personality,which is manifested by her vanity she desires for fame and wealth.     

Translation invariance when utility streams are infinite and unbounded

The translation‐invariance axiom consists in asserting the invariance of the ranking of two utility streams if one applies the same translation to both. This axiom is significant in the characterization of utilitarian criteria in finite dimension. This characterization is achieved thanks to the weak weighted utilitarianism theorem. The objective here is to extend this theorem to a space of infinite and unbounded utility streams. In the context of intergenerational choice, a consequence of the suggested generalization is that every maximal point with respect to a Paretian utilitarian order granting comparable considerations to the present and the future, is also a maximal point with respect to some future‐oriented criterion.     

论国际法院的三重性分级判案规则

国际法院在解决涉及领土纠纷的实践中,适用了一项三重性分级判案规则,即条约优先适用,然后考虑保持占有,最后适用有效控制理论。条约和保持占有法律是证明领土权利归属的直接方法,有效控制则为间接方法。但是,国际法院在适用该规则过程中过于依赖条约法,甚至赋予未经批准的条约以法律效力,尤其在2008年新加坡/马来西亚的白礁岛、中岩礁和南礁案中,采取了崭新的权利取得模式,意在进一步弱化当事国的原始权利,以凸显有效控制的效力,其法理依据难以令人十分信服。尽管如此,国际法院三重性分级规则对中国在解决领土争端中仍具有一定借鉴意义。作者认为,中国应加强对享有历史主权的固有领土的有效控制,进一步彰显主权。     

High‐Frequency Contagion of Currency Crises in Asia*

Using daily data from the Asian currency crisis, the present paper examines high‐frequency contagion effects among six Asian countries. The ‘origin’ (of exchange rate depreciation, or decline in stock prices) and the ‘affected’ (currencies, or stock prices) in the daily spillover relationship were defined and identified. Indonesia is found to be the main origin country, affecting exchange rates of other countries. Contrary to conventional wisdom, evidence of high‐frequency crisis spillover from the Thai exchange rate to other currencies was weak at best. There exists a high‐frequency contagion in stock markets among East Asian countries. Contagion coefficients are positively correlated with trade indices, indicating that investors lower their financial assessment of a country that has trade linkage to a crisis origin country within days, if not hours, of a shock.     

A New EU Member Country on the Road to the Euro Area: Monetary and Fiscal Policies for Slovenia

Slovenia was the first of the ten new EU member states to enter the Euro Area on January 1, 2007. It was an explicit objective of Slovenian policy-makers to introduce the euro as early as possible. Slovenia was participating in the exchange rate mechanism ERM-II since June 2004. This paper analyses whether the choice of participating in the ERM-II soon after EU accession was the best strategy in terms of the macroeconomic performance. It is shown that a better overall economic performance could have been achieved under a crawling peg regime allowing a depreciation of the Slovenian tolar (SIT) before introducing the euro in 2007. The worst policy results are obtained when the exchange rate is totally fixed at an early stage of EMU integration. The labor market performance can be significantly improved by cutting income taxes and social security contribution rates.      

Health and development: The Venda care group organisation

Health is one of the crucial problems confronting the development of Third World countries. Community‐based primary health care is the best instrument for mobilising community development.Development through health, however, can only be achieved if primary health care is implemented in a comprehensive approach in which a supportive environment and living conditions are as important as the provision of health care services. The Venda care group organisation, like other village health workers, is involved in primary health care and community development in the communities of the care groups. Such supportive community‐based organisations are able to alleviate health and development problems at the grass roots provided that programmes and activities are based on community participation, self‐reliance and the development of local decision‐making and leadership skills. The degree of success of the Venda care group organisation in achieving these objectives was investigated.     

An Experimental Investigation of Approaches to Audit Decision Making: An Evaluation Using Systems‐Mediated Mental Models*

The objective of this research is to articulate a decision‐making foundation for the systems audit approach. Under this audit approach, the auditor first gains an understanding of the auditee's economic environment, strategy, and business processes and then forms expectations about its performance and financial reporting. Proponents of this audit approach argue that decision making is enhanced because the knowledge of the system allows the auditor to focus on the most important risks. However, there has not been an explicit framework to explain how systems knowledge can enhance decision making. To provide such a framework, we combine mental model theory with general systems theory to produce a hypothesis we refer to as a systems‐mediated mental model hypothesis. We test this hypothesis using experimental economics methods. We find that (1) subjects make systematic errors under the setting without an organizing framework provided by the systems information, and (2) the presence of an organizing framework results in lower reporting errors. Importantly, the organizing framework significantly enhances decision making in the settings where the environment changed. Establishing a decision‐making foundation for systems audits can provide an important building block that, in part, can contribute to the development of a more effective and efficient audit technology ‐ an important objective now when audits are facing a credibility crisis.     

ane Austen＇s Pride and Prejudice： Feminism in Satire

Jane Austen （1775-1817） is regarded as one of the greatest women wdters in the world. As a woman writer, she shows a great deal of concem about the prevailing gender discrimination against women of her time. Through portraying characters in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen conveys her new perspective on love, marriage, and family. Besides, she shows special concern for women＇s life and condition. This thesis attempts to give an interpretation of Jane Austen＇s feminist consciousness by exploring the way in which Austen satirizes her flat and round characters in the novel.     

Suzumura‐consistent relations: An overview

This paper provides a brief introduction to the use and usefulness of Suzumura consistency, a coherence requirement for binary relations that weakens transitivity. The property was introduced by Suzumura in the context of collective choice but, as demonstrated in some recent contributions, its applicability reaches beyond the boundaries of social‐choice theory. In addition to a summary of its mathematical underpinnings, some recent applications in individual and collective decision‐making are provided. Several examples are employed to illustrate the property and how it distinguishes itself from alternative weakenings of transitivity such as quasi‐transitivity or acyclicity.     

CEO Power and Relative Performance Evaluation

We model relative performance evaluation (RPE) when a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) has the power to opportunistically influence the design of RPE by choosing the weight on an index‐based peer group or by customizing the selection of peers comprising a peer group. A powerful CEO compares the benefits of reducing common risk affecting his compensation with the benefits of receiving a higher bonus by economizing on expected peer‐group performance. As a consequence, the Board of Directors (BoD) is less likely to use RPE. Our analytical model yields hypotheses predicting that powerful CEOs choose to reduce common risk only partially and that BoDs choose to not implement RPE if expected peer performance is sufficiently high. Our model has further empirical implications in (i) providing new interpretations of tests for detecting strong‐form and weak‐form RPE in the presence of powerful CEOs, and (ii) suggesting a new empirical measure of CEO power with a focus on the delegation of RPE decision rights.     

An economic analysis of factors influencing rural‐urban migration in southern Africa

Rural‐urban migration is a serious problem being encountered by developing countries, including South Africa. A single‐equation model is formulated to test hypotheses concerning the determinants, namely personal and household characteristics, of the decision by household heads in Ciskei to migrate. The migration model was expressed as a dichotomous ordered‐response model using logistic regression. The results suggest that the personal characteristics of the household heads had a bearing on the probability of migration. The coefficients of the household characteristics, with the exception of the number of adults in the household, were found to have a statistically weak association with the decision to migrate.