Decisionmetrics: A decision-based approach to econometric modelling

An approach to developing a possibly misspecified econometric model that will be used as the beliefs of an expected utility maximiser is proposed. This approach builds on a novel objective function that measures the value of predictive distributions in decision-making and is used in model estimation, selection and evaluation. The methods proposed also provide an econometric approach for developing arbitrary parametric action rules such as technical trading rules. The approach is compared in detail with existing methods and is applied in the context of a CARA investor's decision problem where analytical and empirical results suggest it is very effective.     

Expected utility theory with non-commutative probability theory

In this paper, we extend von Neumann and Morgenstern’s expected utility approach to a non-commutative probability theory. We introduce a new representation of the decision maker’s set of events which extends the canonical representation. We reformulate von Neumann and Morgenstern’s approach to modeling decision maker behavior by non-commutative probability theory. We introduce a set of preference axioms similar to von Neumann and Morgenstern’s axioms, and show that they lead to a generalization of the expected utility theorem. Our generalization allows for decision makers to make an intuitive distinction between representations of a set of events. We find that this methodology enables several paradoxes and inconsistencies in traditional expected utility theory (e.g., Allais paradox, etc.) to be solved or better understood.     

Persuasion and industrial relations: a case of argument in a joint consultative committee

As persuasion and argument are central to the processes of industrial relations this article makes a plea for a ‘rhetorical turn’ within industrial relations. Using Toulmin’s model of argument, it highlights the utility of such an approach through analysis of the argumentative nature of discussion within a JCC.     

A new approach to peak load pricing

This paper explores an alternative method of ‘solving’ the problem of recurring time variable demands in a public utility context. It views the utility's load curve as a series of horizontal layers or ‘slices’ of varying lengths, rather than as a series of vertical slices as in the traditional approach. Several cases are examined, and traditional time-of-day pricing is shown to be inefficient or inapplicable in some of them, while ‘demand-layer’ pricing, based on horizontal slicing, is efficient. In still other cases, neither method of pricing is efficient.     

Doing what comes naturally? Why we need a practical ethics of teamwork

This paper challenges the belief that teamwork is a ‘natural’ form of work organization that satisfies universal human needs such as social affiliation and self-actualization. A corollary of this belief–that teamwork is a morally superior form of work organization–unnecessarily restricts debate about the desirability and usefulness of teams because any criticism comes to be seen as a denial of our essential humanity. Using an approach inspired by Michel Foucault's concept of ‘care of the self’, I will propose a practical ethics of teamwork that allows us to appreciate the moral ambiguities of teamwork.     

Helping at NASA: Guidelines for using process consultation to develop impactful research

Management research has long been criticized for its perceived lack of relevance or impact beyond academia. How can we, as management scholars, create research that is more relevant and impactful? I argue that Edgar Schein's process consultation approach can be part of the answer. Process consultation's ultimate aim is to help client organizations. Key aspects of what is now recognized as engaged scholarship were fundamental to process consultation even before engaged scholarship was part of the management vocabulary. Based on my engagement process with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration since 2013, I argue that trust can fruitfully be seen as an outcome and an enabler of productive long-term helping relationships and of engaged scholarship; that what I call pragmatic bricolage is important in terms of offering help based on the client's needs as they develop at different junctures; and that unexpected dilemmas in such relationships are inevitable, but ways forward can be found by applying key principles of social systems. I conclude by outlining guidelines for impactful research and for disseminating research to wider audiences.     

Analysing Place and Place‐making: Urbanization in Suburban Oslo

Despite developments within planning theory challenging the ideal of the rational master plan it may be argued that there is still use for the production of knowledge through analysis in planning. However, the cultural complexity of today's planning contexts, and a move towards governance and entrepreneurial policies, makes it difficult to make places, to achieve social welfare and sustainability. Traditionally, the analysis of places has been done by architects and planners focusing on physical form, having an essentialist perspective of place resembling the theory of genius loci. In Norway, the planning authorities refined this methodology in the 1990s. This approach is, however, not in tune with a progressive view of places as multiple and dynamic social constructions, and may be accused of ‘symbolic violence’. If one is to take this view seriously and still be able to make plans, planning must also be based on other types of knowledge. In this article I argue for a socio‐cultural approach to reveal social representations and practices that make a place. I use the case of place‐making in Sandvika, a suburban ‘minicity’ outside Oslo, as an example of how a constructivist understanding differs from and may supplement an essentialist approach.     

Countervailing incentives in allocation mechanisms with type-dependent externalities

I study an allocation mechanism of a single item in the presence of type-dependent externalities between bidders. The type-dependency introduces countervailing incentives and the allocation sometimes requires that types in an interior subset obtain their reservation utility. Furthermore, truth-telling requires the ex-ante allocation to satisfy a non-trivial monotonicity condition. I show that this problem is technically different from the one analyzed in related single agent settings. I provide a procedure to identify the main properties of the ex-post allocation. Typically, the solution does not entail a single reserve price. More specifically, each agent faces an allocation rule contingent on whether his and his rival’s types fall below, in or above the (endogenously determined) subset of types that obtain their reservation utility.     

Teamworking and Lean revisited: a reply to Carter et al.

This paper is a reply to Carter et al.’s response to an earlier paper of ours in this journal on the subject of teamworking under Lean in the UK public services . Our reply covers the following issues which Carter et al. have raised: the literature we used to structure our findings; the way in which we used concepts such as autonomy and teamworking; our research methods and approach; how Carter et al.’s newly available data on teamworking might be interpreted; and how data drawn from an official employee attitude survey might best be understood. On the basis of this, we conclude that Carter et al.’s paper fails to meet its objectives. On some things, the authors are simply wrong; on others, they grossly misrepresent our position; on still others, their interpretations are, at best, highly questionable.     

When the principal knows better than the agent: Subjective evaluations as an optimal disclosure mechanism

When the firm has some private and unverifiable information about an employee’s ability, it can design a subjective evaluation mechanism, whereby payments are tied to evaluations, to communicate such information. In this paper, I investigate how to design an optimal disclosure mechanism for the firm. I characterize the firm’s optimal disclosure policy as a function of the worker’s ability distribution, with the hazard rate function playing a key role. I also demonstrate that with some reasonable restrictions on the ability distribution, the firm’s optimal strategy exhibits a particular pattern: it will reward the best workers aggressively, fire the worst ones, and assign one central rating to the rest. The predictions are consistent with the way firms utilize subjective evaluations in reality.     

Factual and modal notions in social research

The article discusses a distinction between factual and modal notions, and corresponding generalizations, in social research. The discussion starts from the suggestion, made by Charles Ragin, that theoretical statements in social research most often can be formulated as statements about sets of cases and relations between such sets. In contrast to this view, it is argued that theoretical statements in social research often require modal notions referring to possibilities and probabilities which cannot be formulated as statements about sets of cases. In order to show this, the article reformulates Ragin’s set-theoretic approach in the conceptual framework of statistical variables. It is shown that this can be done for both crisp and fuzzy set versions of Ragin’s approach. The article then goes on to argue that social research is often interested in modal generalizations (probabilistic and deterministic rules) which require a fundamentally different conceptual framework. The article shows how such a framework can be defined, and finally indicates its usage for causal interpretations.     

Research design: the methodology for interdisciplinary research framework

Many of today’s global scientific challenges require the joint involvement of researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds (social sciences, environmental sciences, climatology, medicine, etc.). Such interdisciplinary research teams face many challenges resulting from differences in training and scientific culture. Interdisciplinary education programs are required to train truly interdisciplinary scientists with respect to the critical factor skills and competences. For that purpose this paper presents the Methodology for Interdisciplinary Research (MIR) framework. The MIR framework was developed to help cross disciplinary borders, especially those between the natural sciences and the social sciences. The framework has been specifically constructed to facilitate the design of interdisciplinary scientific research, and can be applied in an educational program, as a reference for monitoring the phases of interdisciplinary research, and as a tool to design such research in a process approach. It is suitable for research projects of different sizes and levels of complexity, and it allows for a range of methods’ combinations (case study, mixed methods, etc.). The different phases of designing interdisciplinary research in the MIR framework are described and illustrated by real-life applications in teaching and research. We further discuss the framework’s utility in research design in landscape architecture, mixed methods research, and provide an outlook to the framework’s potential in inclusive interdisciplinary research, and last but not least, research integrity.     

Resource-envy-free and efficient allocations: A new solution for production economies with dedicated factors

I consider the problem of determining an equitable and efficient allocation of resources in production economies with factors which must be dedicated to production and cannot be consumed directly. First, I show that in such economies envy-free and efficient allocations exist under standard assumptions. However, I argue this notion of fairness is unsuitable for the present context. I then introduce a new notion of fairness, which I call resource-envy-freeness. First, I associate with each consumption bundle its resource footprint consisting of the vector of factors used to produce it. I then show that preferences over consumption bundles can be extended to preferences over factor bundles. An allocation is resource-envy-free if no agent prefers another agent’s resource footprint to its own. The analysis of resource-envy-free allocations in production is exactly analogous to the analysis of envy-free allocations in exchange. I establish that resource-envy-free and efficient allocations exist under standard assumptions, and I demonstrate that such allocations are intuitively appealing.     

Labor and Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Rereading Braverman Today

How has Harry Braverman’s book Labor and Monopoly Capital, published forty years ago, stood the test of time? In this essay I argue that it remains a vital text for understanding the capitalist labor process. But I also address three lacunae in Braverman’s book. First, it overlooked limits to deskilling, such as the challenge of standardizing services; second, Braverman refused to concede that states could provide workers with material welfare, which can protect them from the labor market; and third, Labor and Monopoly Capital’s vision of the future is unnecessarily pessimistic. Standardization and automation can degrade work, but they also generate surplus that can potentially expand human freedom. Braverman’s critical analysis of production begs an equally critical account of exchange and distribution.     

Coalition-enhancing fiscal policies in an open economy: A CES framework of Gale’s transfer paradox

The motivation of our paper comes from David Gale’s seminal work in 1974. He constructed an example of the “transfer paradox” based on three Leontief functions. The transfer paradox is that when there is a set of agents in the home country and that the home country is trading with other countries, then certain public lump-sum tax transfer plans could make all agents in the home country better off. Our contributions are as follows. First, we show that such an example can be constructed with three smooth CES utility functions. Second, we establish the three crucial conditions for the existence of the transfer paradox: (1) the donor (a taxpayer) has stronger preference for the foreign good than the recipient; (2) the donor is ex-ante wealthier than the recipient; (3) the elasticity of substitution of the foreign country’s preference is strictly less than one.     

New measure of brand equity status of a basketball club

ABSTRACT

“Brand Status” is defined as a measure that examines the equity “health” and “strength” of a brand in each stage of the brand value chain. A six-stage brand value chain model was developed where Stage I highlights the marketing efforts of the brand equity building; Stage II focuses on the customer’s attitudinal mind-set; Stage III describes actual customer behavioral outcomes (such as attachment and commitment); Stage IV refers to the strength of the brand and its relative advantage in the marketplace (such as brand preference, re-purchase, and premium pricing); Stage V reflects the company gains in sales and profits and the last, Stage VI refers to financial value of the brand for shareholders. Analyzing data obtained from 1,330 fans of basketball clubs gave sufficient evidence to propose a “new” model that can be used to estimate the value scores of the brand’s equity status for each of the various stages in the model and provide the brand’s total brand equity status score.     

Risk and prices in separable utility functions

Many decision problems involve more than one attribute. Separable multi-attribute utility functions are commonly used to model preferences in such situations. We consider the case in which one attribute can be identified as money. The price at which non-monetary attributes may be substituted by money, the relation of this price to a decision-maker's wealth, and the implications on attitudes toward risk are examined for additively and multiplicatively separable multi-attribute utility functions. In particular, it is shown that additive separability, price independent of wealth and monetary risk-aversion are mutually inconsistent.