Association,agreement, and equity

The paper attempts to make a clear distinction between three broad families of statistical indices: association, agreement, and what one may call equity. The need for this distinction arises in social research, for example, where reliability (accuracy, reproducibility, and stability) is assessed by measures of association rather than agreement. In this application, the assumptions built into an association measure conflict with the reality that gives rise to reliability data. A second motivation for this distinction is that association measures tend to express chance as the product of two potentially very different frequency distributions, agreement as the product of two identical distributions, and equity ignores such distributions altogether. A third motivation for this distinction is that the probability distribution of such measures does not depend on whether they are linear or non-linear, symmetrical or asymmetrical, or whether they express predictability or the extremality of a frequency distribution, but on their family membership. Notions of association, agreement, and equity have inherently nothing to do with the (nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio) ordering in data. The 2-by-2 case is therefore chosen as the basis of the proposed distinction. All statistical indices, whether they are designed to characterise multivariate data or to identify complex orderings, ought to be applicable to this most reduced case of two variables, making one distinction in each. To test a coefficient's membership in one of the three families, nothing more complex is needed.     

Underlying determinants driving agreement among coders

There are plenty of intercoder reliability indices, whereas the choice of them has been debated. With a Monte Carlo simulation, the determinants of the agreement indices were empirically tested. The chance agreement of Bennett’s S is found to be only affected by the number of categories. Consequently, S is a category based index. The chance agreements of Krippendorff’s $\alpha $ , Scott’s $\pi $ and Cohen’s $\kappa $ are affected by the marginal distribution, the level of difficulty and the interaction between them, and yet the difficulty level influences their chance agreements abnormally. The three indices are hence in general distribution based indices. Gwet’s $AC_1$ reversed the direction of the three aforementioned indices, but its chance agreement is additionally affected by the number of categories and the interaction between the number of categories and the marginal distribution. $AC_1$ can be classified into a class based on the number of categories, the marginal distribution and the level of difficulty. Both theoretical and practical implications were also discussed in the end.     

The development of a comprehensive medical-surgical distribution agreement

The selection of a medical-surgical distributor has become one of the most important decisions made by a hospital materiel manager today. It is therefore critical that before a distributor is selected a clearly defined development process and master plan be established. This master plan should contain, at a minimum, (1) a comprehensive strategic plan, (2) a detailed request for proposal, and (3) a detailed project implementation schedule. A well-structured, well-executed plan will help to ensure that the best distributor is selected and that the best possible distribution agreement is designed.     

Regional trade agreement and foreign direct investment

This paper investigates the relationship between regional trade agreements, such as the NAFTA, and FDI. Using a fixed-effects gravity model to estimate OECD panel data spanning 1982–1997, we learn that trade integration encourages FDI. We find specific evidence for each of the NAFTA member countries—Mexico, Canada and the United States. In addition, we find evidence that FDI will rise with host and parent country GDP and fall with distance.     

The dynamics of social agreement according to Conceptual Agreement Theory

Many social phenomena can be viewed as processes in which individuals in social groups develop agreement (e.g., public opinion, the spreading of rumor, the formation of social and linguistic conventions). Conceptual Agreement Theory (CAT) models social agreement as a simplified communicational event in which an Observer \((O)\) and Actor \((A)\) exchange ideas about a concept \(C\) , and where \(O\) uses that information to infer whether \(A\) ’s conceptual state is the same as its own (i.e., to infer agreement). Agreement may be true (when \(O\) infers that \(A\) is thinking \(C\) and this is in fact the case, event \(a1\) ) or illusory (when \(O\) infers that \(A\) is thinking \(C\) and this is not the case, event \(a2\) ). In CAT, concepts that afford \(a1\) or \(a2\) become more salient in the minds of members of social groups. Results from an agent-based model (ABM) and probabilistic model that implement CAT show that, as our conceptual analyses suggested would be the case, the simulated social system selects concepts according to their usefulness to agents in promoting agreement among them (Experiment 1). Furthermore, the ABM exhibits more complex dynamics where similar minded agents cluster and are able to retain useful concepts even when a different group of agents discards them (Experiment 2). We discuss the relevance of CAT and the current findings for analyzing different social communication events, and suggest ways in which CAT could be put to empirical test.     

Estimating economic impacts of the US-South Korea free trade agreement

ABSTRACT

We analyze the economic impacts of the United States-South Korea Free Trade Agreement by applying the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) computable general equilibrium model to highly disaggregated commodity flow data. The analysis calculates the impacts in terms of welfare effects, national economic indicators (such as GDP), and business performance metrics (such as sales revenue), which can be used by a variety of decision-makers. Our results suggest several trade-offs among these measures. Positive welfare gains between the US and South Korea are about the same in absolute terms, but favor the latter in relative terms, and very heavily so for GDP gains. Moreover, the US is projected to incur a loss of gross output (sales revenue) in several major manufacturing sectors that are heavily concentrated in geographic areas that have been promised a return of jobs by the Trump Administration.     

Some views on agreement to be used in content analysis studies

In content analysis studies texts might be coded three times or more, certainly in the training part. With respect to reliability several views on agreement can be used now, as these are found in the literature. These views are presented, and this is followed by a discussion resulting in the opinion that in research only one view, that of mean pairwise agreement, should be used.     

Estimating regional trade agreement effects on FDI in an interdependent world

Recent research on trade and multinationals highlights that multinational firms’ integration strategies are complex and the degree of vertical integration varies in a multilateral world with many possible locations of activity. In particular, multinationals control a large fraction of trade within the block of developed countries. The most important regional trade agreements (RTAs) are signed between members of the very same block of economies. This gives rise to the question asked in the present paper: what is the impact of RTAs on FDI in an interdependent world? Recent spatial HAC estimation techniques are applied to both estimation and testing.     

A fuzzy set theory based computational model to represent the quality of inter-rater agreement

In this paper we present a method to evaluate the quality of a rater’s judgement, which can integrate and enrich the use of inter-rater agreement as a reliability measure. Our proposal is an integrative one and evaluates the quality of a rater’s performance through an analysis of the profile of that individual rater’s performance. We discuss its rationale on the basis of the interpretation of inter-rater agreement, highlighting some critical issues. For this purpose, we adopt a computational model based on fuzzy set theory, demonstrating its main characteristics with an exemplary case study.     

A new approach to inter-rater agreement through stochastic orderings: the discrete case

We wish to study inter-rater agreement comparing groups of observers who express their ratings on a discrete or ordinal scale. The starting point is that of defining what we mean by “agreement”. Given d observers, let the scores they assign to a given statistical unit be expressed as a d-vector in the real space. We define a deterministic ordering among these vectors, which expresses the degree of the raters’ agreement. The overall scoring of the raters on the sample space will be a d-dimensional random vector. We then define an associated partial ordering among the random vectors of the ratings, illustrate a number of its properties, and look at order-preserving functions (agreement measures). In this paper we also show how to test the hypothesis of greater agreement against the unrestricted hypothesis, and the hypothesis of equal agreement against the hypothesis that an agreement ordering holds. The test is applied to real data on two medical observers rating clinical guidelines.     

Measuring pairwise interobserver agreement when all subjects are judged by the same observers

Abstract  An experiment is considered where each of a sample of subjects is rated on an L- point scale by each of a fixed group of observers. Weighted kappa coefficients are defined to measure the degree of agreement among the observers, between two particular observers, or between a particular observer and the other observers. Attention is paid to the selection of one or more homogeneous subgroups of observers. A linearized Taylor series expansion is used to derive explicit formulas for the computation of large sample standard errors. The procedures are illustrated within the context of a study where seven pathologists separately classified 118 histological slides into five categories.     

Trade unionism and partnership in practice: evidence from the Barclays–Unifi agreement

This article draws on empirical evidence from Barclays Bank PLC to explore the impact of partnership on trade union organisation. It outlines the rationale, development, benefits and pitfalls of the partnership agreement between Barclays and Unifi. Particular attention is paid to the positive impact the agreement has had on systems of workplace representation and on the ways in which the partnership needs to develop to better serve the trade union side. It is argued that unions need to manage the risks of partnership, ensuring their continued legitimacy in the eyes of union members.     

Ordinal scales and fuzzy set systems to measure agreement: An application to the evaluation of teaching activity

Student evaluation of university teaching activity is now compulsory in Italy and a research group of the ItalianMinistry of Instruction, University, and Research proposed a questionnaire with items based on the four-point Likert scale and a traditional item-by-item analysis for the evaluation of classrooms, work load, course organization, lectures, and teaching aids. Three split-ballot experiments were carried out to test the differences between the four-point and five-point Likert scale. The traditional analysis is compared with the results of the fuzzy system set up to achieve the same purposes. The fuzzy system yielded scores that proved to be generally higher but sometimes also lower than those obtained using the five- or four-point Likert scale. Furthermore, an extension of standard procedures of the fuzzy system is suggested to obtain a fuzzy item-by-item analysis, thereby increasing the possibility of their use in social sciences.This study is a part of the project Methods and technology for innovating and re-organising teaching activity supported by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.