Improving telephone fundraising by use of self‐prophecy

The self‐prophecy phenomenon served as the basis for a simple, inexpensive technique aimed at increasing donations in a telephone fundraising drive. Self‐prophecy is predicated on two psychological effects. First, asking people to make predictions about normatively influenced behaviours results in biased responses—people respond as they think they should. Secondly, when later asked to perform those same behaviours, people tend to be consistent with their predictions. In an experiment, asking people to make a prediction increased the success rate from 30.4 per cent to 49 per cent, relative to a control group. Although it may be limited to occasional use, the self‐prophecy technique appears a simple and economical tool for increasing donations. Copyright © 2000 Henry Stewart Publications.     

浅析现场5S管理特色——以秀强企业为例

企业文化,说大就大,说小可小。大到包括群体意识、思维方式、(信仰)信念、精神面貌等企业环境的总和,小到一个人的衣着打扮、言行举止。6年来,秀强公司始终把5S管理作为一种基础管理,渗透到企业每一位员工心里,形成了企业文化重要组成部分。     

Forecasting among alternative strategies in the management of uncertainty

This paper explores why expectations elicited from corporate decision-makers may fall short of the rational expectations ideal: the formation of an informed forecast may just not be part of the optimal management of uncertainty. The analysis of an investment decision shows that when forecasting is expensive, this strategy is likely to be superseded by the possibility to wait, to switch between projects, or the alternative to eliminate inferior projects over time. Even at low forecasting costs it may be optimal not to forecast and instead to diversify over different projects. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Individual versus group spot price forecasting in the international petroleum market: A case study

This paper utilizes the conventional statistical tests associated with the rational expectations hypothesis so as to compare the relative accuracy of individual versus group forecasting within the organization. In order to maintain comparability between forecasting regimens the study employs like information sets for the two prediction methods. Using the rational expectations tests as criteria, the statistical results show group forecasts inferior to individually produced predictions These findings imply that group-produced forecasting accuracy may be hampered by the psychological interaction associated with consensus behavior. Conversely, we find forecasting accuracy improves when predictions are elicited from individuals in an isolated laboratory-like setting.     

Stability and efficiency from a Neo-Keynesian viewpoint

This paper raises once more the Keynesian challenge of the classical doctrine that an unguided market economy has a natural tendency towards optimal employment of resources. By means of a simple macromodel, we show that if quantity expectations are incorporated into the Walrasian model, then it is no longer generally true that the ‘invisible hand’ leads the economy to Walrasian equilibrium. Instead, it may lead the economy to a kind of Keynesian equilibrium in which the firms' sales expectations constitute a binding constraint on production. Moreover, while Pareto optimum is unstable and hence unattainable in our model, a ‘second-best’ optimum among stable equilibria exists and requires a public sector. Accordingly, a trade-off between efficiency and other policy aims occurs only at tax rates above the positive tax rate in optimum     

Growth and enduring epidemic diseases

This paper analyzes the interplay of human capital formation and economic growth when there is premature adult mortality. Failing adequate insurance arrangements, a long wave of such mortality can so undermine human capital formation as to induce an economic collapse. In nuclear family structures, random matching of partners is superior to assortative mating only if the shock is not too big and initial levels of human capital are not too low. Full pooling of mortality risks with equal treatment of all children in extended families may fend off a general collapse, depending on the initial conditions and the size and duration of the shock. To avoid undesirable effects on expectations, awareness campaigns should be complemented by policies that credibly promise to reduce future mortality. If mortality depends on the general level of human capital, indeterminacy can arise in the form of more than one rational expectations path.     

Learning bad habits across generations: How negative imprints affect human resource management in the family firm

Organizational learning can be a key shared value that perpetuates the family's and the family firm's culture across generations. Imprinting theory helps to explain the impact that lessons learned and transmitted can have on the development of human resources in the family firm. However, the results of imprinting may not necessarily be positive, particularly when imprinting manifests itself in negative processes and expectations. Whereas imprinting and organizational learning are often associated with a “positive halo effect,” they have the potential to result in negative behaviors and deleterious firm-level outcomes. Employing imprinting theory as a framework, we highlight the potential dark side of imprinting within the family firm context and how it can damage human resource efforts and threaten company performance and firm survival. Finally, we suggest how bad habits may be broken and replaced with more effective routines so as to ensure the family firm's continuity and success.     

探析园林景观设计中的色彩设计

色彩作用于人的眼睛,人们不仅会产生对各种颜色的感受,还会产生情绪和其它一些心理效应。色彩既可以装点生活,美化环境,给人一种美的享受。也可能刺激人们的视觉给人以烦躁、沉闷的情绪。与众多设计要素一样,色彩是现代园林景观环境设计中需要关注的要素之一。在景观视觉效果中起着越来越重要的作用,影响我们的心理,也改变着我们的生活,我们只有通过精炼、提取、抽象,实现色彩与园林景观的协调统一,才能升华至色彩组合的艺术美,才能成为园林景观环境"师法"的对象。因此作为环境艺术的景观设计对于色彩的设计应用就尤为重要。     

Self-employment,educational attainment and employment protection legislation

We analyse how educational attainment and employment protection influence an individual's decision to become self-employed. By altering expected income from dependent employment, employment protection is likely to affect an individual's choice of occupation, although such a link has not been established in the literature so far. We argue that an interaction between an individual's educational attainment and the institution of employment protection exists when it comes to the decision regarding whether to become self-employed. Based on survey data from OECD countries, we find evidence for a negative interaction, and conclude that only after taking this interaction into account can the effect of employment protection and educational attainment on self-employment rates be assessed.     

A social cognitive interpretation of person‐organization fitting: The maintenance and development of professional technical competency

Information technology professionals must continually align their competencies with new technological innovation and changing organizational technological climates. Existing theory and practice is deficient with respect to dynamic models of person‐organization (P‐O) fit. Social cognitive theory proposes a rich and well‐defined theoretical framework for understanding dynamic, interactive behavioral processes, and so is adopted as a basis for developing a model of P‐O fitting focused on the development of professional technical competencies. P‐O fitting is so named because it refers to organizational fit as an ongoing process of adaptation. The article begins by reviewing existing literature on P‐O fit and social cognitive theory to produce a set of propositions and a theoretical model of P‐O fitting as an adaptive, dynamic phenomenon. Applications of the model for both future research and practice are suggested. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Systematic Price Differences Between Successive Auctionsare no Anomaly

Identical cases of wine are often auctioned one immediately after another. Ashenfelter (1989) reports that on average, the later lots fetch less. Such a systematic price difference seems anomalous, the more so because it is shown here that rational expectations imply not equal, but rising, prices. Risk aversion is an obvious way of reconciling the evidence with rational behavior. There is an alternative explanation. The auctions observed by Ashenfelter involved a buyer's option, whereby the first-round winner could purchase further cases at the same price. It is shown that this feature may both account for the observed price trajectory and raise seller revenue.     

Formation of expectations: A model in temporary general equilibrium theory

The paper studies, in a temporary general equilibrium framework, the way expectations of agents can be formed along time through some learning mechanism. One is then faced with a set of coupled equations from which the time evolution of both the state of the economy and the individual expectations have to be derived. Three main results are proven, for an open dense set of economies. First, there actually exists a recurrence which allows to determine, locally around some stationary temporary equilibrium, the time dependant dynamics for the states and the time dependant expectations. Next, sufficient first-order conditions are given for the dynamics and expectations to converge to some limits when time goes to infinity. Last, additional sufficient first-order conditions guarantee that the chosen stationary temporary equilibrium has definite stability properties for the time dependant dynamics.     

我国第三方物流的现状问题及发展对策分析

我国第三方物流的现状体现在企业规模不大,服务水平不高,第三方物流还只停留在某一个层面或某一个环节上,没有实现从原材料供给到商品销售整个供应链的全程服务,还没有形成真正意义上的网络服务。我国第三方物流发展中存在的主要问题．体现在物流观念落后,自办物流现象突出：务块分割严重,企业规模偏小;物流渠道不畅;服务功能不全,物流人才匮乏,设施落后,管理水平较低等几方面。文章认为应该从加快产权制度改革,激发企业活力、以信息技术应用为核心,加强网点建设、培育具有国际竞争力的物流集团。实行集约化经营、强化增值服务,发展战略同盟关系、重视物流人才培养,实施人才战略等几个方面入手。来制定我国第三方物流的发展对策。     

Many-to-one matching markets with externalities among firms

We study a labor market described by a many-to-one matching market with externalities among firms in which each firm’s preferences depend not only on workers whom it hires, but also on workers whom its rival firms hire. We define a new stability concept called weak stability and investigate its existence problem. We show that when the preferences of firms satisfy an extension of substitutability and two new conditions called increasing choice and no external effect by an unchosen worker, then a weakly stable matching exists. We also show that a weakly stable matching may fail to exist without these restrictions.     

《数字逻辑电路实验仪》的研究与制作

针对商品《数字电路》实验设备存在的单次脉冲不可靠、元件被屏蔽起来、实验连接导线坏了难以修复等问题,研究制作了功能齐全,性能优越的《数字逻辑电路实验仪》,克服了长期以来难以解决的实验教学难题。     

Intertemporal coordination in two-period markets

This paper studies the stability of the intertemporal coordination dynamics when the common knowledge of individual expectations of future prices is perturbed in a neighborhood of a perfect foresight equilibrium. The main forces that affect stability are: (i) the effect of a change in asset demand on second period spot market prices, and (ii) the effect on asset demand of a small change in second period prices. In an intertemporal market game whose interior Markov perfect equilibria correspond to perfect foresight equilibria, it is shown that though M-rationalizability implies the stability of the intertemporal dynamics, the converse is not always true.     

Intertemporal coordination in two-period markets

This paper studies the stability of the intertemporal coordination dynamics when the common knowledge of individual expectations of future prices is perturbed in a neighborhood of a perfect foresight equilibrium. The main forces that affect stability are: (i) the effect of a change in asset demand on second period spot market prices, and (ii) the effect on asset demand of a small change in second period prices. In an intertemporal market game whose interior Markov perfect equilibria correspond to perfect foresight equilibria, it is shown that though M-rationalizability implies the stability of the intertemporal dynamics, the converse is not always true.     

Non-native accents and stigma: How self-fulfilling prophesies can affect career outcomes

This article proposes a framework examining the impact of non-native accents on speakers' work and career outcomes, namely, career advancement and career satisfaction. Drawing on stigma theory, we present a conceptual model to assess cognitive, affective, and behavioral reactions towards non-native accents. We contend that speaking with a non-native accent is linked with (i) managers' perceptions of speakers' fluency, (ii) expectations concerning non-native speakers' performance abilities, (iii) positive regard in social interactions and (iv) supervision style towards speakers with non-native accents. Moreover, we suggest that speaking with a non-native accent may lead speakers to (i) feel excluded and devalued at work, and (ii) assume an avoidance approach at work. Together, these effects can create a self-fulfilling prophecy that negatively affects non-native speakers' work and career outcomes. We also suggest that the strength of accents' consequences depend on the presence of particular person-related (accent prestige, exposure to the non-native accent, and non-native speakers' goal orientation) and job-related factors (nature of the job and company ethnocentrism). Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Implications of corporate culture: a manager's guide to action

Drawing on cultural anthropology, Sathe develops a way of thinking about corporate culture that makes the concept analytically useful for dealing with managerial problems. He shows that by distinguishing between culture and behavior, and examining both simultaneously, it is possible to see more clearly why culture can be both an asset and a liability, and why it has such a subtle but powerful influence on organizational life. Not all cultures are equally powerful, however; Sathe presents some approaches for diagnosing a culture and understanding its strengths along with some implications for managerial action. Noting that a "perfect" culture-person fit is difficult to engineer, he makes suggestions for avoiding such mismatches and for better managing the culture shocks that inevitably hit the newcomer to an organization. He then turns to the question of how culture/person misfits may be understood and managed and what it takes to successfully deviate from the organization's culture when one is required to do so.