Action Teams That Work

A growing awareness of workplace hazards and identification of airborne contaminants, coupled with a changing safety and health regulatory environment, created an unexpected demand for new and innovative respirators in the early 1980s. 3M's Occupational Health and Environmental Safety Division broke new ground by taking the team concept further than ever before in the company. The division's Action Teams successfully designed, built and introduced products in less than half the time it would have taken previously. Robert Hershock, Charles Cowman and Douglas Peters describe how 3M learned important lessons about team selection, training, performance and motivation, the importance of project sponsors, and the role of middle management.     

Improved estimation of portfolio value‐at‐risk under copula models with mixed marginals

Portfolio value‐at‐risk (PVAR) is widely used in practice, but recent criticisms have focused on risks arising from biased PVAR estimates due to model specification errors and other problems. The PVAR estimation method proposed in this article combines generalized Pareto distribution tails with the empirical density function to model the marginal distributions for each asset in the portfolio, and a copula model is used to form a joint distribution from the fitted marginals. The copula–mixed distribution (CMX) approach converges in probability to the true marginal return distribution but is based on weaker assumptions that may be appropriate for the returns data found in practice. CMX is used to estimate the joint distribution of log returns for the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE) index and the associated futures contracts on SGX and TAIFEX. The PVAR estimates for various hedge portfolios are computed from the fitted CMX model, and backtesting diagnostics indicate that CMX outperforms the alternative PVAR estimators. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 26:997–1018, 2006     

Price rigidities and institutional variations in markets with posted prices

Summary Standard laboratory posted-offer markets respond slowly and incompletely to demand shocks. In these one-sided markets, where sellers control the setting of prices, very little information is transmitted via the process of exchange. For this reason, traders have trouble distinguishing randomness in their own experience from changes in market fundamentals. This paper reports the results of twelve laboratory markets conducted to assess whether some common variants to standard posted-offer rules can correct the adjustment deficiences. Although discounting, multiple postings and excess demand information all improve performance, we find that response remains poor, and efficiencies low.Support for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation (SBR 9319842 and SBR 9320044), and the University of Virginia Bankard Fund. Data are archived at FTP address: fido.econlab.arizona.edu. We wish to thank Charles Plott and Shyam Sunder for useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The usual disclaimer applies.     

AN EVALUATION OF PROCESS‐ORIENTED SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORKS

Supply chain management (SCM) is implemented by integrating corporate functions using business processes within and across companies. Several process‐oriented frameworks for SCM have been proposed but only two of these provide sufficient detail to enable implementation. We evaluate the Supply‐Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) framework and The Global Supply Chain Forum (GSCF) framework using four criteria and identify their relative strengths and weaknesses.     

Efficiency in Pari-Mutuel Betting Markets across Wagering Pools in the Simulcast Era

Simulcast wagering, where bets from across the country are taken at tracks, off-track betting facilities, casinos, by phone or online and incorporated into the same mutuel pool, has contributed to a large increase in betting volume on American horse races since the mid-1990s. This article investigates betting-market efficiency in the simulcast era focusing on whether the interrelated betting markets comprised of win, place (finishing in the top two), and show (finishing in the top three) wagering are efficiently priced. We find that the increased accessibility and betting volume associated with simulcasting has reduced, but not eliminated, the inefficiencies seen in prior studies. Despite the inefficiencies in these markets, arbitrage is not profitable because market closing prices are unknown when bets are placed.     

Checkmating the Consumer: Passive Consumption and the Economic Devaluation of Culture

Early neoclassical economics embodied a gendered symbolic system that devalued consumption and enabled economists to ignore a basic contradiction underlying their treatment of consumption. According to consumer-sovereignty dogma, the consumer determined which firms would survive by actively pursuing maximum individual utility. While this consumer retained the culturally masculine attributes of initiative and agency, consumption itself was devalued because, from a systemic point of view, it is not important which firms survive. At the macro level, consumption was marginalized through Say's law, which holds that excessive acquisition of commodities for consumption is potentially dangerous, because saving and investment drive the economy. The rise of mass consumption and Keynesian macroeconomics threw into question the cultural gendering of consumption – which had acquired feminine attributes like passivity and frivolity – and rendered the neoclassical devaluing of it increasingly untenable. The postwar, neoclassical synthesis and subsequent developments have reinstated the pre-Keynesian gendering of consumption and devaluation of culture.     

Multiple-objective methods in regulatory decision making: A conceptual framework applied to U.S. automobile safety standards

Public policy making is a complex matter. Policy makers are charged with balancing a broad spectrum of competing objectives, reflecting in varying degrees the interests and aspirations of a diverse range of constituencies and stakeholders. Policy decisions have differential impacts on differing constituencies and the contributions of these impacts to objectives are frequently uncertain, difficult to quantify, and hotly disputed. Formal methods of decision analysis have been advanced as aids for coping with complexity and have been applied to some public policy issues, most notably the management of water resources. While formal methods have the apparent benefit of rationalizing the policy process and improving the efficacy and equity of policy decisions, serious questions remain concerning the acceptability and ultimate usefulness of formal analyses in the public arena. In this article we examine these questions in the context of policy making relating to government regulation of automobile designs for safety. We consider what would be involved in attempting to use a relatively modern, multiple-objective approach in this context. The key questions are how and, more importantly, why multiple-objective methods might be used. The article begins with an illustrative case study, describes the current policymaking process, identifies the parties involved in and affected by this process, elicits key objectives, looks briefly at some scalar-objective approaches, and then outlines a multiple-objective approach. The framework developed arguably is useful in assisting policy making, at least at a qualitative level. Issues which impede a more quantitative resolution of this framework are discussed. This article is intended as a pilot study which may promote research toward the achievement of a useable multiple-objective procedure applicable in the public domain.     

Income Redistribution with Well-Informed Local Governments

This paper examines the problem of redistributing incomeacross jurisdictions and to mobile workers within jurisdictionswhen local governments have better information than the centralgovernment about local production conditions. Under the centralgovernments optimal policy, the subsidies or taxes that localgovernments provide to mobile workers normally depend on whetherthese governments are net recipients or net donors of interjurisdictionalincome transfers. Moreover, the public-input decisions of somelocal governments are distorted. The analysis demonstrates thatit may not be desirable to harmonize social policies across jurisdictions,even when the beneficiaries are quite mobile.