Underwriting the elderly: the utility of DWR, part II

Cognitive function is an important predictor of mortality in the elderly. Over the past few years, an increasing number of life insurance companies have incorporated screening for cognitive impairment into the underwriting process at older ages. Many different test instruments provide a measurement of cognitive function. Among these, the 10 word delayed word recall test (DWR) offers the best opportunity to study mortality directly, because of a long history of use in long-term care risk assessment. This article revises and extends a previous report published in the Journal in 2006 looking at the relationship between DWR score and mortality.     

Sony Online Entertainment: EverQuest® or EverCrack? Oxford Style Debate Presented at Tenth Annual International Conference Promoting Business Ethics

Part C of this three part series is the presentation from the Oxford style debate held at the Tenth Annual International Conference Promoting Business Ethics between Laura Hartman, J.D., and Dr. Moses Pava on topics related to the EverQuest^? v. EverCrack case (Part B). In a traditional Oxford style debate, two debaters take opposing viewpoints and the third debater argues the neutral position. At the Conference, the modified format featured the two debaters presenting diametrically opposing views – corporate responsibility versus personal responsibility. This modified format was also used during the Ethics Awareness Week (Part A), with University professors presenting the debate before the student body. Ms. Hartman’s position focused on the personal responsibility by Mr Woolley while Dr. Pava opined that Sony Online Entertainment had corporate responsibility toward Mr. Woolley and all other individuals similarly situated.     

Off-season tourists and the cultural offer of a mass-tourism destination: The case of Rimini

This paper assesses the potential implications on off-season tourism of enhancing the cultural offer of Rimini, a popular Italian seaside holiday destination hosting about 12 million overnight stays per year. Since more than 9 million of these stays are concentrated in the summer season, in the last 20 years. Rimini has been undergoing a policy of seasonality smoothing, which mainly pivots around business and cultural tourism. This assessment has been carried out through discrete choice experiments submitted to a sample of about 800 tourists who visited Rimini outside the summer months. Since tourism can be viewed as a composite good, which overall utility depends on how the component characteristics are arranged, the choice experiments allow to disentangle the importance and the willingness to pay of tourists for different attributes of the holiday. The choice model incorporates a number of possible changes to actual tourism features (which are also the subject of public debate), including them in hypothetical alternative “holiday packages”. The conditional logit analysis of the choice experiments can highlight any synergy or trade-off between cultural and business tourism. Results suggest that business and leisure tourists share many features related to the use of the territory, while there are important trade-offs between these two groups and cultural tourists. Since business tourists have a higher willingness to extend their stay, a softer budget, and their demand is also complementary to the demand of summer tourists (Brau, Scorcu, & Vici, 2009), from the destination point of view investing in this market segment would be the best option. Although a “second best”, however, cultural tourists share with the local population of Rimini many aspects of the demand of territory (Figini, Castellani, & Vici, 2009). Hence, cultural tourism can play a fundamental role in the intermediate season as a tool for smoothing seasonality, to diversify investments and to give value to the city’s cultural heritage.     

Nonlinear dynamics in economic modelling

Decisions in Economics and Finance -     

Business,Aging, and Socioemotional Selectivity: A Qualitative Study of Gray Entrepreneurship

This three‐stage qualitative paper explores the motivations and experiences of gray entrepreneurship through age‐related lenses outlined in behavioral psychology literature. In contrast to economic approaches that presuppose financial drivers, findings reveal that intrinsic drivers such as achievement, fulfillment, and relationships had primacy among the participants in this research. Entrepreneurship enabled the older people in this study to construct their social environments in a way that maximizes the potential for positive affect, and minimizes the potential for negative affect, both in and out of work.     

Diversity and Communication in Teams: Improving Problem-Solving or Creating Confusion?

Despite the rich and interdisciplinary debate on the role of diversity and communication in group problem-solving, as well as recognition of the interactions between the two topics, they have rarely been treated as a joint research issue. In this paper, we develop a computational approach aimed at modeling problem-solving agents and assess the influence of various levels of diversity and communication in teams on agents’ performance in problem-solving. By communication, we intend a conversation on the persuasiveness of the features characterizing problem-setting. By diversity, we mean differences in how agents build problem representations which allow them to access various solutions. We deploy the concept of diversity along two dimensions: knowledge amplitude, which accounts for the level of available knowledge allowing access to poorer or richer problem representations (compared with complete problem representations), and knowledge variety, which pertains to the differences in the constituents of agents’ representations. We define performance as the frequency with which diverse agents choose the same alternative representation of an agent displaying complete representations of the problem. Our results indicate that communication is more effective when agents elaborate from relatively richer problem representations, as this provides a basis for integrating the variously diverse beliefs of their teammates. Conversely, poorer diverse representations may lead to worse performance when knowledge variety also applies. Lastly, we show that the influence of communication is not monotonically positive, as increasing communication intensity performance may worsen at any level of knowledge availability and knowledge variety.     

Contents of Volume 47

Volume Contents

Contents of Volume 47     

Measuring Food Product Differentiation by Quality Ratings: A Cross‐Entropy Analysis of Specialty Coffee e‐Auctions

Food quality ratings can be used for product differentiation and strategic marketing. This article develops a differentiation measure based on the cross‐entropy of two distributions for speciality coffees. It examines whether quality ratings achieve their objectives for speciality coffee supply chains. The estimation, using e‐auctions data, indicates that the quality rating is more informative in the Cup of Excellence (CofE) relative to the Q auction. To determine significance, a statistical test for comparing the information measure across different e‐auctions and segments of the quality rating was developed. The significant difference between the two auctions is not a surprise as the auctions trade coffee lots of different volumes and the quality evaluation is more important in the case of the CofE, with its jury of renowned coffee experts. The total cross‐entropy measure of product differentiation shows that the 100‐point quality rating does not carry the same information content and meaning in the two different e‐auctions and their respective supply chains. The cross‐entropy measure of product differentiation is shown to be a good indicator of the information and the value created throughout the speciality food supply chain.     

Who will lead and who will follow: Identifying Influential Users in Online Social Networks

Along with the explosive growth of the phenomenon Online Social Networks (OSN), identifying influential users in OSN has received a great deal of attention in recent years. However, the development of practical approaches for identifying them is still in its infancy. By means of a structured literature review, the authors analyze and synthesize the publications particularly from two perspectives. From a research perspective, they find that existing approaches mostly build on users’ connectivity and activity but hardly consider further characteristics of influential users. Moreover, they outline two major research streams. It becomes apparent that most marketing-oriented articles draw on real-world data of OSN, while more technology-oriented papers rather have a theoretical approach and mostly evaluate their artifacts by means of formal proofs. The authors find that a stronger collaboration between the scientific Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) and Marketing communities could be mutually beneficial. With respect to a practitioner’s perspective, they compile advice on the practical application of approaches for the identification of influential users. It is hoped that the results can stimulate and guide future research.     

The effect of a tax training program on tax compliance and business outcomes of starting entrepreneurs: Evidence from a field experiment

This paper estimates the long-term impact of a short, partly personalized, mandatory tax training program on tax compliance and business outcomes of first-time entrepreneurs. To this end, we combine survey data, audit data and unique register data from the Netherlands' Tax and Customs Administration with a three year long randomized experiment. The results show that the training affects specific domains of tax compliant behavior. Moreover, it has no impact on business survival, but treated entrepreneurs have significantly higher profits compared to the control group due to lower business costs. These outcomes are partially supportive of our hypotheses developed from theories on tax compliance and mental accounting.