A less-than-truckload carrier collaboration planning problem under dynamic capacities

This paper addresses the deterministic dynamic single carrier collaboration problem for the small- to medium-sized less-than-truckload (LTL) industry. It is formulated as a binary (0–1) multi-commodity minimum cost flow problem and solved using a branch-and-cut algorithm. Its inherent network structure is exploited to generate the lower bounds to the branch-and-cut algorithm using the network simplex method and by relaxing the integrality constraints. Results from numerical experiments indicate inherent trade-offs at the higher degrees of collaboration between waiting for more affordable collaborative capacity and incurring higher holding costs. They also suggest that collaborating LTL carriers experience increased capacity utilization.     

The Financial Stability of Notional Account Pensions

A number of European countries are reforming their pension benefit formulas by adopting 'notional' accounts. These accounts are used to determine individual benefits, but pay-as-you-go financing is retained. This paper addresses the belief that by choosing adjustment rules cleverly, notional accounts can provide automatic financial equilibrium in the short run. If this were true, it would be a valuable advantage in terms of insulating the government budget from demographic pressures, while insulating the pension budget from fiscal pressures. It is shown that notional account benefit formulas cannot provide automatic financial equilibrium in the short run. The paper also suggests that if indexing rules are chosen in a particular way, and shocks revert rapidly to a mean, the pension institution may achieve financial stability in the long run. However, long-run stability is unlikely to be valuable because political interference occurs in the short run.     

康普腾斯大学——人民币升值：经济与政治的碰撞

当两股强大的力量在政治和经济交叉的领域出现正面冲突时，这种碰撞便带有巨响。而且令人不安。来看看目前美国和中国就中国货币元的分歧吧。布什政府为了避免参议院保护主义者的立法提案。公开对中国施加压力。要求中国提高人民币对美元的汇率。一些立法者为了回应生产企业和工会组织的担忧。声称廉价的中国出口产品——他们说。由于人民币对美元的汇率过低。令这些产品价格更低——使得中国企业和美国公司竞争时，取得了不公平的优势。这也是美国贸易赤字和经常项目赤字的主要原因。因此。美国在这一问题上公开高调地表达自己的立场。试图强制中国提高汇率。     

The trolley problem: A social constructivist pedagogy approach

The trolley problem has been one of the more widely used thought experiments in business ethics education. However, the approaches used to integrate it in the classroom have not explicitly utilized individual reflection and interpersonal engagement, elements essential for cultivating moral development. Using social constructivist pedagogy, an instructional module integrating the trolley problem into the undergraduate business classroom is presented. The results of an instructional experiment assessing the effectiveness of the module indicate that while the module did not increase moral awareness among students, it had a positive influence on their prosocial intentions. Implications and limitations of the study, as well as directions for future research, are discussed.     

Corporate identity management in the banking sector: effects on employees’ identification,identity attractiveness,and job satisfaction

This paper analyzes the effects of corporate identity management (CIM) on employees’ responses. Specifically, it advances previous literature by exploring how CIM dimensions affect identity attractiveness, organizational identification, and job satisfaction from the employees’ perspective. The empirical study is aimed at 293 branch managers in the Spanish banking sector, an industry facing changes in the corporate identity of many financial entities. The results show the relative importance of each dimension and help brand managers to anticipate the effects of CIM practices. Of all the dimensions, it highlights the key role of the employee–client focus strategy.     

Spillovers through backward linkages from multinationals: Measurement matters!

We argue that the measures of backward linkages used in recent papers on spillovers from multinational companies are potentially problematic, as they depend on a number of restrictive assumptions, namely that (i) multinationals use domestically produced inputs in the same proportion as imported inputs, (ii) multinationals have the same input sourcing behaviour as domestic firms, irrespective of their country of origin, and (iii) the demand for locally produced inputs by multinationals is proportional to their share of locally produced output. We discuss why these assumptions are likely to be violated in practice, and provide alternative measures that overcome these drawbacks. Our results, using plant level data for Ireland, clearly show that the choice of backward linkage measure and thus, the assumptions behind it, matters greatly in order to draw possible conclusions regarding the existence of foreign direct investment (FDI)-related spillovers. Using the standard measure employed in the literature we fail to find robust evidence for spillovers through backward linkages. However, when we use alternative measures of backward linkages that relax assumptions (i)–(iii), we find robust evidence for positive FDI backward spillover effects.     

Individual versus group strategy-proofness: When do they coincide?

A social choice function is group strategy-proof on a domain if no group of agents can manipulate its final outcome to their own benefit by declaring false preferences on that domain. There are a number of economically significant domains where interesting rules satisfying individual strategy-proofness can be defined, and for some of them, all these rules turn out to also satisfy the stronger requirement of group strategy-proofness. We provide conditions on domains guaranteeing that for all rules defined on them, individual and group strategy-proofness become equivalent. We also provide a partial answer regarding the necessity of our conditions.     

Voting by committees under constraints

We consider social choice problems where a society must choose a subset from a set of objects. Specifically, we characterize the families of strategy-proof voting procedures when not all possible subsets of objects are feasible, and voters’ preferences are separable or additively representable.     

THE IDENTIFICATION AND ECONOMIC CONTENT OF ORDERED CHOICE MODELS WITH STOCHASTIC THRESHOLDS*

This article extends the widely used ordered choice model by introducing stochastic thresholds and interval‐specific outcomes. The model can be interpreted as a generalization of the GAFT (MPH) framework for discrete duration data that jointly models durations and outcomes associated with different stopping times. We establish conditions for nonparametric identification. We interpret the ordered choice model as a special case of a general discrete choice model and as a special case of a dynamic discrete choice model.