Female Managers in Britain – A Comparative Perspective

The aim of this article is to present the current position of female managers in Britain and examine the similarities and differences between male and female managers. In terms of managerial efficiency and performance per se, the evidence strongly suggests that there are far more similarities than differences between the way men and women ‘manage’. However, there are some major sex differences in relation to demographic profiles, job status and employment factors, career development, occupational stress levels, and attitudes towards female managers compared to their male counterparts. One in nine managers in Britain are women and less than one per cent occupy senior management positions. Women managers tend to have to be more highly qualified than men managers, are more likely to be single or divorced, and encounter more prejudice and discrimination in the work environment. In addition, compared to male managers female managers have to cope with additional stresors stemming both from their work and home lives. It is suggested that many of these differences are hampering the career prospects of women in management and contributing towards the difficulties they have in reaching the higher levels of management compared to men. Finally, recommendations for changes in corporate and legislative policies are also proposed.     

Separation of the redistributive and allocative functions of government: A public choice perspective

The implications of not separating the redistributive and allocative functions of government are examined from a public choice perspective. Many democratic governments lump transfers and public services into a single unified budget. This can distort voter perceptions of the marginal cost of public services relative to the marginal tax price embodied in the taxing institutions employed to generate public revenue. If the median voter's perception of marginal cost is affected, the majority rule outcome with respect to public goods spending will be altered correspondingly.     

Industrial Migration: A Case Study of Destination by City-Surburban Origin within the New York Metropolitan Area*

Since the early stages of industrial development, the outflow of jobs from central city to suburb has been discernable. This intrametropolitan dispersion process, slowed by depression and war, gained impetus following World War II and accelerated during the ensuing decades. By the 1970s, however, a new dimension had been added to the dispersion process—especially in the mature urban areas of the North-east and Midwest—that being the outflow of jobs from suburbs themselves to other regions of the U.S. Given this new interregional dimension, a multi-jurisdictional strategy to stem the job outflow is in order. This paper provides an input into the framework for developing such a strategy through an examination of destination patterns of jobs by intrametropolitan point of origin using New York City and Nassau-Suffolk as a case study.     

Franchising: A marketing system to improve inner city conditions

One of the most pressing problems for society today is that of the Race/Poverty dilemma. The plight of the black and the ghetto are synonymous in that they are a portrait of poverty. One program which many have heard very little about can make a significant contribution to upgrading of a ghetto area. It can do so primarily by creating new opportunities for the nation's small businessman—and, in the process, for those in disadvantaged minority groups. This paper examines the many facets of thefranchise system exploring its attractiveness to minority group members who aspire to own their own businesses, in uplifting the economic base of the ghetto, and in easing the plight of its inhabitants.     

Centralized institutions and cascades

Why do sudden and massive social, economic, and political changes occur when and where they do? Are there institutional preconditions that encourage such changes when present and discourage such changes when absent? I employ a general model which suggests that cascades which induce massive equilibrium changes are more likely to occur in regimes with centralized coercive power, defined as the ability to impose more than one type of sanction (economic, legal, political, social, or religious). Centralized authorities are better able to suppress subversive actions when external shocks are small, as citizens have little incentive to incur numerous types of sanctions. However, citizens are also more likely to lie about their internal preferences in such regimes (e.g., falsely declare loyalty to an oppressive government), entailing that larger shocks are more likely to trigger a cascade to a vastly different equilibrium. The model is applied to the severity of protests that followed austerity measures taken in developing nations since the 1970s.     

Loss aversion and the quantity–quality tradeoff

Firms face an optimization problem that requires a maximal quantity output given a quality constraint. But how do firms incentivize quantity and quality to meet these dual goals, and what role do behavioral factors, such as loss aversion, play in the tradeoffs workers face? We address these questions with a theoretical model and an experiment in which participants are paid for both quantity and quality of a real effort task. Consistent with basic economic theory, higher quality incentives encourage participants to shift their attention from quantity to quality. However, we also find that loss averse participants shift their attention from quality to quantity to a greater degree when quality is weakly incentivized. These results can inform managers of appropriate ways to structure contracts, and suggest benefits to personalizing contracts based on individual behavioral characteristics.     

Shopping for Information: Implications of Consumer Learning for Optimal Pricing and Product Design*

I study a seller's pricing problem where consumers perform costly product research about value before purchase. They buy the product when sufficiently optimistic about value and cease research when sufficiently pessimistic. I find that the seller encourages product research when prior belief about value is high, even though he could sell immediately for a high price. The prior affects both expected value and how additional information changes consumers' beliefs. I show that an increase in research cost affects equilibrium price nonmonotonically. Finally, when the seller chooses price and product value dispersion, the optimal level of dispersion need not be extremal.     

The genesis of design: learning about design,learning through design to learning design in play

International Journal of Technology and Design Education - Learning about design and learning through design have emerged in the literature and important works show heuristics and matrices for...