Comparative optimism and risky road traffic behaviors among high‐risk sports practitioners

This study examines the relationship between participation in risky sports, comparative optimism (CO), and risky road traffic behaviors among a sample of adult men. We surveyed high‐risk (n = 313) and low‐risk (n = 53) sports practitioners, and non‐sportsmen (n = 89), assessing their CO, as well as their self‐reported risky behaviors and their accident experiences while driving a car. Results show that high‐risk sports practitioners expressed CO regarding the quality of their reflexes while driving and their vulnerability to traffic accidents. High‐risk sportsmen reported more risky behaviors while driving a car than the members of the other groups, and some of them, namely BASE‐jumpers, have experienced more traffic accidents. High‐risk sportsmen’s risky behaviors and accident experiences did not prevent them from expressing CO regarding their vulnerability to road accidents. Results are discussed, as well as putative psychological mechanisms underlying high‐risk sport practitioners’ CO and risky behaviors while driving.     

Information for health futures research : Guide to published and on-line resources

Most published material relevant to health futures research is not clearly labelled as such, so health futurists can be frustrated in their quests for information until they learn some searching techniques. Many books, reports and articles do exist, however, about epidemiological patterns, technological trends and transitions in health-care systems, about behavioural, environmental and social factors affecting health, about the goals and strategies of pharmaceutical companies, health-care providers and other actors, and about many other futures-related aspects of health. Information seekers are likely to be successful as long as they give adequate attention to what kinds of information should be sought, employ well thought-out search terminology, and make use of a variety of information technologies. Essential local information resources for health futurists are the computerized catalogue, reference and secondary literature, and CD-ROM indexes of a research library. On-line best bets include the National Library of Medicine OPAC, WHOLIS, DDBS at IDRC, and Uncover at CARL. Other health-related Internet resources can be identified through the subject trees at Rice University and BUBL, Netlink at Washington and Lee University, and WWW subject trees such as the WWW Virtual Library.     

Defined contribution health plan to consumer driven health benefits: evolution and experience

Today, the idea of placing more choice on employees "consuming" health care and giving them more responsibility and incentive to control health care costs and utilization is alive and thriving in the form of consumer-driven health care. This article examines the evolution of consumer-driven health benefits--including the experience of the first generation of "defined contribution" health care participants (i.e., retirees) and the results of different approaches employers have taken to early consumer-driven plan designs. The author then describes what's needed to answer the question: "Can consumer-driven health care control health cost?"     

The Sahel: A Malthusian Challenge?

The population of the least developed countries of the Sahel will more than triple from 100 million to 340 million by 2050, and new research projects that today’s extreme temperatures will become the norm by mid-century. The region is characterized by poverty, illiteracy, weak infrastructure, failed states, widespread conflict, and an abysmal status of women. Scenarios beyond 2050 demonstrate that, without urgent and significant action today, the Sahel could become the first part of planet earth that suffers large-scale starvation and escalating conflict as a growing human population outruns diminishing natural resources. National governments and the international community can do a great deal to ameliorate this unfolding disaster if they put in place immediate policies and investments to help communities adapt to climate change, make family planning realistically available, and improve the status of girls and women. Implementing evidence-based action now will be an order of magnitude more humane and cost-effective than confronting disaster later. However, action will challenge some long held development paradigms of economists, demographers, and humanitarian organizations. If the crisis unfolding in the Sahel can help bridge the current intellectual chasm between the economic commitment to seemingly endless growth and the threat seen by some biologists and ecologists that human activity is bringing about irreversible damage to the biosphere, then it may be possible also to begin to solve this same formidable problem at a global level.     

Bank Runs in Emerging-Market Economies: Evidence from Turkey's Special Finance Houses

Recent banking crises in emerging-market countries have renewed debates about deposit insurance. Because insurance erodes banks' incentives to manage risks prudently, some argue that its elimination would improve bank stability. Yet eliminating insurance could be destabilizing if it recreates risks of self-fulfilling runs. This paper examines dynamics of depositor behavior during a set of runs on Turkey's Special Finance Houses, an uninsured sub-sector of Islamic banks. Detailed data on withdrawals are analyzed in a vector autoregressive framework that enables us to distinguish between informational and self-fulfilling elements of runs. We found that both types of dynamics were at work during the runs, suggesting a role for deposit insurance, judiciously used, in ruling out expectational problems that fuel tendencies to run.     

Risk and risk management in organic and conventional cash crop farming in Norway

This study presents empirical insight into organic and conventional cash crop farmers' perceptions of risk and risk management strategies, and identifies socio-economic variables linked to these perceptions. The data originate from a questionnaire survey of farmers in Norway. The results indicate that organic farmers perceived themselves to be less risk averse than conventional farmers. For both groups, crop prices and yield variability were the two top rated sources of risk, followed by institutional risks. The two groups evaluated risk management strategies quite similarly; favoured strategies were good liquidity and to prevent and reduce crop diseases and pests. The farmers' evaluation of sources of risk and choice of risk strategies depended on various socio-economic variables. The importance of institutional risks implies that policy makers should be cautious about changing policy capriciously and they should consider strategic policy initiatives that give farmers more long-term reliability.     

Providing health checks as incentives to retain blood donors — Evidence from two field experiments

The collection of blood given by donors has proven to be a substantial societal and a managerial challenge. Consequently, blood donation services seek for incentive mechanisms to retain donors. However, economic or material rewards might entail negative side effects such as motivational crowding out or even attracting “bad blood”. In an effort to increase the retention of established blood donors, we conducted two randomized field trials (N₁?=?53,257, N₂?=?31,522) in cooperation with the German Red Cross Blood Donation Service and tested the effectiveness of an incentive strategy that is directly related to the blood donation itself: offering a comprehensive blood health check. Contrary to previous related research, we found substantial positive effects of a comprehensive blood health check incentive on donation behavior. In addition, unlike previous studies, we examine effects of repeated exposure to this incentive and do not find any wearout effects. Considering the positive effect of this incentive on donor retention and the relative low cost for providing this service to donors, our findings suggest that offering comprehensive blood health check incentives is a viable and cost-efficient marketing strategy to increase the retention among previous donors even if offered over the longer run.     

Ethical concerns in grievance arbitration

Although the use of arbitration has become commonplace in the organizational world, the ethical issues surrounding arbitration have never been fully explored. The paper reviews ethical issues in arbitration, particularly in terms of forensic bias parallels, that may affect decision-making and make the arbitrator's decision questionable. Finally, the maintenance of fairness in the arbitration process, and the importance of an ethically acceptable system of organizational justice are also discussed.Robert A. Giacalone is Associate professor of Management Systems at the E. Claiborne Robins School of Business, University of Richmond. He is co-editor (with Paul Rosenfeld) ofImpression Management in the Organization (Erlbaum, 1989) andApplied Impression Management (Sage, 1991) and has authored papers on business ethics, organizational sabotage, exit interviewing, and impression management in organizational life. His work has appeared inHuman Relations, Business and Society Review, Journal of Business Ethics, andJournal of Social Psychology, as well as in a variety of other journals.James C. Goodwin is Professor of Management at the University of Richmond. He previously taught at the University of North Carolina and at Florida State University and served as a petroleum engineer with Chevron and Atlantic-Richfield. Dr. Goodwin is the author of numerous articles which have appeared in national and international journals.Martha L. Reiner is Assistant Professor of Management at the E. Claiborne Robins School of Business, University of Richmond. She received her Ph.D. in business and public policy. She has co-authored articles that appeared in theCalifornia Management Review and theNonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly.The authors would like to thank Hinda Greyser Pollard for her insightful comments on a previous draft of this paper.     

Toward a complete definition of relatedness in merger and acquisition transactions

The interrelation between different sources of relatedness in M&A transactions has been largely overlooked in extant literature. This paper offers theoretical and empirical investigation and introduces a few new measures of relatedness. We find that single-dimensional measures of relatedness are complements, not substitutes, of each other, and their impacts on the market’s reaction are additive and interdependent. Specifically, each measure contains unique relatedness information and the market’s perception of, and reaction to, the presence of relatedness in M&A deals is more sophisticated than the extant literature prescribes. The market seems to reward operational and marketing relatedness in small-vicinity mergers and out-of-state mergers. In contrast, related in-state mergers seem to be associated with a significantly negative market reaction. Similarly, technology affiliation induces an additional positive market reaction that is separate from simple industry matching, and the market seems to reward the acquisition of high-technology targets by high-technology acquirers and to penalize the acquisition of high-technology targets by non-high-technology acquirers. Furthermore, we find that horizontally and vertically related mergers are relatively more likely to be completed, while in-state and large-vicinity mergers are less likely to be completed. We also find that when the target is incorporated in a target-friendly state, the merger is less likely to be completed, though state-specific merger laws do not contribute significantly to mergers’ valuation. Taken together, our results indicate that relatedness is a multidimensional metric composed of several interrelated components, and, thus, single-dimensional proxies are not sufficient to capture relatedness accurately and completely.