Do boards know when they hire a CEO that is a good match? Evidence from initial compensation

Are CEO initial compensation packages based on variations in the expected match quality of the hiring firms? Using CEO tenure as a proxy for expected match quality, and a sample of CEO turnovers between 1992 and 2006, we find that CEOs that experience good matches, defined as tenures exceeding four years, have higher initial compensation packages. We also find evidence from exogenous switching regression models that inside CEOs receive a higher good match premium than outside CEOs. To account for economic and regulatory changes across our sample period, we divide our sample into three subsamples: 1992–1997, 1998–2002, and 2003–2006, and repeat our analyses. Even though the positive relation between expected match quality and initial compensation persists across all periods, we find that the good match premium for inside and outside CEOs does not differ in the post-2002 period. We attribute this result to increased board independence and changes in regulation (Sarbanes–Oxley) in the post-2002 sample period.     

Mexico's private toll road program reconsidered

Mexico's private toll road program of 1989–1994 is famous both as one of the first and the most ambitious highway privatization programs among the developing countries and as one of the most dramatic failures. In just five years Mexico awarded 52 concessions totaling over 5300 km of toll roads, but as early as 1993 many of the concessions had to be renegotiated and in 1997 the government was forced to takeover 23 of them at an immediate financial cost of billions of dollars. This paper reconsiders the Mexican program and, with the benefit of hindsight, argues that it does not deserve its bad reputation. Although Mexico made some important mistakes in the design of the concessions, many of the highways turned out to be socially worthwhile investments. Moreover, the restructuring of the concessions in 1993–1997 converted many of them into financially profitable projects over the long-term, while the 1997 bailout ended up costing the government little in budget terms.     

April 2010 UK Airspace closure: Experience and impact on the UK’s air-travelling public and implications for future travel

Ash emitted from the Eyjafjallajökull Icelandic volcano resulted in the closure UK’s airspace in 2010. This research highlights passengers experience throughout the crisis and it is impacted on their wellbeing. Analysis of a survey shows that just 90% of respondents highlighted the failure of airline, travel agencies and/or government to provide timely and appropriate information. The airspace closure also caused adverse health impacts, with 79% of respondents highlighting this as a concern. Although passengers were greatly inconvenienced and had a negative experience, seventy-nine percent of respondents indicated that the crisis had little or no impact on their decision to fly in the future.     

An alternate approach to modeling the slack season provision of guided tours to tourists

We discuss an approach to modeling the slack season provision of guided tours to tourists that accounts for the twin phenomena of stochastic demand and tourist heterogeneity but is different from the way in which this problem has been modeled in the extant tourism literature. Our discussion uses the theory of discrete-time Markov chains and it models the slack season from a tourist demand perspective. Specifically, we first study a case in which the wait plus tour or the excursion time of an arriving tourist is exponentially distributed with a fixed mean. Next, we focus on a scenario in which the excursion time is exponentially distributed with one of two possible fixed means and these two means arise with specific probabilities.     

Search reduction in hierarchical distributed problem solving

Knoblock and Korf have determined that abstraction can reduce search at a single agent from exponential to linear complexity (Knoblock 1991; Korf 1987). We extend their results by showing how concurrent problem solving among multiple agents using abstraction can further reduce search to logarithmic complexity. We empirically validate our formal analysis by showing that it correctly predicts performance for the Towers of Hanoi problem (which meets all of the assumptions of the analysis). Furthermore, a powerful form of abstraction for large multiagent systems is to group agents into teams, and teams of agents into larger teams, to form an organizational pyramid. We apply our analysis to such an organization of agents and demonstrate the results in a delivery task domain. Our predictions about abstraction's benefits can also be met in this more realistic domain, even though assumptions made in our analysis are violated. Our analytical results thus hold the promise for explaining in general terms many experimental observations made in specific distributed AI systems, and we demonstrate this ability with examples from prior research.This research has been sponsored, in part, by the National Science Foundation under grants IRI-9015423 and IRI-9010645, by the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School, and by a Bell Northern Research Postgraduate Award.     

Does Religion Matter? A Comparison Study of the Ethical Beliefs of Marketing Students of Religious and Secular Universities in Japan

This study was designed to examine the determinants of and differences between the ethical beliefs of two groups of Japanese students in religious and secular universities. Multiple regression analysis revealed that students of the Japanese religious university perceived that young, male, relativistic, and opportunistic students tended to behave less ethically than did older, female, and idealistic students. Students of the Japanese secular university perceived that male, achievement-oriented, and opportunistic students tended to behave less ethically than did female and experience-oriented students. Opportunism was found to be one of the most important determinants in explaining misconduct. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) revealed that students of the Japanese secular university tended to score higher on achievement and humanism, and lower on theism and positivism than did students of the Japanese religious university. In addition, students of the Japanese secular university were somewhat more sensitive to academic dishonesty practices than were students of the Japanese religious university.     

Money Allocation to Out-of-Home Leisure Activities and the Organization of These Activities in Time and Space

Monetary budgets influence activity participation and related travel as they demarcate limits on how people organize their activities in time and space. In this paper, we are interested in money allocation to out-of-home leisure activities and how this is affected by duration, sociodemographics, and time-location variables. Analyses were carried out by applying a seemingly unrelated regression model to a leisure activity data set. The analyses revealed that expenditures for out-of-home leisure activities are influenced by the variables mentioned above. Moreover, the results indicate that there is a substitution between expenditure of each activity.