Informational society

The coming technology of automation, communications, and information processing, contributing to a new “social nervous system”, is discussed. The basic assumptions are that in the future, organisations will have no physical location and that man's primary activities will not be traditional work. The article suggests what this would mean for communities, economic organisations, government and the individual, and proposes a utopian institutional structure based on the stated technological assumptions.     

Leader support for gender equity: Understanding prosocial goal orientation,leadership motivation,and power sharing

We focus on how interpersonal characteristics should influence leader support for gender equity in organizations. Recognizing gender disparities in organizations and the “labyrinth” that women face when they advance in their careers (cf. Eagly & Carli, 2007), we develop a model for how interpersonal characteristics of leaders, both men and women, influence power construal and thus their use of empowerment, mentoring, and performance feedback, ultimately affecting career opportunities for women in organizations. The model proposes that leaders who are high on communal goal orientation, a prosocial characteristic, are more likely to construe power through a responsibility lens and behave in ways that ultimately support gender equity in organizations. In contrast, leaders with an exchange goal orientation are more likely to construe power through a freedom lens and behave in ways that are self-serving. Prestige motivation will increase the extent to which leaders, especially those who are communally oriented, share power. Dominance motivation will increase the extent to which leaders, especially those who are exchange oriented, act in self-interest and retain power, ultimately imposing barriers to women's career advancement. Organizations can potentially increase leader power sharing by encouraging and reinforcing leaders' prosocial characteristics of communal orientation and prestige motivation. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Explicit instrument versus targeting rules in the backward-looking model

In the backward-looking model, an explicit instrument rule is almost as efficient as a target rule. An explicit instrument rule leads to a more stable real rate of interest and hence an output stabilization bias compared to the target rule.     

Escalating penalties: a supergame approach

The paper provides an economic rationale for punishing repeat offenders with increasing sanctions. We analyze the optimal intertemporal punishment scheme within a supergame framework, in which the legal authority is assumed to minimize the social costs of punishment under the constraint of keeping delinquency at an exogenously given maximal tolerable level.     

The relative efficiency of slave agriculture: a comment

In their book Time on the Cross, Fogel and Engerman (FE) present evidence that average factor productivity was greater for larger Southern slave farms in 1860 than for both free farms and smaller slave farms. In a recent article, Field (1988) lends support to the FE theory by finding that an upward shift in the production function occurs for slave farms at 15 slaves, the size at which FE propose that gang labour became feasible. In a more recent article, Grabowski and Pasurka (GP) contradict both FE and Field by finding that there was no relationship between the size of slave farms and their efficiency. The present paper extends both GP's and Field's work and refines a point made by FE. We distinguish between a technological advantage due to the gang labour system and revenue inefficiency due both to the incentive structure of slavery and the repugnance of gang labour, two factors which foster rational shirking and resistance by slaves. That is, we propose that relative to small slave farms, large slave farms may have enjoyed a higher revenue frontier but that actual output and revenue fell farther below their frontier. Our construction is consistent with the historical view that emphasizes the harshness of slavery, the repugnance of the gang labour system, and the rational resisting behaviour of the slaves. We test this hypothesis with the stochastic frontier function approach as did GP. However, our findings contradict them. We find, consistent with both FE and Field, that large slave farms exhibited superior technology over small farms. More importantly, we find empirical confirmation of our theory that large slave farms suffered greater revenue inefficiency than smaller slave farms.     

Revolution,Reform, and Social Justice

The literature on mainstream economics usually takes the United States as the main geographical reference. However, the various criteria that define mainstream economics can be applied outside the United States. The ideas that have prestige and influence in a given country’s academia may not be the same ideas that constitute American mainstream economics. Brazil has been an example of pluralism. An institutional perspective helps explain why several people in Brazil conform with institutional rules of thought and of behavior that differ from those of the American mainstream, including the norm of pluralism, and how these rules influence many people.