Setting people up for success: How the Portman Ritz‐Carlton hotel gets the best from its people

In China, where many multinational companies face a constant shortage of talent and high employee turnover, the Portman Ritz‐Carlton Hotel has been able to attract, develop, and retain high‐quality talent to deliver excellent customer service and ensure profitable growth. Under the leadership of Mark DeCocinis since 1998, the Portman Ritz‐Carlton has not only been named as the “Best Employer in Asia” by Hewitt Associates three consecutive times, but has also rated the highest in employee satisfaction among all of the Ritz‐Carlton's 59 hotels worldwide for five consecutive years. How can DeCocinis and his leadership team achieve such remarkable results? In his interview with Arthur Yeung, Mark DeCocinis, general manager of the Port‐man Ritz‐Carlton and regional vice president, Asia‐Pacific, of the Ritz‐Carlton Hotel Company, shares his philosophy and practices on talent management in China and elsewhere. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Combating deceptive advertisements and labelling on food products – an exploratory study on the perceptions of teachers

People are becoming more health conscious nowadays, but most of them are not able to adopt a lifestyle with adequate physical exercise and a healthier eating pattern. Many attempt to compensate by taking ‘health foods’. Despite the recent economic recession, the functional food market is expanding rapidly in Asian countries. Recent statistics indicate a huge increase in weight loss and functional food product advertising expenditure in Hong Kong and other Asian countries. In a large scale survey conducted by the Hong Kong Consumer Council on advertisements, it was found that 85% of the medicines, health food and therapies sampled contain questionable claims and misleading messages, which was the second most problematic category of the survey. In addition, young people do not understand much about modern food processing, in particular with regard to low energy and functional foods, and they know very little about modern food marketing strategies. The situation is potentially detrimental to consumer welfare, especially to the younger generation. This study was conducted to reflect critically on implications of the issue on the health and well‐being of young people in Hong Kong. Attempts are made to explore directions for designing relevant and effective education programmes to empower young people's abilities in understanding food advertising strategies and making informed decisions on food choice. This paper begins with a critical review of the current situation with regard to Hong Kong. Then, the results of an interview survey and a questionnaire survey on pre‐service and in‐service teachers’ perception towards misleading food advertising and labelling are reported. The situations at schools are defined and problems faced by teachers in providing relevant consumer education programmes to students are identified. Finally, some prospective foci for further investigation of this important issue, with a view to developing students’ critical skills in evaluating claims offered in food advertisements, will be considered.     

Expectations, the business cycle and the Mexican peso crisis

The 1994–95 ‘peso’ crisis did not displaycharacteristics which allow it to be easily captured by traditionalcrisis models. Models based on Minsky's financial fragilityhypothesis offer more persuasive accounts but have been supportedby relatively little direct empirical evidence. This paper providessuch evidence, with particular attention being paid to the roleof domestic financial liberalisation in the process. Minsky'shypotheses about the evolution of expectations over the businesscycle are tracked using business survey data. In addition, crisisindicators are constructed, reflecting the changing vulnerabilityof the economy to shocks. The findings support a Minskyian interpretationof the crisis.     

Two-stage flowshop earliness and tardiness machine scheduling involving a common due window

This paper studies a non-preemptive two-stage flowshop scheduling problem to minimize the earliness and tardiness under the environment of a common due window. The window size and the window location are considered to be given parameters. The just-in-time problem exists naturally and has many practical applications. The problem is shown to be NP-complete in the strong sense. We develop a branch and bound algorithm and a heuristic to solve the problem. We conduct the computational experiments to test the performances of the algorithms. A strong lower bound is derived for the branch and bound algorithm that can efficiently solve 15 jobs problem for about 5 minutes. The heuristic is shown to be efficient and effective, which can solve the problem of 150 jobs for about 20 seconds and provide near-optimal solution. We justify that the heuristic is an excellent solution approach for large problem instances. We also show that four special cases are either polynomial solvable or NP-complete in the ordinary sense.     

Protection and Trade in Services: A Survey

This paper surveys the literature on trade in services, focusing on the policies that are used to restrict such trade, the gains from liberalization, and the institutional mechanisms that have been adopted in the pursuit of liberalization. The paper argues that technological progress and international trade negotiations are likely to keep liberalization of trade in services a high profile policy issue. It also suggests that the research agenda should focus on developing better estimates of the welfare costs of protectionism in the service sector.     

Robert Browne and Full Employment

Among the valuable contributions Robert Browne made in his career was the role he played in shaping the “Equal Opportunity and Full Employment Bill of 1974” that was introduced by Congressman Augustus Hawkins of California. Browne defined full employment as “a condition in which all persons willing and able to work, no matter what their race, gender, or national origin would be guaranteed a job”. In his view, if the private sector was unable to produce full employment, the government should act as the employer of last resort. Language in support of that view was included in the Hawkins bill. Robert Browne believed only a national policy to achieve that goal would eliminate racial disparities in employment and unemployment—a long term reality in the American labor market. The 1974 Hawkins bill was met with only tepid Congressional support, little notice from civil rights leaders, and no response from the business community. Little was done to advance full employment legislation until Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota embraced the cause in 1975. Negotiations with Congressman Hawkins led to the development of the “Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1975,” a legislative measure to replace the Employment Act of 1946. The new bill was commonly known as the Humphrey–Hawkins Full Employment Bill. Robert Browne offered far less support for the new bill than for the original full employment bill introduced by Mr. Hawkins. The Humphrey Hawkins Bill failed to provide explicitly a job guarantee for all workers, and included an inflation target to make price stability co-equal with full employment as a national policy objective. The Humphrey–Hawkins Bill was enacted into law in 1978, and remains the nation’s policy dictum on full employment to this day.     

Multiunit Pay‐Your‐Bid Auction with One‐Dimensional Multiunit Demands*

An arbitrary number of units of a good is sold to two bidders through a discriminatory auction. The bidders are homogeneous ex ante and their demand functions are two‐step functions that depend on a single parameter. We characterize the symmetric Bayesian equilibrium and prove its existence and uniqueness. We compare this equilibrium with the equilibrium of the multiunit Vickrey auction and with the equilibria of the single‐unit first price and second price auctions. We examine the consequences of bundling all units into one package. We study the impacts that variations of the “relative” supply have on the equilibrium, on the bidders' average payoffs per unit, and on the efficiency of the equilibrium allocation.