Flexible work practices and human resource management: a comparison of South African and foreign owned companies

This study compares the use of flexible work practices in wholly owned South African (SA) companies with that in foreign-owned companies. Data were obtained from questionnaire results of a study conducted by Horwitz and Franklin (1996) of flexible work practices in SA organizations. The questionnaire was used as part of a collaborative research project involving three countries (Brosnan et al ., 1996). It was found that SA-owned companies use certain flexible work practices to a lesser extent than foreign-owned companies. This was found to be the case particularly in the use of numerical forms of flexibility, such as sub-contractors/consultants and the use of temporary employees. Use of subcontractors/consultants and temporary staff agencies was found to be the greatest in partially foreign-owned companies. A larger proportion of foreign-owned companies have lower labour costs than do SA-owned companies. This has, however, not been as a result of the greater use of flexible work practices. Foreign-owned companies make more joint decisions with unions than do SA-owned companies when changing work practices.     

When punishment fails: Research on sanctions, intentions and non-cooperation

People can become less cooperative when threatened with sanctions, and previous research suggests both “intentions” and incentives underlie this effect. We report data from an experiment aimed at determining the relative importance of intentions and incentives in producing non-cooperative behavior. Participants play a one-shot investment experiment in pairs. Investors send an amount to trustees, request a return on this investment and, in some treatments, can threaten sanctions to enforce their requests. Decisions by trustees facing threats imposed (or not) by investors are compared to decisions by trustees facing threats imposed (or not) by nature. When not threatened, trustees typically decide to return a positive amount less than the investor requested. When threatened this decision becomes least common. If the request is large relative to the sanction then most trustees return nothing. If the request is small, trustees typically return the requested amount. These results do not vary with investors' intentions.     

Spin‐outs: knowledge diffusion through employee mobility

In many industries, one important method of diffusion is through employee mobility: many of the entering firms are started by employees from incumbent firms using some of their former employer's technological know‐how. This article explores the effect of incorporating this mechanism in a general industry framework by allowing employees to imitate their employers' know‐how. The equilibrium is Pareto optimal because the employees “pay” for the possibility of learning their employers' know‐how. The model's implications are consistent with data from the rigid disk drive industry. These implications concern the effects of know‐how on firm formation and survival.     

Identifying individual differences: An algorithm with application to Phineas Gage

In many research contexts it is useful to group experimental subjects into behavioral “types.” Usually, this is done by pre-specifying a set of candidate decision-making heuristics and assigning each subject to a heuristic in that set. Such approaches might perform poorly when applied to subjects with prefrontal cortex damage, because it can be hard to know what cognitive heuristics such subjects might use. We suggest that the Houser, Keane and McCabe (HKM) robust classification algorithm can be a useful tool in these cases. An important advantage of this classification approach is that it does not require one to specify either the nature or number of subjects' heuristics in advance. Rather, both the number and nature of the heuristics are discerned directly from the data. To illustrate the HKM approach, we draw inferences about heuristics used by subjects in the well-known gambling task [Bechara, A., Damasio, A.R., Damasio, H., Anderson, S., 1994. Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex. Cognition 50, 7–12].     

Evaluating Government Bond Fund Performance with Stochastic Discount Factors

This article shows how to evaluate the performance of managedportfolios using stochastic discount factors (SDFs) from continuous-timeterm structure models. These models imply empirical factorsthat include time averages of the underlying state variables.The approach addresses a performance measurement bias, describedby Goetzmann, Ingersoll, and Ivkovic (2000) and Ferson and Khang(2002), arising because fund managers may trade within the returnmeasurement interval or hold positions in replicable options.The empirical factors contribute explanatory power in factormodel regressions and reduce model pricing errors. We illustratethe approach on US government bond funds during 1986–2000.     

Willingness-to-Pay Estimates and Their Relevance to Agribusiness Decision Making

Although methods such as contingent valuation have received a great deal of attention in environmental valuation literature, fewer studies have reported willingness-to-pay estimates with agribusiness applications. Because agribusinesses are increasingly interested in producing and selling differentiated goods and services whose values has not been established by well-functioning markets, we provide a short introduction to willingness-to-pay methodology and provide a discussion of several different methods used to estimate willingness-to-pay. More specifically, we discuss how much of the work in environmental and experimental valuation literature can be extended to agribusiness applications, which have their own set of unique issues.