Social memory,evidence, and conflict

This paper examines an equilibrium model of social memory — a society's vicarious beliefs about its past. We show that incorrect social memory is a key ingredient in creating and perpetuating destructive conflicts.We analyze an infinite-horizon model in which two countries face off each period in a game of conflict characterized by the possibility of mutually destructive “all out war” that yields catastrophic consequences for both sides. Each country is inhabited by a dynastic sequence of individuals. Each individual cares about future individuals in the same country, and can communicate with the next generation of their countrymen using private messages. Social memory is based on these messages, and on physical evidence — a sequence of imperfectly informative public signals of past behavior. We find that if the future is sufficiently important for all individuals, then regardless of the precision of physical evidence from the past there is an equilibrium in which the two countries engage in all out war with arbitrarily high frequency, an outcome that cannot arise in the standard repeated game. In our construction, each new generation “repeats the mistakes” of its predecessors, leading to an endless cycle of destructive behavior.Surprisingly, we find that degrading the quality of information that individuals have about current decisions may “improve” social memory. This in turn ensures that arbitrarily frequent all out wars cannot occur.     

Income Underreporting and Tax Evasion in Italy: Estimates and Distributional Effects

The paper estimates the extent of evasion of personal income tax (PIT) in Italy by integrating two methods that the literature has previously applied separately. The consumption-based method introduced by Pissarides and Weber (1989) is used to estimate misreporting of income in micro data collected in the household IT-SILC survey. We adopt an econometric specification close in spirit to that of Feldman and Slemrod (2007), which allows us to estimate income misreporting at different rates for different income sources. The misreporting estimates are then used in the discrepancy method to correct the incomes compared with administrative registered data. The comparison provides new estimates of evasion of personal income tax by type of income, region and income class. The estimates are used to improve microsimulation analyses of the distributional impact of tax evasion.     

Solid waste management in small hotels: a comparison of green and non-green small hotels in Wales

Solid waste generation and disposal is one of the most negative impacts of small hotels on the environment. Small hotels often pay little attention to their environmental responsibilities. This research builds upon an earlier work by the same authors considering solid waste management (SWM) issues in small Welsh hotels. It considers the Welsh Assembly Government's Green Dragon Environmental Standard (GDES) as an environmental management system developed specifically to target small and medium-sized enterprises and help them with aspects of environmental management, such as SWM. It explores SWM practices in green (i.e. GDES-accredited) and non-green small hotels and develops a best practice SWM model for them. Semi-structured interviews were used to investigate hoteliers’ attitudes and the barriers to implement sustainable SWM practices. The findings revealed that most non-GDES small hotels were highly reliant on landfill for the disposal of solid waste and felt negatively about the implementation of more sustainable SWM alternatives. In contrast, GDES small hotels used landfill as a last resort and targeted other waste hierarchy options in preference. The study develops a best practice model for policymakers (local authorities and UK central government) to influence and encourage better SWM practices in small hotels.     

Distributed Knowledge in Environmental Planning: Hybrid IT-Based Approaches in Scenario-Building Contexts

The new argumentative and communicative approach to environmental planning is replacing the traditional approach of planning derived from cybernetic models and based on the linear control of systems' dynamics. The traditional absolute monologic rationality of planning is today challenged by more complex, multilogic, multivalue and weak rationality, explicitly contextualized to different social and physical environments. Not achieving targets, but rather building discourses and visions related to evolving situations are the new grounds of planning processes, where different stakeholders can intentionally locate behaviours, meanwhile learning about themselves and their realities.In this context, traditional cybernetic planning seem unable to face the probabilistic and chaotic environmental phenomena, so making it extremely hard to point out elements, to schedule times, to respect consistencies. However, practical cases of experimentation of the argumentative approach to environmental planning are particularly rare. Given this starting conceptual condition, the present paper will try to contribute to the research field, dealing with the potentials using an ICT-based argumentative and communicative approach to environmental planning. In particular, a proposed process will be discussed, with reference to Future studies and to the Strategic choice approach, hybridized by information technologies.The context of such experimentation is a 5-year EU-financed project to build sustainable development futures in the Mediterranean region, ended in 2003.The present study was carried out by the authors as a joint research work. Nonetheless, chapter 1 was written by D.Borri, chapters 2, 3.2, 4 were written by D.Camarda, chapters 3.1 and 3.3 were written by L.Grassini.     

From the self to the screen: a journey guide for auto-netnography in online communities

Supported by the previous literature, the author explores the method of auto-netnography, delimiting and differentiating its scope and boundaries. This article contributes to the literature with a Journey Guide for Auto-Netnography that can be used in online communities in social media by practitioners, organisations and scholars. That guide is constituted by six elements: (1) the traveller, (2) the map, (3) the routes, (4) the learning, (5) the telling and (6) the safety of the trip. The article also advances the literature by identifying and discussing the novel concept of brand auto-netnography. For illustrative purposes, the author uses an example of his own efforts to perform an auto-netnographic study in the context of a presidential candidate’s Facebook community; the author was the candidate’s campaign manager.     

Expected utility theory with non-commutative probability theory

In this paper, we extend von Neumann and Morgenstern’s expected utility approach to a non-commutative probability theory. We introduce a new representation of the decision maker’s set of events which extends the canonical representation. We reformulate von Neumann and Morgenstern’s approach to modeling decision maker behavior by non-commutative probability theory. We introduce a set of preference axioms similar to von Neumann and Morgenstern’s axioms, and show that they lead to a generalization of the expected utility theorem. Our generalization allows for decision makers to make an intuitive distinction between representations of a set of events. We find that this methodology enables several paradoxes and inconsistencies in traditional expected utility theory (e.g., Allais paradox, etc.) to be solved or better understood.     

The application of change management theory to HR portal implementation in subsidiaries of multinational corporations

HR portals are complex information technology (IT) applications that can be accessed by all employees of a given organization. By placing more applications and information online, HR portals reduce the reliance employees have on HR personnel. Given this relational change, from human to computer, the HR portal implementation process must take into account the challenges of both change management and technology acceptance. By integrating change management theories with IT user acceptance models, this article adds to HR's collective knowledge of ways to effectively implement HR portals. In addition, this article describes the cross‐national challenges that exist when a global firm attempts to implement an HR portal around the world. Thus, this article will present a model that (1) integrates change management theories and IT user acceptance models and (2) illustrates the ways in which change management plans may need to be adapted to be effective in various subsidiaries. A case study of Hewlett‐Packard's (HP's) worldwide implementation of their @HP Employee Portal in the Italian subsidiary of HP illustrates the key issues of these theories. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Does Partisan Heritage Matter? The Case of the Federal Reserve

Received evidence suggests that changes in appointer- and overseer-preferencesinfluence monetary policy (i.e., partisan heritage matters).Evidence presented here, on the other hand, is consistent withchanges in the cost of pursuing a common preference influencingpolicy. I draw this evidence from a panel of Federal Open MarketCommittee (FOMC) votes and find support for the following conclusions:(1) Federal Reserve Board (FRB) governors who were nominatedand confirmed by the same party (Republican or Democrat) prefersignificantly looser policy than do other FOMC members. (2)Monetary policy is significantly looser when either party controlsthe oversight mechanism (i.e., the presidency and Senate) thanwhen control is split. (3) Oversight acts less forcefully ondistrict bank presidents than on FRB governors. In short, thepresent evidence suggests that political agents from both partiesprefer loose money and pursue this preference more efficientlywhen their parties are aligned.     

Information acquisition in committees

The goal of this paper is to illustrate the significance of information acquisition in mechanism design. We provide a stark example of a mechanism design problem in a collective choice environment with information acquisition. We concentrate on committees that are comprised of agents sharing a common goal and having a joint task. Members of the committee decide whether to acquire costly information or not at the outset and are then asked to report their private information. The designer can choose the size of the committee, as well as the procedure by which it selects the collective choice, i.e., the correspondence between agents' reports and distributions over collective choices. We show that the ex ante optimal device may be ex post inefficient, i.e., lead to suboptimal aggregation of information from a statistical point of view. For particular classes of parameters, we describe the full structure of the optimal mechanisms.