The demand for game day attendance in college football: an analysis of the 1997 Division 1‐A season

This paper develops a predictive model which includes game, team and university specific factors that are likely to influence game day demand for Division 1‐A college football. Attendance during the 1997 regular season is used as the dependent variable. Tobit estimates of two separate equations reveal that the quality of both teams, traditional rivalry and membership of specific conferences have a significant influence on demand. In addition, colleges with lower enrollments and a higher percentage of off‐campus students attract smaller crowds. The presence of a nearby professional football team also detracts from a college team's drawing power. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Anomalies in the Foundations of Ridge Regression

Errors persist in ridge regression, its foundations, and its usage, as set forth in Hoerl & Kennard (1970) and elsewhere. Ridge estimators need not be minimizing, nor a prospective ridge parameter be admissible. Conventional estimators are not LaGrange's solutions constrained to fixed lengths, as claimed, since such solutions are singular. Of a massive literature on estimation, prediction, cross–validation, choice of ridge parameter, and related issues, little emanates from constrained optimization to include inequality constraints. The problem traces to a misapplication of LaGrange's Principle, unrecognized singularities, and misplaced links between constraints and ridge parameters. Alternative principles, based on condition numbers, are seen to validate both conventional ridge and surrogate ridge regression to be defined. Numerical studies illustrate that ridge regression as practiced often exhibits pathologies it is intended to redress.     

Influence factors for operational control and compensation in professional service firms

Professional service firms have distinct operational challenges due to the type of work that is transacted by the employees of these firms, and due to the nature of the employees themselves. In this paper, we develop and present factors that influence professional service operations in firms and compensation structures for professional service providers. We establish professional service influence factors, which we posit will impact agency relationships in professional service firms. That is, we hypothesize that professional service influence factors (PSIFs) will moderate the effect of task programmability and outcome measurability in predicting the use of behavior- or outcome-based compensation schemes (control strategy). Logistic regression is used on data provided by 192 professional service providers in order to examine the impact of the agency variables and moderating factors on control strategies. The results indicate that company- and profession-based factors have moderating effects on task programmability when predicting control strategy. We discuss the implications of our findings.     

Managers’ Corporate Entrepreneurial Actions and Job Satisfaction

Through the development and extension of theories and scholars’ subsequent empirical analyses of significant, theoretically grounded research questions, the knowledge about corporate entrepreneurship (CE) and its successful use continues to advance. Moreover, the literature suggests important relationships between the corporate environment, managers’ entrepreneurial behavior and successful implementation of corporate entrepreneurship actions. In an attempt to test some of those relationships, we describe an empirical study of 523 managers that examines the relationships among the antecedents to managers’ entrepreneurial behavior, a decision to implement entrepreneurial actions, and resulting job satisfaction and reinforcement practices.     

Partial‐ and General‐Equilibrium Measures of Trade Restrictiveness

New partial‐equilibrium forms of the Trade Restrictiveness Index and the Mercantilist Trade Restrictiveness Index have recently been used by the World Bank and others. In this paper we examine the bias in the partial‐equilibrium forms due to the neglect of general‐equilibrium effects. We propose “semi‐general‐equilibrium” measures that capture those general‐equilibrium effects due to vertical input–output relations without the need for a computable general‐equilibrium model. These measures also incorporate nontariff measures. Australian data are used to compute the semi‐general‐equilibrium measures. These estimates indicate that the partial‐equilibrium forms generally underestimate the true value of the indices, and by a large margin in some cases.     

Does progress matter?

This paper, presented as an addresss to the Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought, argues that writing history may be more interesting if progress is not made the leitmotif. Starting from an examination of early causal accounts of the history of political economy, written in the ninteenth century by Marx, Toynbee, Ingram and Leslie, a plea is made for narratives rather than explanations. Consistent with the former historians of economic thought this may be perceived as eavesdropping on conversations of the past. To understand the richness of these conversations they need to perceive their work not just as a sub-discipline of economics but in a wider interdisciplinary setting.     

Economics,Ethics and Thanatology: Lessons from the Ancients

The normative presuppositions motivating rational choice decision-making based on optimizing objectives amount to a thin account of ethical economic behavior. Ancient thought offers insights that can provide a firmer basis both for personal, individual choice as well as for public policy. After a brief review of Epicurean and Stoic ethical principles, a comparison is made of modern economic and Hellenistic conceptions of rationality and rational behavior. These competing conceptions are then applied to an examination of a contemporary public policy problem, namely health care, particularly as this applies to “end-of-life” issues. The argument concludes that decision-making based on a eudaimonic conception of the good has the potential to provide us with a more efficient health care system as well as one that more satisfactorily addresses the needs of the chronically ill and dying patients who account for a highly disproportionate share of health care expenditures.