Becoming the boss

Even for the most gifted individuals, the process of becoming a leader is an arduous, albeit rewarding, journey of continuous learning and self-development. The initial test along the path is so fundamental that we often overlook it: becoming a boss for the first time. That's a shame, because the trials involved in this rite of passage have serious consequences for both the individual and the organization. For a decade and a half, the author has studied people-particularly star performers-making major career transitions to management. As firms have become leaner and more dynamic, new managers have described a transition that gets more difficult all the time. But the transition is often harder than it need be because of managers' misconceptions about their role. Those who can acknowledge their misconceptions have a far greater chance of success. For example, new managers typically assume that their position will give them the authority and freedom to do what they think is best. Instead, they find themselves enmeshed in a web of relationships with subordinates, bosses, peers, and others, all of whom make relentless and often conflicting demands. "You really are not in control of anything, says one new manager. Another misconception is that new managers are responsible only for making sure that their operations run smoothly. But new managers also need to realize they are responsible for recommending and initiating changes-some of them in areas outside their purview-that will enhance their groups' performance. Many new managers are reluctant to ask for help from their bosses. But when they do ask (often because of a looming crisis), they are relieved to find their superiors more tolerant of their questions and mistakes than they had expected.     

A model of adolescents' online consumer self-efficacy (OCSE)

This paper investigates adolescent online shopping and self-efficacy development in the virtual setting. The authors present and test a model of antecedents and mediators to two dimensions of online consumer self-efficacy. Additionally, a discriminant analysis finds that more involved adolescent online shoppers can be differentiated from less involved online shoppers on key variables of interest-shopping motivations, self-efficacies, shopping behaviors, and relative influence in household decision-making.     

The role of instrumentation and process controls in minimizing accidental releases

Most accidental releases are the result of either mechanical failures or measures taken to prevent such failures, such as, venting through emergency vents, relief valves, or rupture discs. Where the mechanical failure is the result of defective materials, inadequate design, or external factors, little can be done by means of instrumentation to prevent the release. It may be possible, however, to reduce the flow. Many failures are due to process upsets such as overpressure, internal explosions, and runaway reactions. The probability of these failures occurring can be substantially reduced by proper instrumentation.     

Immigrant decisions concerning duration of stay and migratory frequency

"The temporary and repetitive character of contemporary labor migration is explained by assuming that immigrants have a preference for location. A life-cyle model of immigrant behavior is developed to determine net lifetime income, total time allocated to home-country and foreign-country residence, and the number of migratory trips. Because of income effects, home wages and foreign wages are not symmetric in their effect on the location of work effort. It is also shown that changes in travelling costs have predictable consequences for the number of border crossings, but not for the total time spent in the foreign labor market." The emphasis is on labor migration to developed countries.     

An additively separable representation in the Savage framework

This paper proposes necessary and sufficient conditions for an additively separable representation of preferences in the Savage framework (where the objects of choice are acts: measurable functions from an infinite set of states to a potentially finite set of consequences). A preference relation over acts is represented by the integral over the subset of the product of the state space and the consequence space which corresponds to the act, where this integral is calculated with respect to an evaluation measure on this space. The result requires neither Savage's P3 (monotonicity) nor his P4 (weak comparative probability). Nevertheless, the representation it provides is as useful as Savage's for many economic applications.