Realism: Austrian vs. Neoclassical Economics,Reply to Caplan

The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics -     

The impact of international outsourcing on individual employment security: A micro-level analysis

The paper analyzes how international outsourcing affected individual employment security. The analysis is carried out at the micro-level, combining monthly spell data from household panel data and industry-level outsourcing measures. By utilizing micro-level data, problems such as aggregation and potential endogeneity bias, as well as crude skill approximations that regularly hamper industry level displacement studies, can be reduced considerably. The main finding is that international outsourcing significantly lowers individual employment security. Interestingly, the effect does, however, not differ between high-, medium-, and low-skilled workers but only varies with job duration.     

Disentangling Alliance Management Processes: Decision Making, Politicality, and Alliance Performance

abstract    Using a sample of 106 organizations engaged in strategic alliances, we develop and test a framework of alliance-related organizational decision-making processes and their impact on alliance performance. With regard to direct effects, our results show a negative impact of decision-making recursiveness and no significant relationship for openness and procedural rationality. Acknowledging the importance of the organization's micropolitical context in which these decision processes are embedded, we also test the moderating influence of politicality. Our findings provide support for our hypotheses that in a context of low politicality, the decision-making characteristics of openness and procedural rationality have a positive influence, whereas recursiveness negatively affects alliance performance. In a context of high politicality, however, openness and procedural rationality exert a negative influence, and the negative impact of recursiveness is aggravated. We suggest that alliance-related decision making cannot be adequately understood without explicitly considering the micropolitical context in organizations.     

保险业要么锁定客户，要么收购

贝恩公司调查发现,仅有1／10的保险公司成功地实现连年持续地创造价值。许多公司最终表现欠佳的主要原因在于,他们严重误判自己提供客户所需产品／服务的能力。当高级主管被问及是否认为本公司提供最佳客户体验时,77％的高管自认为是,但仅有6％的客户认同。那么,究竟什么才是保险业实现最佳股东回报的关键呢?     

The behavior of intra-daily exchange rates

The behavior of exchange rates is examined as they evolve continuously over time. The data consist of Swiss franc/U.S. dollar rates for nine days during the years 1978–1980 as quoted by a major Swiss dealer operating on the interbank market. Since this market is highly organized, the observations are market prices at the same time. The distributions of relative changes in exchange rates measured over one minute are highly leptokurtic. The normal distribution is rather rapidly approached when the measurement interval is lengthened from one up to ten minutes. Time series analysis reveals that the natural logarithms of exchange rates are adequately described by a random walk, the same stochastic process as has been found for daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly observations. For short time intervals, significant autocorrelations sometimes occur at the first few lags, which are, however, not stable enough over time to form a basis for reliable forecasts.     

Finding the best strategy for service distribution

To determine appropriate levels of care and access, while maximizing quality and capital resources, a service distribution plan fully defines: How the organization will serve the market, How each of the system's operations will relate to other operations, How clinical resources will be organized and deployed, The financial impact of the service distribution plan on the overall organization.     

Multihoming, content delivery networks, and the market for Internet connectivity

Peering points between different Internet service providers (ISPs) are among the bottlenecks of the Internet. Multihoming (MH) and content delivery networks (CDNs) are two technical solutions to bypass peering points and to improve the quality of data delivery. So far, however, there is no research that analyzes the economic effects of MH and CDNs on the market for Internet connectivity. This paper develops a static market model with locked-in end users and paid content. It shows that MH and CDNs create the possibility for terminating ISPs to engage in monopolistic pricing towards content providers, leading to a shift of rents from end users and content providers to ISPs. Implications for future innovations are discussed.     

开放式领导的挑战

李夏琳（Charlene Li）的《开放式领导》（Open Leademhip：How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead）写得生动活泼,其中有不少行动和自查建议,方便领导们审查自己的组织在开放性方面到底做得如何。她与Josh Bernoff合著的《公众风潮》是2008年的畅销书（Groundswel：Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies）．