Exploring the Relationship Between Rework Projects and Risk Indicators

When projects fail to adequately meet requirements, organizations are forced to either abandon the project or to initiate a new project to address the original project requirements. Because the organization already has experience with and exposure to many project details, it is possible that the second attempt to address the original requirements (a rework project) will create different challenges for the project team. The purpose of this study was to examine risk indicators for rework projects and to determine whether or not risk indicators were the same or different for rework projects. A risk indicator is a factor that has predictive power about the likelihood of a risk occurring in the course of a project's life cycle. The projects studied for this research were undertaken by a large engineering design organization. The results show that there are some important differences in the types of risk indicators experienced by project managers and project teams in rework projects. Specifically, the risks associated with project urgency, quality, and technological changes were more common in rework projects. By understanding and attending to these differences in rework project risks, project managers will be better equipped to successfully guide rework projects to completion.     

Sampling methodology and fieldwork changes in the October Household Surveys and Labour Force Surveys

The 1999 October Household Survey was the first time that Statistics South Africa introduced a master sample of Enumeration Areas. There were several important changes in sampling and fieldworker practice that accompanied the introduction of the master sample of Enumeration Areas, which have not been systematically documented and which make comparability of the surveys undertaken by Statistics South Africa before and after this time difficult. We document these changes in this research note and provide evidence that these changes were partly responsible for the odd trends in the total number of single-person households estimated from the October Household Surveys and the Labour Force Surveys, as well as rapid increases in employment, in the late 1990s.     

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: Why It Fails to Deter Bribery as a Global Market Entry Strategy

Recent studies (Cragg and Woof, Bus Soc Rev 107(1):98–144, 2002; Weismann, J Bus Ethics 88:615–66, 2009) revealed that in the first 28 years of its existence, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was not enforced by the federal government. The Weismann study further concluded that the FCPA, designed by Congress as a self-regulatory model of corporate governance, failed to achieve the regulatory goal of deterring global bribery by U.S. companies. The current article addresses the reasons that the FCPA remains an ineffective measure to control bribery as a global market entry strategy despite the highly publicized 2006 Department of Justice initiative to increase prosecutions and tighten enforcement efforts. The failure arises out of both the increased use of informal dispositions of case prosecutions, (including non-prosecution and deferred prosecution agreements), which has made “getting caught” merely an increased “cost of doing business” and the failure to close the regulatory gaps in the statute that permit violators to slip through the enforcement net. The article updates and compiles the case prosecution data for every reported case prosecuted between 1977 and 2011. That data are then compared to the results of a 2010 integrity risk survey performed by Deloitte Financial Advisory Services and Forbes which reveal a widely held global business perception that compliance and integrity risks appear to be rising sharply and that the FCPA is ineffective in deterring bribery and corruption in foreign markets. The article aims to serve as a predictive tool for policy makers and business professionals in assessing risk in the global markets, particularly as commerce intensifies in the BRIC countries, notable for bribery and corruption.     

Consumer Rationing and Cournot Outcomes: Experimental Evidence

We report the results of duopoly market experiments where firms first commit to capacities and then compete in prices. The theoretical literature pertaining to these duopoly models suggests that the way residual demand is rationed is fundamental to the character of equilibrium outcomes when capacity costs are sufficiently low. The experiments test this prediction by varying capacity cost and demand‐rationing schemes. We find that residual demand rationing does not significantly impact the capacity choices of experimental subjects, although it does affect pricing. Regardless of rationing scheme, the Cournot outcome is common with high capacity costs and rare with low capacity costs.     

Humour at the Model United Nations: The Role of Laughter in Constituting Geopolitical Assemblages

Model United Nations (MUN) is a simulation in which students take on the roles of ambassadors to the United Nations, engaging in debate on ‘real’ issues from the perspective of their assumed national identities. This paper, based on a year of ethnography and interviews of a college-level MUN team, examines the role of humour in producing particular geopolitical imaginations among those participating and also in producing the MUN assemblage itself. Key here is the circulation of affects among participants' bodies, producing an orientation among them that facilitates debate and consensus-building. This finding is seen as a corrective to past work on geopolitics and humour, which has tended to emphasise irony and satire, as well as mass-mediated humor.     

Community assessment of Indigenous language-based tourism projects in Haida Gwaii (British Columbia,Canada)

Abstract

Research into language-based tourism programming is rare. Aside from a few studies that consider the language/tourism nexus broadly, research has failed to examine the community context in which development takes place or the impact of communities on the choice of suitable projects. This study assessed the relative merits of 12 proposed language-based tourism projects to support the development and revitalization of Haida language. This research was conducted in two phases: initially, informal focus groups were used to identify key criteria affecting development, which were then used as a means of reflecting on the proposed projects from the perspective of the community. The results show that the two projects with the greatest potential include Impromptu Cultural Performances and Increased Signage in Haida Language. The level of community support contingent upon their ability to (1) find suitable partnerships, (2) secure adequate approvals, (3) hold long term industry potential, (4) deepen speaker opportunities, and (5) moderate high level political concerns. This research fills a gap in the literature by offering evidence to support projects best suited to the needs and aspirations of the community and introduces a necessary distinction between language use in tourism settings versus language planning in tourism settings.     

Modelling and trading the EUR/USD exchange rate at the ECB fixing

The motivation for this paper is to investigate the use of alternative novel neural network (NN) architectures when applied to the task of forecasting and trading the euro/dollar (EUR/USD) exchange rate, using the European Central Bank (ECB) fixing series with only auto-regressive terms as inputs. This is done by benchmarking four different NN designs representing a higher-order neural network (HONN), a Psi Sigma Network and a recurrent neural network with the classic multilayer perception (MLP) and some traditional techniques, either statistical such as an auto-regressive moving average model, or technical such as a moving average convergence/divergence model, plus a naïve strategy. More specifically, the trading performance of all models is investigated in a forecast and trading simulation on the EUR/USD ECB fixing time series over the period 1999–2007 using the last one and half years for out-of-sample testing, an original feature of this paper. We use the EUR/USD daily fixing by the ECB as many financial institutions are ready to trade at this level and it is therefore possible to leave orders with a bank for business to be transacted on that basis. As it turns out, the MLP does remarkably well and outperforms all other models in a simple trading simulation exercise. However, when more sophisticated trading strategies using confirmation filters and leverage are applied, the HONN network produces better results and outperforms all other NN and traditional statistical models in terms of annualized return.     

A concentration index for differentiated products: the case of religious competition

In the past, scholars have used a Herfindahl–Hirschman Index using denominational market shares to measure the competitiveness of religious markets. However, this approach ignores both the imperfect substitutability between denominations and the degree of competition within denominations. These two shortcomings make the current index a suspect measure of religious competition; it often falsely identifies which market micro-economists would generally consider the more competitive one. We develop a new religious competition index that incorporates intra-denominational competition and creates a ‘substitutability parameter’ to better specify the appropriate degree of inter-denominational competition. While the model developed in this article applies specifically to religious markets, our index of competition could be expanded to other economic markets where such a substitutability parameter is meaningful.     

The Effects of Cross-Ownership and League Policies Across Sports Leagues Within a City

Since prior research suggests that some economic competition exists between teams in different sports leagues, economic competition and ownership structure can affect an owner’s incentive to invest in talent. This paper uses a theoretical model to examine the differences in owners’ incentives to invest in talent when they are operating as monopolists, as duopolists, or as a cross-owned team. Our model shows that economic competition results in an ambiguous level of investment compared to that of a monopolist. A firm that engages in cross-ownership will invest less in talent compared to a duopolist, but the difference in profits is ambiguous. League policies are studied and are shown to affect the quality of teams in other leagues.