The relationship of psychological and situational variables to usage of a second-order marketing system

The study of one type of second-order market, personal sales, indicated that various consumer attitudes and merchandising strategies were related to utilization of this market. Similarities and differences between this market and other second-order markets were also noted.     

Don't forget our charge nurses

In response to the nursing shortage, many health care organizations are utilizing a team approach to nursing care delivery. Although, the role of the charge nurse in these changing nursing care delivery models is a pivotal one to the effective and safe management of patient care units, many receive no leadership training. An educational program that hundreds of charge nurses have attended over the past 2 years is described. Strategies that organizations should consider when planning their own training are shared.     

The Nature of Managerial Work in Small Growth-Orientated Businesses

In this study we explore the daily managerial behaviour of managers of small growth-orientated businesses and contrast it to previous research of managers in large organisations. We also investigate if one background characteristic, the owner–managers functional experience, is related to daily managerial activity. More specifically, we seek to strengthen the ‘managerial work’ tradition through a replication of Mintzberg’s work (The Nature of Managerial Work, New York: Harper and Row 1973) and an extension of the ‘managerial work’ tradition to another contingency, that of small growth- oriented businesses. The study is based on direct observations of ten CEOs of small growth-orientated businesses. The research provides evidence that organisational size is an important determinant of the nature of managerial work. However, in exploring the variability that may occur in managerial work within a given size context, we failed to establish a relationship between the owner–manager’s functional experiences and daily functional work orientation. The article concludes by speculating why the nature of managerial work in small growth-orientated businesses may provide a template for management in larger (more bureaucratic) organisations.     

Group play in games and the role of consent in network formation

We study games played between groups of players, where a given group decides which strategy it will play through a vote by its members. When groups consist of two voting players, our games can also be interpreted as network-formation games. In experiments on Stag Hunt games, we find a stark contrast between how groups and individuals play, with payoffs playing a primary role in equilibrium selection when individuals play, but the structure of the voting rule playing the primary role when groups play. We develop a new solution concept, robust-belief equilibrium, which explains the data that we observe. We provide results showing that this solution concept has application beyond the particular games in our experiments.     

The Stability of Hedonic Coalition Structures

We consider the partitioning of a society into coalitions in purely hedonic settings, i.e., where each player's payoff is completely determined by the identity of other members of her coalition. We first discuss how hedonic and nonhedonic settings differ and some sufficient conditions for the existence of core stable coalition partitions in hedonic settings. We then focus on a weaker stability condition: individual stability, where no player can benefit from moving to another coalition while not hurting the members of that new coalition. We show that if coalitions can be ordered according to some characteristic over which players have single-peaked preferences, or where players have symmetric and additively separable preferences, then there exists an individually stable coalition partition. Examples show that without these conditions, individually stable coalition partitions may not exist. We also discuss some other stability concepts, and the incompatibility of stability with other normative properties. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C71, A14, D20.     

Some new Time Sdries results

Summary Some recent work on Time Series is surveyed, and interest is focussed on Moving Average Processes, for which some new results are given. First, the background theory of the Time Domain is outlined, and then the problem of interpreting Box-Jenkins fits is discussed. Finally, we detail certain moving average properties of theoretical interest but also potentially useful in process modelling.

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Zusammenfassung Es werden einige neuere Arbeiten über Zeitreihen untersucht, wobei sich das Interesse auf Verfahren mit gleitenden Mittelwerten konzentriert, für die einige neue Ergebnisse angeführt werden. Zunächst wird der theoretische Hintergrund des Zeitbereiches umrissen, und anschließend wird das Problem der Interpretation von Box-Jenkins-Anpassungen diskutiert. Abschließend untersuchen wir detailliert bestimmte Merkmale gleitender Mittelwerte, die zwar von theoretischem Interesse sind, jedoch auch für die Erarbeitung von Verfahrensmodellen potentiell nützlich sind.

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This work was carried out while the author was with the Department of Mathematics, Nottingham University.     

A theory of capital gains taxation and business turnover

We present a theory concerning the realization of capital gains where ownership and control are linked as in Holmes and Schmitz (J. Pol. Econ. 103: 1005–1038, 1995). The model developed is a version of a Lucas-tree economy in which the productivity of a technology depends on the ownership of the technology. The existence and uniqueness of equilibrium follow from the Contraction Mapping Theorem. The theory implies that impediments to asset trading, such as capital gains taxation, negatively affect production efficiency. Moreover, we calibrate the model economy to U.S. data on small-business turnover and find that indexing deductions for inflation is capable of increasing capital-gains tax revenues. We thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments, and well as Tom Holmes, Ed Prescott, Jim Schmitz and Neil Wallace for insightful conversations. Cavalcanti is grateful for financial support from CNPq, as well as the hospitality from the University of Toronto during his visiting appointment at the Department of Economics in 2006. Erosa acknowledges the support from the Institute for Policy Analysis at the University of Toronto and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.