Comparing Forms of Common Property Resource and Collective Goods Organizations Operating Water Markets in the Colorado Lower Arkansas River Basin

What sociological attributes characterize the form of an enduring social organization that empowers individually rational self‐interested actors to provide themselves with a common property or collective goods resource? To address this question, two common property/collective goods organizations for water management—located in the Arkansas River Basin of Colorado—were compared. The method was to assess attributes of each organization against those of conceptual benchmarks that reflect a tradition of common property resource and collective goods organizational research. The organizations were the Arkansas River Water Bank Pilot Program and the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Management Association. The Arkansas River Water Bank Pilot Program lacked the characteristics that theorists advancing the conceptual benchmarks have hypothesized as important to success. The pilot program also failed to generate local interest. The program was decommissioned in 2005 after the pilot trial period concluded. The Lower Arkansas Water Management Association possessed the attributes. It was considered a success as defined by member support for the organization and the capacity of that organization to re‐time flows on the Arkansas River. This program has been operating a water market in the lower Arkansas River Basin for over 30 years and continues to successfully move groundwater and surface water around the landscape. Implications for policy and theory are addressed.     

Periodically expanding discounted debt: a threat to fiscal policy sustainability?

This paper models the behaviour of discounted US debt using a Markov‐switching time series model. The significance of modelling fiscal policy within this framework derives from the implications it has for long‐term sustainability. The two‐regime framework used in this paper identifies periods where the present value of US Federal debt is expanding versus periods when it is collapsing. Using an updated data series from Hamilton and Flavin ( 1986 ), a test is conducted to establish if the expanding periods pose a threat to the long‐run sustainability of fiscal policy. For the USA, it is found that they do not. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

U.S. and Canadian Industrial Relations: Convergent or Divergent?

Two models, the divergence and the convergence models, address comparisons of Canadian and American industrial relations. Most specialists support the divergence hypothesis. It asserts that the two countries' systems have produced major transnational differences in industrial relations outputs. The convergence model reassessed the assumptions, data, and conclusions of the divergent model and concluded that the two countries' systems produced very similar, although not identical, industrial relations outputs.     

Business Ethics – Deontologically Revisited

In this paper we look at business ethics from a deontological perspective. We address the theory of ethical decision-making and deontological ethics for business executives and explore the concept of “moral duty” as transcending mere gain and profit maximization. Two real-world cases that focus on accounting fraud as the ethical conception. Through these cases, we show that while accounting fraud – from a consequentialist perspective – may appear to provide a quick solution to a pressing problem, longer term effects of fraud and misconduct make ethical implications more apparent. Widely used compensation schemes also may have the tendency to fuel unethical behavior. We argue that an ethical reinvigoration of the business world can only be accomplished by encouraging the business realm to impose upon itself some measure of self-regulating along the lines of deontological ethics. Principles of deontology should guide executive decision-making particularly when executives are tempted to operate outside of codified legislation or are bound to act under judicial-free conditions. Carmelita Troy is an Assistant Professor of Accounting in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. Micewski, Edwin R., Dr., Brigadier General, is social philosopher and Director of the Institute for Human and Social Science of the Austrian National Defence Academy, Vienna. Member of the Science Commission of the Austrian Ministry of Defence and Visiting Professor at the Department of National Security Affairs of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Research and teaching areas: Social and cultural philosophy, military ethics, (military) professionalism and leadership, postmodernism and war. Recent publication: (Ethics and international Politics (2001); Civil- Military Aspects of Military Ethics (2003/2005); Terror and Terrorism- History of Ideas and Philosophical-Ethical Reflections (2005); Asymmetry and Western Society - Culture-critical Reflections(2006).     

Work redesign: Eight obstacles and opportunities

Successful work‐design initiatives must overcome many obstacles in order to have their intended impact.This article outlines eight obstacles to work redesign: (1) influences on multiple outcomes, (2) trade‐offs between different approaches, (3) difficulty in choosing appropriate units of analysis, (4) difficulty in predicting the nature of the job, (5) complications from individual differences, (6) job enlargement occurring without job enrichment, (7) creating new jobs as part of growth or downsizing, and (8) differences between longterm and short‐ term effects. This article examines the nature of these eight obstacles, reviews prior research on this topic, and outlines suggestions for managing these obstacles in practice. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Equilibrium Selection and Stability for the Groves Ledyard Mechanism

In their seminal paper Groves and Ledyard (1976) construct a balanced incentive compatible mechanism that solves the free rider problem. In subsequent research, Bergstrom, Simon, and Titus (1983) prove that there exist numerous asymmetric equilibria in addition to the symmetric equilibrium. In the present paper, we explicitly solve for the additional equilibria and use computational experiments to examine the structure and stability of the set of equilibria of the Groves Ledyard Mechanism. We find that all of the equilibria found by Berstrom, Simon, and Titus are unstable and that for a high level of the punishment parameter these equilibria do not exist. Further, we find that there exists an additional boundary equilibrium for each of the equilibria found by Bergstrom, Simon, and Titus. The boundary equilibria are all stable.     

Congressional Memberships as Political Advertising: Evidence from the U.S. Senate

The present article analyzes signaling by elected officials of moderate or centrist legislative behavior from a benefits/costs perspective. To do so, we provide statistical evidence regarding the tendency of senators to join the U.S. Senate Centrist Coalition, a congressional membership organization of moderate legislators. We find that changes in party loyalty, perhaps due to changes in constituent preferences, and U.S. Senate tenure are both important determinants of membership in the Centrist Coalition. Tests also point out that freshman senators are more likely than more senior senators to seek membership as a form of information provision.     

Informing or obfuscating stakeholders: Integrated reporting and the information environment

The global development of integrated reporting (IR) is underpinned by the recognition of increased complexity of businesses and stakeholder demands for information relating to financial performance, management, corporate governance, and sustainability being provided in a single, coherent document which facilitates stakeholder decision making. This paper examines the lexical properties of IR following the introduction of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) Framework. Using an international sample, we find that when adopted voluntarily, IR are lengthier, use more complex language, and contain more boilerplate statements. Our findings suggest that without regulation, firms may continue to produce long and difficult to understand reports in fear of being perceived as omitting “bad news.” This fear might be justified as we find loss of analyst following and greater analyst uncertainty when voluntarily adopted IR is concise. In the regulated setting of South Africa, however, we find IR has become more concise, and firms that produce longer and more complex documents suffer from a deterioration of their information environment. Our findings suggest that regulators and practitioners need to be cognizant of the potential for an increased volume in reporting to obfuscate the message rather than inform stakeholders.     

Generating new product ideas: An initial investigation of the role of market information and organizational characteristics

Although product innovation is widely recognized as crucial to the success of organizations, the literature still contains certain gaps that limit our understanding of successful product innovation. These gaps include a lack of research employing a decompositional approach (i,e., analysis of the drivers at each stage of the process) to studying product innovation and a related lack of research investigating the effect of organizational characteristics on specific stages of the product innovation process. The authors attempt to close these gaps by developing and testing a model examining the moderating effects of organizational characteristics on the relationship between the amount of market information gathered and the number of new product ideas generated by work groups in organizations. The study findings provide insights into the types of organizational structure and climate characteristics that can have an impact on the relationship between amount of market information and new product idea generation. Lisa C. Troy is an assistant professor of marketing at Utah State University. She earned her Ph.D. from Texas A&M University. Her research interests include product innovation management, environmental marketing, and international marketing management. Her work has appeared in theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science and theJournal of Marketing. David M. Szymanski is the Al and Marion Withers Research Fellow and Director, Center for Retailing Studies in the Lowry Mays College and Graduate School of Business at Texas A&M University. His research interests are in the areas of applied meta-analysis, marketing strategy, personal selling and sales management, product innovation, and retail strategy. Representative research has appeared in theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, and theJournal of Retailing. P. Rajan Varadarajan is a professor of marketing and the Jenna and Calvin R. Guest professor of business administration at Texas A&M University. His research interests are in the areas of corporate, business, and marketing strategy. His research has been published in theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, theAcademy of Management Journal, theStrategic Management Journal, Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, Business Horizons, and other journals.