Partnering in the construction industry—Problems and opportunities

During recent years partnering has been on the top of the management agenda in the construction industry. Despite this attention there is limited and partly contradicting evidence of the impact of these efforts. The objective of this literature-based paper is to explore why it has been difficult to realise potential partnering benefits on the strategic level, while partnering in individual projects has improved construction performance. The analysis builds on a comparison of the features of business relationships in construction with the characteristics of so called ‘high-involvement relationships’ based on close cooperation. It is concluded that prevailing supply arrangements established to handle the particular conditions in the construction industry makes it unlikely for partnering to reach outside the individual project. Taking the step to strategic partnerships would require modification of some of the basic assumptions and norms of industry efficiency. On the basis of this analysis we explore potential consequences of modifications of current behaviour with respect to decentralisation and competitive tendering. The paper is finalised with a suggestion for a differentiated approach to partnering.     

Some new characterization of rational expectation equilibria in economies with asymmetric information

We compare the family of rational expectation equilibria with the ex-post Aubin core allocations in the framework of an economy with uncertainty and asymmetric information. We do it in a very general setting: an arbitrary space of agents and an infinite dimensional commodity space. We also present a characterization of the ex–post Aubin core by allocations belonging to the core of the associated complete information economies, and we use a suitable definition of Edgeworth equilibria to characterize the family of rational expectation equilibria. Moreover, we study some generalizations of the ex-post Aubin core obtained by making some restriction on the families of blocking coalitions.     

Stakeholder Engagement: Keeping Business Legitimate in Austria’s Natural Mineral Water Bottling Industry

Stakeholder maneuvers such as Internet media attacks or consumer boycotts can have devastating effects on companies. By contrary, vital relationships between companies and their stakeholders can be highly beneficial. A review of the existing stakeholder-management literature suggests to engage stakeholders in business activities in a positive manner. However, the types of successful engagement activities differ across industries. The purposes of this article are to develop an explanatory framework based on the literature findings, to introduce stakeholder-engagement literature to a segment of the water sourcing industry, and to unfold industry’s stakeholder-engagement measures. Based on a content analysis of 11 cases, we investigate if and how companies in the natural mineral water bottling industry in Austria inform, communicate, and therefore engage with stakeholders. It became evident that fewer than three of eleven companies published information on sustainability or corporate social responsibility reports, open house days, workshops, or international community activities. Most companies maintained a website for their bottled natural mineral water or communicated quality consciousness. We conclude that most companies in the Austrian mineral water industry could increase their stakeholder-engagement activities to positively respond to challenging business environments.     

Gender differences in the intentions to voice complaints across different service failure modes

The present study investigates the joint impact of the service failure mode (interpersonal service versus self-service technology) and gender on consumers’ intention to voice their complaints. Results from a quasi-experiment suggest that female consumers are more likely to voice their dissatisfaction following a self-service technology failure rather than an interpersonal failure. However, the service failure mode fails to influence male consumers’ complaint intentions. Moreover, our findings indicate that motivation to help is the mechanism behind female consumers’ complaint behaviors, thus mediating the effect of service failure mode on complaint intention. Therefore, hospitality practitioners might want to pay attention to the differences in each gender’s complaint behaviors across different service failure modes and provide effective service recovery solutions across the two genders.     

Contextualising capability development: configurations of knowledge governance mechanisms in project-based organizations

Given the project-based organization’s (PBO) strong focus on autonomy and temporary decentralisation, it faces unique challenges with regard to long-term organisational learning and capability development. To address how PBOs cope with these challenges, we address the role of knowledge governance (KG) mechanisms to foster capability development. The present paper reports on a multiple case study comprising 23 PBOs and demonstrates the importance of ‘configurations of KG mechanisms’ for facilitating learning and capability development. This paper develops four distinct configurations (balanced, formalistic, interactive, and fragile) that promote three principal organisational-level learning processes: shifting, leveraging and adapting. This research underscores the close relationship between knowledge governance mechanisms and capability development and the importance of designing the appropriate configuration of KG mechanisms to foster capability development.     

Dynamics of sectoral business cycle comovement

Sectoral comovement accounts for a considerable share of the variance of aggregate variables. However, little is known about its time-varying aspects by now. In this article, a multivariate DCC- GARCH framework is employed to study dynamics of sectoral comovement across manufacturing sectors both in the United States and in Germany. To account for possible nonlinearities, asymmetric effects in conditional volatilities as well as in conditional correlations are being assessed. We find that comovement across sectors is not stable but shows irregular movements. Particularly, contractions tend to be more synchronized than expansions in manufacturing sector. Moreover, we examine the role of various aggregate factors for the fluctuations in conditional correlations. Our findings reveal that both the non-constant variability of common factors and the changes in the effects of these factors play role for the fluctuations in sectoral comovement.     

A Comment on Dehez and Tellone, “Data games: sharing public goods with exclusion”

This comment shows that the data cost game introduced in Dehez and Tellone (Journal of Public Economic Theory, 2013) coincides with the nonadditive component of the library cost game studied in Driessen, Khmelnitskaya, and Sales (TOP, 2012) where the core, nucleolus, and Shapley value were also investigated.     

Discounting and welfare evaluation of policies

We start with the premise that if policy discounting is to have any welfare relevance, one has to accept it being a derivative of a social welfare function (SWF). We show that if that derivative is to have a net present value (NPV) form, then the baseline allocation must be stationary. In addition, we show that at a stationary baseline in an overlapping generations growth economy, the intergenerationally fair discount rate equals the growth rate of per‐capita consumption, which is, roughly, 2% for the United States. This differs from the interest rate, even in the golden rule equilibrium, unless population growth is null. The last result is based on the main theorem in Mertens and Rubinchik (2012) and is demonstrated for a policy space that might naturally arise in applications.     

The impact of stress on tournament entry

Individual willingness to enter competitive environments predicts career choices and labor market outcomes. Meanwhile, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful. We use two laboratory experiments to investigate whether factors related to stress can help explain individual differences in tournament entry. Experiment 1 studies whether stress responses (measured as salivary cortisol) to taking part in a mandatory tournament predict individual willingness to participate in a voluntary tournament. We find that competing increases stress levels. This cortisol response does not predict tournament entry for men but is positively and significantly correlated with choosing to enter the tournament for women. In Experiment 2, we exogenously induce physiological stress using the cold-pressor task. We find a positive causal effect of stress on tournament entry for women but no effect for men. Finally, we show that although the effect of stress on tournament entry differs between the genders, stress reactions cannot explain the well-documented gender difference in willingness to compete.