Heredity or Environment: Why is Automobile Longevity Increasing?

Over the past 25 years the longevity of automobiles has increased dramatically. We disentangle the rise in longevity into an embodied or inherent-durability effect and a disembodied effect (driven by the external environment, such as reduced accident rates or reductions in the prices of auto repair parts) and estimate these effects by year from 1950 through 1991. We find that the entire rise in auto longevity is due to some force disembodied from the cars themselves and offer some speculation about the nature of this external environment.     

Managerial Justice: A Field Study of the Initial Steps of Appeal

Most of the existing grievance literature has focused on formal legalistic processes. This exploratory field study discovered that many issues in the instant case site were dealt with informally via negotiation outside the formal hearings. Based on the author's experiences while working as a union officer for 20 months and an employee for 11 years, we attain a more accurate political portrait of what transpires in the initial stages of appeal. A largely tacit managerial system of justice comes to light in the author's encounters with stonewalling, runarounds, double talk, threats, coercive acts, snow jobs, misdirection, smoke screens, and disinformation.     

The Financing and Redeployment of Specific Assets

We model the role various forms of nonrecourse secured debt play in efficiently redeploying assets whose value is state-specific. Ex ante, an entrepreneur and an asset redeployer make noncontractible state-specific investments in the primary and next-best uses of an asset, respectively. The redeployer provides a secured nonrecourse loan equal to the value of the asset in the critical state that separates the good and bad states. In the event of a bad state, this contract averts ex post bargaining over the asset's quasi-rents on redeployment and leaves the parties' ex ante investments undistorted.     

Cross-impact analysis using group decision support systems: an application to the future of Hong Kong

When several interdependent events affect the future of an organization, an industry, or a society, it is often useful to know how these events may affect each other. Determining the impact of external events on other such events, called a cross-impact analysis, is usually accomplished by asking knowledgeable people to (1) discuss any relationships among the events and (2) provide subjective estimates of conditional probabilities relating the events. However, there are two possible problems. First, in some political environments people may be reluctant to discuss the events openly. Second, the subjective probability estimates may violate the laws of probability theory, such as Bayes' theorem. We present a simple method, using group decision support systems (GDSS), for eliciting anonymous comments and preparing consistent probability estimates concerning interdependent events. We then illustrate our method by using it to perform a cross-impact analysis concerning the future of Hong Kong.     

Managing requirements capture within a global telecommunications company

Many firms engage in research activities with the purpose of finding information about the future state of technology, competition and the market. In parallel, companies absorb knowledge through a variety of social and political processes that also influence decision‐making. Such activities enhance understanding of a firm's internal and external environment, so that it can develop and evaluate new product or service ideas more effectively. How firms manage this process is critical to define and prioritise new product development ideas – how organisations find the 'right' idea is critical to ensure future market success. This paper seeks to gain a better understanding of how the knowledge used to create new products and services is acquired, what organisational structures facilitate or impinge this process and how individuals and groups within organisations behave in the very early stages of new product development. An in-depth case study of a global telecommunications company is presented and the management processes for a number of different projects in various divisions of the company are compared and discussed.     

The Road to Serfdom symposium.: Comment on papers by Rosser and by Levy, Peart, and Farrant

The paper reviews the history of the socialist calculation debate leading up to the publication of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, and then uses that information to address various claims made by Rosser and Levy, Peart, and Farrant in their symposium papers.     

Accounting for expenditure on software development for internal use

The methods accepted by Australian, International, U.S. and U.K. Accounting Standards for the treatment of expenditure on software development are inconsistent, and permissive. A host of methods for recording capitalized software in terms of those standards is identified by reference to an illustrative case study. It is questionable whether many in-house developed software applications satisfy the professionally endorsed definition of 'asset'. Moreover, even if accounting standards significantly reduce the range of options for capitalizing expenditure on software development, there would still be many values which could be assigned to capitalized software. That suggests that those 'measures' are not reliable, so that it would be inappropriate initially to recognize software expenditure as an 'asset'. It is contended that expensing all outlays on software development as they are incurred (accompanied by reporting that expenditure as a line item in statements of financial performance, and expanded disclosures in notes) is likely to provide a clearer and more useful report on business operations than the alternative of capitalization, amortization and subsequent assessments of whether or not recorded values should be adjusted for 'impairment'.     

Collective Choice in the Commons: Experimental Results on Proposed Allocation Rules and Votes

We analyse and empirically examine a multi-level common-pool resource (CPR) game consisting of a collective-choice level game and an operational-level game. In the collective-choice game, participants anonymously propose allocation rules to be used in the operational game and vote anonymously on the proposed rules. Majority and unanimity rules are investigated. Our major finding is that both types of voting rules substantially increase efficiency relative to a baseline with no opportunity for collective choice, but the distributional consequences of the rules differ. To understand the process by which efficiency is improved better, we examine four predictive theories related to proposals, votes, and outcomes.