Nomic necessity in marketing theory: The issue of counterfactual conditionals

One of the well-established characteristics of lawlike generalizations is nomic necessity, i.e., the quality of universality or inevitability. In turn, the ability to support so-called “counterfactual conditionals” is considered the hallmark of lawlike statements which possess nomic necessity. Unfortunately, there seems to be some inconsistent interpretation of this counterfactual-support requirement, revealed even in some of the most prominent works on the subject in the field of marketing. This paper represents an attempt to clarify the situation.     

Coasean bargaining with symmetric delay costs

Delay costs play a role in Coasean bargaining over environmental conflicts when an injunction restricts actions until a settlement is reached. Results from the lab suggest that efficiency remained relatively robust to discrete and increasing marginal delay costs, but declined significantly with nonincreasing marginal delay costs. Bargainers appear to deal with probability and consequences separately rather than in combination as maintained by expected utility theory, and as such, neglect ends over means. How the distribution of wealth is best organized depends on perspective: constrained self-interest best organizes behavior if expected utility is maintained; pure self-interest dominates if we acknowledge the probability–consequence heuristic.     

Cash balance pension plans: A case of standard-setting inadequacy

Accounting for and ownership of U.S. private employee pensions has long been a controversial and politically contested terrain. The uniqueness in the U.S. of using employers as the principal provider of pensions makes the reporting of pensions more problematic since the corporate employers providing pensions are not strictly accountable to only the pensioners. Over the last quarter century there has been a marked swing in power toward management and away from employees making it possible for increasing numbers of U.S. companies to switch from conventional defined benefit plans to cash balance plans. This paper provides a “case” study of how accounting standard-setters framed the pension reporting problem vis-à-vis how they frame the “reporting problem” in general. Utilizing various sources of commentary about the phenomenon of cash-balance conversions, we triangulate on the pension problem to demonstrate how current FASB disclosure rules fail to satisfy the condition of neutrality and how those rules have facilitated the shifting of economic risk from shareholders to employees.     

Disruption management in distributed enterprises: A multi-agent modelling and simulation of cooperative recovery behaviours

Disruption management in industrial areas consists in dealing with unanticipated events that get the plans deviate from their intended course. The solution results from the design and the maintenance of an operating mode ensuring a relevant deployment of individual recovery behaviours.The paper proposes an approach to minimize the impact of disrupting events on the whole system. It is based on an analysis of disrupting events and the characterization of the recovery process, and on a cooperative repair method for distributed industrial systems. This method is based on a cooperative distributed problem solving approach supported by a multi-agent system framework.     

A survey on pickup and delivery problems

This paper is the first part of a comprehensive survey on pickup and delivery problems. Basically, two problem classes can be distinguished. The first class, discussed in this paper, deals with the transportation of goods from the depot to linehaul customers and from backhaul customers to the depot. This class is denoted as Vehicle Routing Problems with Backhauls (VRPB). Four subtypes can be considered, namely the Vehicle Routing Problem with Clustered Backhauls (VRPCB – all linehauls before backhauls), the Vehicle Routing Problem with Mixed linehauls and Backhauls (VRPMB – any sequence of linehauls and backhauls permitted), the Vehicle Routing Problem with Divisible Delivery and Pickup (VRPDDP – customers demanding delivery and pickup service can be visited twice), and the Vehicle Routing Problem with Simultaneous Delivery and Pickup (VRPSDP – customers demanding both services have to be visited exactly once). The second class, dealt with in the second part of this survey, refers to all those problems where goods are transported between pickup and delivery locations. These are the Pickup and Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem (PDVRP – unpaired pickup and delivery points), the classical Pickup and Delivery Problem (PDP – paired pickup and delivery points), and the Dial-A-Ride Problem (DARP – passenger transportation between paired pickup and delivery points and user inconvenience taken into consideration). Single as well as multi vehicle versions of the mathematical problem formulations are given for all four VRPB types, the corresponding exact, heuristic, and metaheuristic solution methods are discussed.      

The Integrity Factor-Critical to Accounting Education

Integrity must be the organizing principle for accounting education and accounting practice. Without integrity, ethical frameworks can be misused as manipulative devices to support particular interests. The accounting profession has frequently addressed integrity. The professional interpretation, however, has been a narrow rules-oriented approach focusing on identifying fraudulent financial reporting and on traditional views on the nature and scope of the audit report. This paper links integrity to corporate responsibility and to the individual moral responsibility to take the moral point of view.     

Quantifying Price Liberalization in Russia

We seek to quantify the success of Russia's attempt to achieve price-liberalization initiatives as part of the reforms established under the Big Bang of January 1992. We do so by studying the time-series behavior of commodity prices between 1992–1995 and focusing on the relationship between the behavior of prices of similar goods within and across cities. We supplement this analysis by examining city-level surveys that seek to quantify the extent to which firms are currently able to set and adjust commodity prices in accordance with market conditions. Our evidence suggests that price liberalization gradually gained momentum following the Big Bang and that prices generally reflected market conditions by the first quarter of 1995. However, regional pockets of resistance to price-reform efforts continue to persist, indicating that Russia has yet to achieve full market integration.J. Comp. Econom.,December 1998, 26(4), pp. 735–760. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260.