Guilt Appeals and Prosocial Behavior: An Experimental Analysis of the Effects of Anticipatory Versus Reactive Guilt Appeals on the Effectiveness of Blood Donor Appeals

This study investigates the effectiveness of guilt-arousing communication in promoting prosocial behavior. By analyzing the distinct effects of anticipatory versus reactive guilt appeals, we contribute to the discussion of guilt appeals as drivers of prosocial behavior, especially blood donation. Research on persuasive communication provides the theoretical basis of our study and we validate our hypotheses by means of two 2?×?2 factorial between-subjects designs. We find that anticipatory rather than reactive guilt appeals are more effective in generating prosocial action tendencies. Compared to noninformational reference group influences, messages endorsed by members of informational reference groups yielded more favorable attitudinal responses. Besides their significant main effect, two-sided messages reinforce the favorable impact of anticipatory guilt appeals. The study concludes with practical implications for nonprofit organizations and public blood donor services as well as avenues for future research.     

Managerial optimism and investment choice

This paper analyzes whether it might be desirable for a firm to hire an overoptimistic manager to commit to a certain R&D strategy. I consider a Cournot model with an ex‐ante R&D stage where firms can invest in cost reduction before product market competition takes place. I show that firms want to hire overoptimistic managers and argue that a manager's type may serve as a substitute for strategic delegation via contracts. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the evasion of employment protection legislation

This paper analyzes how the option to evade employment protection legislation impacts on unemployment. Using a stylized model, it is established that the level of unemployment is non-monotonous in the degree of strictness with which employment protection legislation is enforced. Considering just cause and social criteria requirements for three regulatory regimes representative of a large number of industrialized countries, we find that different regimes generate different dismissal decisions only if the regimes are strictly enforced. In contrast, unemployment rates may differ across regimes even in the case of weak enforcement. Additionally, we find that it may be worse for the economy to weakly enforce harmful regulations than to strictly enforce them.     

Why don’t they answer? Unit non-response in the IAB establishment panel

The paper proposed focuses on the unit-nonresponse in the IAB (Institute for Employment Research) Establishment Panel, a comprehensive data set describing the employer side of the labour market in Germany. Every year since 1993 (1996) the IAB Establishment Panel has surveyed the same establishments from all branches and different size categories in western (eastern) Germany. Although great efforts are taken to convince the owner/manager to take part in the survey there are always firms that do not answer the questionnaire. In this paper the authors try to find out why some establishments are not willing or able to respond to the questionnaire. If the respondent has the authority to provide relevant information, is able to give reliable answers to the questions with a justifiable amount of effort and is interested in the survey in business terms, participation is less frequently refused. The results also confirm the central significance of the interaction between the respondent and the interviewer. If one of the two individuals changes, the probability of further participation falls clearly.     

Supplier Portfolio Management for IT Services Considering Diversification Effects

By means of service-oriented architectures the IT support of processes can be designed as a portfolio of individual IT services provided by different suppliers. The processes are designed based on selection decisions between IT services that potentially have to be included. Many companies formulate a multitude of requirements for investments in IT services at ever shorter intervals. However, the scope of the desired investments usually exceeds the available budget. Thus, companies face the challenge of allocating the limited budget to investments in the most promising combination of IT services. This is hardly possible without methodical support. In addition, the allocation is often done intuitively and subject to the decision-makers’ affinity with IT. Therefore, this paper develops a quantitative, multi-period procedure model for the purpose of maximizing the enterprise value in accordance with value based management, which considers the dependencies of the periodical selection decisions. In the following, a decision logic for the heuristic solution to the selection problem is presented and its application is demonstrated by means of an illustrative case example.     

Budgetary policy of the European Communities: Squaring the circle

The EC's budgetary problems are coming to a head. For 1983 virtually all the Community's resources have been utilized, and there are growing fears that the Community will soon have to declare itself bankrupt unless changes are made to current policy. What should be done to secure the financing of Community policies taking account of the additional financial requirements resulting from the impending accession of Spain and Portugal?     

Boundedly Rational Rule Learning in a Guessing Game

We combine Nagel's “step-k” model of boundedly rational players with a “law of effect” learning model. Players begin with a disposition to use one of the step-krules of behavior, and over time the players learn how the available rules perform and switch to better performing rules. We offer an econometric specification of this dynamic process and fit it to Nagel's experimental data. We find that the rule of learning model vastly outperforms other nested and nonnested learning models. We find strong evidence for diverse dispositions and reject the Bayesian rule-learning model.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C70, C52, D83.