Action Teams That Work

A growing awareness of workplace hazards and identification of airborne contaminants, coupled with a changing safety and health regulatory environment, created an unexpected demand for new and innovative respirators in the early 1980s. 3M's Occupational Health and Environmental Safety Division broke new ground by taking the team concept further than ever before in the company. The division's Action Teams successfully designed, built and introduced products in less than half the time it would have taken previously. Robert Hershock, Charles Cowman and Douglas Peters describe how 3M learned important lessons about team selection, training, performance and motivation, the importance of project sponsors, and the role of middle management.     

Auditing in the Presence of Outside Sources of Information

We examine how an auditor's ability to terminate a multi-period client relationship provides the auditor with a real option whose value depends on the nature of informational asymmetry between the incumbent and other potential auditors. In particular, we isolate conditions under which the auditor's private and public sources of information behave as complements rather than substitutes. In such circumstances, increasing the likelihood of publicly provided information induces the auditor to expend more (rather than less)resources in private information gathering activities.     

A longitudinal analysis of earnings change in Canada

Abstract.  We use tax‐based longitudinal microdata for 1982–99 to (i) examine how earnings distributions have shifted, (ii) identify changes in earnings mobility patterns, and (iii) replicate and update Beaudry and Green's cohort analysis of age‐earnings profiles. We find: (i) increased polarization of men's earnings and marked decline in real earnings of workers aged 20–4; (ii) general decline in men's earnings mobility, while women's mobility has increased for young and prime‐age workers; and (iii) upward drift in earnings profiles of 1960s–1970s entry cohorts and downward shifts for 1980s–1990s cohorts (largely confirming Beaudry and Green's findings), but suggestive of steepening profiles for the 1990s cohorts. JEL classification code : J31,O33     

ECONOMIC EFFECTIVENESS OF BRAND ADVERTISING PROGRAMMES FOR U.S. ORANGE JUICE IN THE EUROPEAN MARKET: AN ERROR COMPONENT ANALYSIS

An econometric model is used to measure the impact of the Three-Party Programme on European demand for U.S. orange juice. The results show that the programme has helped expand the demand for orange juice in European countries and, from the viewpoint of the U.S. citrus industry, is an economically preferred way of generating additional exports compared with using price reductions to achieve additional sales.     

Ethics in Information Technology and Software Use

The emerging concern about software piracy and illegal or unauthorized use of information technology and software has been evident in the media and open literature for the last few years. In the course of conducting their academic assignments, the authors began to compare observations from classroom experiences related to ethics in the use of software and information technology and systems. Qualitatively and anecdotally, it appeared that many if not most, students had misconceptions about what represented ethical and unethical behaviors in these realms. Clearly, one can argue that if college students are uncertain about what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate behavior then this uncertainty will be carried forward into their workplaces upon graduation. Furthermore, if their workplaces don't provide ethics training as a component of a new employee orientation program, one can project a potential for unintentional violations and infringements of copyrights and law in the field. This study was conducted among graduate and undergraduate students to gain insight into their attitudes, perceptions and understanding of some of the relevant ethics issues. A questionnaire of 11 statements was employed that described ubiquitous but most likely unethical (or surely dubious) behaviors in the prevailing business and academic environments. Each respondent was asked to evaluate each statement twice (once for “self” and once for “colleague”) on a five-option highly ethical (5) to neutral (3) to highly unethical (1) scale. The statements were worded such that lower instrument score was associated with higher ethical responses. The questionnaire's two-part structure was designed to solicit honest answers. The encouraging learning from this study was that the overall sample and its various sub-samples did not consider any of the eleven behaviors to be “ethical” or “highly ethical.” It was also encouraging to note that the overall sample and all sub-samples considered “highly unethical” those behaviors associated with personal privacy or property or outright theft. This indicated that moral judgment and probity prevail. The discouraging learning was that behaviors associated with the use of enterprise property were viewed as “neutral” i.e., neither “ethical” nor “unethical.” These findings suggested confusion and lack of clarity and definition around workplace deportment as it regards ethics in software and information technology use. The current study suggests that additional research needs to be conducted to define and clarify the issues, which in turn can form the basis for programs to rectify or at least ameliorate the situation.     

The impact of time duration between trades on the price of treasury note futures contracts

Recent research in finance has indicated that the institutional structure in which financial asset prices are determined can have a nontrivial impact on pricing. This report examines transaction level data for Treasury Note futures contracts traded at the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) to identify institutional, or market microstructure, impacts on the pricing of these contracts. Relatively few articles have conducted empirical research on the microstructure of U.S. futures trading due to the limited availability of comprehensive transaction level data from the futures exchanges. This report uses the CBOT's Computerized Trade Reconstruction database, a comprehensive transaction level dataset, to identify the price impact of the time duration between trades in a manner analogous to that of A. Dufour and R. F. Engle (2000). Unique differences from prior research include the application to futures contracts with their relative higher frequency of trading, as well as the investigation of the price impact of the number of active traders present on the trading floor and the trading volume. Subsequent price and sign of trade significantly relate to the time duration between trades, the number of floor brokers, and the trading volume. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl. Fut Mark 24:965–980, 2004     

The Influence of Task Load and Automation Trust on Deception Detection

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effects that user task load level has on the relationship between an individual's trust in and subsequent use of a system's automation. Military decision-makers trust and use information system automation to make many tactical judgments and decisions. In situations of information uncertainty (information warfare environments), decision-makers must remain aware of information reliability issues and temperate their use of system automation if necessary. An individual's task load may have an effect on his use of a system's automation in environments of information uncertainty.It was hypothesized that user task load will have a moderating effect on the positive relationship between system automation trust and use of system automation. Specifically, in situations of information uncertainty (low trust), high task load will have a negative effect on the relationship. To test this hypothesis, an experiment in a simulated command and control micro-world was conducted in which system automation trust and individual task load were manipulated. The findings from the experiment support the positive relationship between automation trust and automation use found in previous research and suggest that task load does have a negative effect on the positive relationship between automation trust and automation use. Experiment participant who incurred a higher task load exhibited an over-reliance on their automated information systems to assist them in their decision-making activities. Such an over-reliance can lead to vulnerabilities of deception and suggests the need for automated deception detection capabilities.     

Urban Influence on Costs of Production in the Corn Belt

This article determines the relative technical efficiency of rural- and urban-influenced crop/livestock enterprises in the Corn Belt. Farmers in urban-influenced locations are less technically efficient than farmers in rural locations. During 1998–2000, stochastic production frontier procedures indicate that a 10% increase in urban influence leads to a close to 4% decrease in technical efficiency. The most successful urban-influenced farms have controlled costs as effectively as rural farms. They have tended to de-emphasize that nondairy livestock activities—particularly beef and hogs—do not rely extensively on off-farm income, and have relatively large, less residential/lifestyle operations compared to less successful urban-influenced farmers. However, our statistical analysis clearly bears out the refrain in popular literature that urban proximity raises the cost for, and decreases the viability of, traditional farms.