Conceptual underpinnings for transformative research in a service ecosystems context to resolve social issues – framework foundations and extensions

ABSTRACT

A number of services within society are designed to improve the well-being of its members and transform lives. Some services focus on the protection and support of vulnerable members of society, for example, those suffering the effects of drug use, mental health conditions, violence or poverty. Clients of such social services may also come from minority or marginalised cultural backgrounds. Typically, social services aim to reduce disparities and enhance individual and population well-being. A major challenge for social policy-makers and social service providers is to establish and maintain constructive engagement between the social services and those they are intended to serve. Some of these vulnerable clients are deemed ‘hard-to-reach’ (HTR) by policy-makers and service providers. Yet, the transformation of lives requires the involvement of the focal actor (client) and their service or activity system, as well as the engagement of other actors, such as the social worker embedded in their service or activity system. This paper aims to further unpack a novel approach, called integrative transformative service framework. This contribution extends its conceptualisation which fuses mainly three different approaches, namely Transformative Service Research (TSR), (Cultural-Historical) Activity Theory (CHAT) and (Regulatory) Engagement Theory (RET).     

Hypothetical Bias Reconsidered: Payment and Provision Uncertainties in a Threshold Provision Mechanism

We extend research on the consequentiality of stated preference choices to a threshold provision mechanism for public goods. We develop a simple theoretical model of option price to analyze how option price varies with payment and provision uncertainty. We explore whether threshold provision contributions are similarly influenced by payment and provision uncertainty using an induced value contribution experiment. Results suggest that: (1) the probability of payment has a negative effect on contributions; (2) the probability of provision has a positive effect on contributions. We offer subjective beliefs regarding payment and provision as a plausible systematic explanation for hypothetical bias.     

Comovement in GDP trends and cycles among trading partners

It has long been recognized that business cycle comovement is greater between countries that trade more intensively with one another. However, nations face shocks to both the cyclical and trend components of their GDP series. Contrary to the result for cyclical fluctuations, we find comovement of shocks to the trend component of real GDP is weaker among countries that trade more intensively with one another. We simulate changes in ten-year output growth correlations corresponding to the estimated effects of trade and show that the impact of trade on trend comovement is quantitatively more important than its effect on cyclical comovement.     

Conditions for Optimality of a Currency Area

Two approaches to the theory of OCA are distinguished in this paper. The first, called the marginalistic approach, attempts to define the OCA from the point of view of a single country, and the second examines the optimality of a currency area of a given membership. The marginalistic approach and its limitations are discussed first. Then, the paper proceeds to the second approach which is discussed in the context of the cooperative game theory in characteristic function form; it argues that a currency area is optimal when the welfare functions of its constituent members are in the core. This implies that the welfare functions of all constituent members of the currency area are maximized and hence they are all better off with a common currency rather than with their own national currencies; hence, no member country has the intention to abandon the currency area. The paper concludes that the condition for the optimality of a currency area independently of the degree of economic similarity of its constituents requires that the characteristic function must exhibit non decreasing returns with respect to its size.     

Strategic Research Partnerships: A Managerial Perspective

Private sector incentives to participate in research partnerships can be grouped roughly into two categories: cost-economizing incentives and strategic incentives. This paper summarizes the argument in two streams of thought that are often identified with these two sides: the transaction-cost/incomplete contracts approach and the strategic management approach. The paper recounts business motives to engage in research partnerships in each and points out that differentiating between more traditional economic perspectives (transaction costs, incomplete contracts) and strategic management/organizational theory perspectives (strategic networks, resource-dependent view, dynamic capabilities, knowledge-based view, organizational learning, options approach) may not be as sharp as one might suppose at first. The complementary nature of these perspectives should be encouraging for theoreticians looking for a more integrated model of collaboration.     

The Bank Lending Channel and Monetary Policy Rules: Evidence from European Banks

There exist two main channels of the monetary transmission mechanism: the interest rate and the bank lending channel. This paper focuses on the latter, which is based on the central bank’s actions that affect loan supply and real spending. The supply of loans depends on the monetary policy indicator, which, in most studies, is the real short-term interest rate. The question investigated in this paper is how the operation of the bank lending channel changes when this short-term indicator is allowed to be endogenously determined by the target rate the central bank sets through a monetary rule. We examine the effect that a rule has on the bank lending channel in European banking institutions spanning the period 1999–2009. The expectations concerning inflation and output affect the decision of the central bank for the target rate, which, in turn, affect private sector’s expectations —commercial banks— by altering their loan supply.     

HYBRID INNOVATION IN MEIJI,JAPAN*

Japan’s hybrid innovation system during the Meiji era provides a useful laboratory for examining the effectiveness of complementary incentives to patents. Patents were introduced in 1885, and by 1911 1.2 million mostly nonpecuniary prizes were awarded at 8,503 competitions. Prizes provided a strong boost to patents, especially in less developed prefectures, and they also induced large spillovers of technical knowledge in prefectures adjacent to those with prizes, relative to distant control prefectures without prizes. Linking competition expenditures with the expected market value of patents induced by the prizes permits a cost–benefit assessment of the prize competitions to be made.     

The Role of Nonattenuated Rights in Positive Economics: A Critical Appraisal

This article assesses the institutionalist elements of Friedrich Hayek's neoliberal political economy by presenting his views on the entangled relations between the state and markets in capitalism. Through the analysis of Hayek's work, the article contributes to further consolidating the view that neoliberalism is an ideological project of institutional transformation which, despite some enduring myths, has an irreplaceable role for a state with many important functions in a more limited democracy. Markets, for their part, are politically contested social constructions that depend on previous non-market institutions for their existence and legitimation. This paper argues that Hayek's work corroborates this institutionalist claim.     

Competition and efficiency in the MENA banking region: a non-structural DEA approach

The goal of this article is to empirically assess the relationship between competition and efficiency in the banking sector of Middle East and North African (MENA) countries spanning the period 1997–2011. To measure the level of competition, the article estimates the non-structural indicator known as the H-statistic, while the level of bank efficiency is estimated through the nonparametric methodology of the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and the Bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis (BDEA), respectively. The empirical results are robust under six econometric methodologies, providing sufficient evidence for the presence of a one-way (negative) Granger causality, running from efficiency to competition. The empirical findings lead to the rejection of the ‘Efficient Structure Hypothesis’, implying that increases in competition do not precede increases in cost efficiency.