Estimating profit performance from similar profit centers

A decision model involving discriminant analysis provides a method by which both upper and middle managers can avoid some pitfalls that are likely to result in the substantially subjective process of pertbrmance evaluation of profit centers. It is designed to provide more objective, more timely, and possibly more accurate information. The model is not designed to estimate the return on investment for a profit center. The resulting discriminate score provides a direct evaluation of a profit center’s management.     

Playing the synthesizer with Canadian data: Adding polls to a structural forecasting model

Election forecasting has become a fixture of election campaigns in a number of democracies. Structural modeling, the major approach to forecasting election results, relies on ‘fundamental’ economic and political variables to predict the incumbent’s vote share usually a few months in advance. Some political scientists contend that adding vote intention polls to these models—i.e., synthesizing ‘fundamental’ variables and polling information—can lead to important accuracy gains. In this paper, we look at the efficiency of different model specifications in predicting the Canadian federal elections from 1953 to 2015. We find that vote intention polls only allow modest accuracy gains late in the campaign. With this backdrop in mind, we then use different model specifications to make ex ante forecasts of the 2019 federal election. Our findings have a number of important implications for the forecasting discipline in Canada as they address the benefits of combining polls and ‘fundamental’ variables to predict election results; the efficiency of varying lag structures; and the issue of translating votes into seats.     

Justice: The root of american business ideology and ethics

Although there are many conceptions of Justice, these different perceptions can provide many interesting insights into a business person's ethical standards as well as that person's decision-making processes. Using the Bishops' Pastoral Letter on the U.S. Economy as the basis for asking questions about justice, twenty-four business executives were interviewed about their conception of justice. An analysis of these interviews reveals that this group of businesspeople operated under very different conceptions of Justice at the Macroenvironmental and Microenvironmental levels. This result has some interesting implications not only for those scholars concerned with business ethics but for everyone who has a stake in business education.Men are called good, chiefly on account of their Justice. Cicero, 56 B.C. Ideology is applied philosophy. Lodge, 1986 Richard McGowan, S. J. is an Assistant Professor of Operations and Strategic Management at Boston College. His research focus involves examining both the rationale behind business and public policy decisions as well as determining the effectiveness of these policy measures. Some of his recent publications include Deciphering the Japanese Import Quota, Policy Studies Journal (1988) and Public Policy Measures and Cigarette Sales: An ARIMA Intervention Analysis Study JAI Social Issues Management Volume (1989).     

Towards an operational sustainability criterion

This paper examines the concept of sustainability and its implications for environmental policy analysis. It builds on the premise that present society holds a moral obligation to pass on a world of undiminished life opportunities to members of future generations. Maintaining life opportunities, in turn, can be achieved by maintaining or improving a diverse set of resources and capabilities that support a person's freedom to define and pursue her own conception of the good life. On an operational level, this framework points to the following guideline for environmental policy: Protecting the rights of future generations requires either the conservation of environmental resources or compensatory measures (including the provision of substitute technologies) that ensure the fair and proportionate sharing of net benefits over intergenerational time scales. In this framework, resource depletion is permissible only if (with reasonable certainty) it would generate a Pareto improvement relative to a baseline scenario involving strict resource conservation.     

Evolutionary social science and universal Darwinism

How should social scientists, inclined to an evolutionary theory of aspects of human culture like science, technology, business organization and practice, react to proposals that they embrace a “Universal Darwinism”? The most prominent variety of Universal Darwinism argues for close counterparts between the variables and mechanisms of cultural evolution and biological evolution, for example proposing the concept of “memes” as units of culture. Other Universal Darwinists propose, more flexibly, that human culture and biological species both change over time through a process that involves variation and selection, but that the details of the processes may be very different. This essay argues that the narrower form of Universal Darwinism should not be acceptable to social scientists. The differences in the details of cultural evolution and biological evolution are considerable. On the other hand, if Universal Darwinism provides a roomy intellectual tent welcoming scholars studying a variety of topics, with the unifying element being a dynamic theory involving variation and selection, but with the key variables and mechanisms being recognized as perhaps differing greatly between biology and human culture, we can be happy in that camp. Evolutionary Social Science and Universal Darwinism.     

Conditions for Asymmetric Information Solutions when Alliances Provide Acquisition Options and Due Diligence

One main problem with both acquisitions and alliances is separating the attractive partners from the rest. An additional problem with alliances is getting each partner to provide its best assets and efforts. One solution offered for the acquisition adverse selection problem is due diligence through a pre-acquisition alliance; however, none of the papers recommending such an approach analyze the alliance adverse selection and moral hazard problems. This paper presents the first formal model of joint venturing as acquisition due diligence, detailing how the joint solution works and under what conditions.revised version received October 20, 2003     

On the measurement of dynamic effects of integration

By allowing a freer interplay of market forces, the market liberalization involved in closer economic integration can improve the efficiency of productive factors. This permits greater output from the same inputs. A side effect of this improved efficiency is an improved investment climate in the integrating region. This in turn will result in a higher investment rate, thereby augmenting the initial output gains by providing the economy with more resources. The same sort of induced capital formation can also boost investment in human capital and knowledge capital. Primitive calculations of the size and timing of these induced capital formation can be made using an aggregate GDP function. A rough approximation of the adjustment path shows that the extra investment will stimulate growth for decades, although half of the total effect will occur in the first 10 to 50 years.     

Cost Heterogeneity and the Potential Savings from Market-Based Policies

Policy makers and analysts are often faced with situations where it is unclear whether market-based instruments hold real promise of reducing costs, relative to conventional uniform standards. We develop analytic expressions that can be employed with modest amounts of information to estimate the potential cost savings associated with market-based policies, with an application to the environmental policy realm. These simple formulae can identify instruments that merit more detailed investigation. We illustrate the use of these results with an application to nitrogen oxides control by electric utilities in the United States.