An Examination of the Quality of Jobs in the Call Center Industry

This paper examines jobs in the information society and the new economy, taking as its focus the call center industry. More specifically, the study analyzes the degree of variability of the quality of call center jobs. In order to achieve this objective, an index of job quality is generated, and an empirical analysis of the characteristics of jobs in call centers is carried out. This allows us to determine the level and variability of quality of jobs in this sector and to establish whether the reality of these jobs is as good as the forecasts for work in the new economy.      

Optimal requirement allocation among quantity-discount quoting suppliers

We consider a problem motivated by a central purchasing organization for a major office products distributor. This purchasing organization must source a quantity of a particular resale item from a set of capacitated suppliers. In our case each supplier offers an incremental quantity discount purchase price structure. The purchaser’s objective is to obtain a quantity of a required item at minimum cost. The resulting problem is one of allocating order quantities among an approved supply base and involves minimizing the sum of separable piecewise linear concave cost functions. We develop a branch and bound algorithm that arrives at an optimal solution by generating linear knapsack subproblems with feasible solutions to the original problem. This research was partially supported by a 2007 Summer Research Grant awarded to Asoo J. Vakharia.     

Implementing technology-forcing policies: The 1970 Clean Air Act Amendments and the introduction of advanced automotive emissions controls in the United States

Technology forcing is a strategy where a regulator specifies a standard that cannot be met with existing technology, or at least not at an acceptable cost. Using the 1970 U.S. Clean Air Act for controlling automobile emissions as a baseline example, we demonstrate the importance of the regulatory implementation process if regulations are to foster technological change. The 1970 legislation required steep emissions reductions for new 1975 and 1976 automobiles, which presented automakers with major technical and economic challenges. Nevertheless, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency successfully forced the adoption of two marquee control technologies—the catalytic converter in 1975 and the three-way catalyst in 1981. We focus on three factors critical to the implementation process: agency credibility to enforce standards, competitive pressures to drive industry research and development, and uncertainty about technological development.     

Supply-constrained fixed price equilibria in monetary economies

In this paper we consider an economy with restrictions on the relative prices of non-money commodities. The non-money commodities are partitioned into two groups, index makers and price following commodities. Then two cases are considered, namely that the relative prices of the index makers are fixed, respectively free. In both cases the money prices are flexible, whereas the relative prices of the price following commodities are tied to the prices of the index makers. The existence of a supply-constrained equilibrium is proved with (i) no rationing on the money commodities (stores of value), and (ii) at least one non-money commodity is not rationed. If prices of the index makers are fixed the result strengthens a theorem of Dehez and Drèze, if the prices are free a theorem of Kurz is strengthened. This paper is not only concerned with these existence results, but also with the question whether supply-constrained equilibria should appear more frequently than demand-constrained equilibria.     

Cognitive Inertia in a Turbulent Market: the Case of UK Residential Estate Agents

Recently, a number of researchers seeking to develop cognitive approaches for understanding processes associated with the development and implementation of competitive positioning strategies have drawn attention to the notion of ‘cognitive inertia’. Once established, there is a danger that actors may become overly dependent on their mental models of competitive space, to the extent that they fail to notice changes in the material conditions of their business environment, until these changes have become so widespread, or significant in other ways, that their organization's capacity for successful adaptation has been seriously undermined. While there have been several anecdotal accounts of cognitive inertia reported in the literature, and a number of researchers have explored processes of cognitive change in organizations more generally, to date there have been virtually no studies published which have investigated this phenomenon specifically within the domain of competitor assessment. This paper reports one such investigation, a longitudinal field study which explored the extent to which actors' mental models of competitive space in the UK residential estate agency (real estate) industry, an industry characterized by high volatility in recent years, remained stable or changed over time. An initial sample of 208 respondents from 58 firms completed detailed questionnaires at the onset of the recent recession in the UK property market. The questionnaires were designed to elicit the respondents' perceptions of their own organization and various competitors on a number of key dimensions. A sub-sample of 114 respondents from 41 firms returned a further set of completed questionnaires, 12 to 18 months later, when the recession had become deeply established. The findings are entirely consistent with the cognitive inertia hypothesis. The results indicate that the respondents' individual and collective cognitions remained highly stable, despite a significant down-turn in the property market from T1 to T2.