Serving Time: Volunteer Work,Liminality and the Uses of Meaningfulness at Music Festivals

Drawing from a participant‐observer study of volunteering in the context of UK music festivals, we examine how the sense of meaningfulness and community relate to instrumental goals of consumption and efficiency. We argue that the liminal nature of the festival setting supports an ambivalence in which meaningfulness is established through constructions of community, while the commodification of community feelings leads to heterogeneous understandings of the work setting. Our findings reveal heterogeneous ways in which work was rendered meaningful by festival volunteers, ranging from (1) A commodity frame, characterizing work as drudgery seeking ‘fun’ through consumption (2) A ‘communitas’ frame, emphasizing a transcendental sense of collective immediacy and (3) A cynical frame, where communitas discourse is used instrumentally by both managers and workers. We discuss meaningful work as caught between creative community and ideological mystification, and how alternative workspaces vacillate between emancipatory principles of solidarity and neo‐normative forms of ideological control.     

Volatility and volatility-linked derivatives: estimation,modeling, and pricing

Decisions in Economics and Finance -     

Cumulative and CUB Models for Rating Data: A Comparative Analysis

Ordinal measurements as ratings, preference and evaluation data are very common in applied disciplines, and their analysis requires a proper modelling approach for interpretation, classification and prediction of response patterns. This work proposes a comparative discussion between two statistical frameworks that serve these goals: the established class of cumulative models and a class of mixtures of discrete random variables, denoted as CUB models, whose peculiar feature is the specification of an uncertainty component to deal with indecision and heterogeneity. After surveying their definition and main features, we compare the performances of the selected paradigms by means of simulation experiments and selected case studies. The paper is tailored to enrich the understanding of the two approaches by running an extensive and comparative analysis of results, relative advantages and limitations, also at graphical level. In conclusion, a summarising review of the key issues of the alternative strategies and some final remarks are given, aimed to support a unifying setting.     

A REVIEW OF STOCHASTIC DOMINANCE METHODS FOR POVERTY ANALYSIS

Stochastic dominance techniques have been mainly employed in poverty analyses to overcome what it is called the multiplicity of poverty indices problem. Moreover, in the multidimensional context, stochastic dominance techniques capture the possible relationships between the dimensions of poverty as they rely upon their joint distribution, unlike most multidimensional poverty indices, which are only based on marginal distributions. In this paper, we first review the general definition of unidimensional stochastic dominance and its relationship with poverty orderings. Then we focus on the conditions of multivariate stochastic dominance and their relationship with multidimensional poverty orderings, highlighting the additional difficulties that the multivariate setting involves. In both cases, we focus our discussion on first‐ and second‐order dominance, though some guidelines on higher order dominance are also mentioned. We also present an overview of some relevant empirical applications of these methods that can be found in the literature in both univariate and multivariate contexts.     

家族企业要行使好所有权

那些能够延续三代或三代以上的家族企业,往往比其他同类企业更具竞争力。＂家族＂的两个难题家族企业往往是一种被忽略的所有制形式。然而,家族企业无所不在：从社区周围的夫妻店,到数百万支撑众多经济体的中小型企业,再到宝马、三星和沃尔玛等家喻户晓的巨头,到处都能见到家族企业的身影。     

Ownership and control in shareholding networks

This paper aims to provide a network analysis of the relationships of shareholders in the Italian stock market for understanding the relevance of portfolio diversification in integrated ownership and firms control. The analysis combines both a complex network and an operational research approach. The former is used for statistical analyses on portfolio diversification. The latter estimates integrated ownership considering the paths on the network, and it emphasizes the difference between ownership and control. The dataset consists of nearly 300 companies traded on the Italian Stock Market. Data were retrieved through CONSOB and AIDA database, and they are adjourned at 2008. The dataset is completed with information on banks and insurance companies. Such data were retrieved through BANKSCOPE and ISIS databases.     

Reducing burnout in call centers through HR practices

Previous research on call centers has demonstrated that human resource (HR) practices can be related to employee stress; however, these studies did not examine the linking mechanisms underlying these associations. Using the job demands–control (JD‐C) model as a theoretical framework, we examine perceived job demands (namely, emotional dissonance and quantitative demands) and autonomy as potential mediators in the relationship between HR systems and burnout (exhaustion and cynicism). We distinguish between HR control systems, which include performance monitoring practices, and HR involvement systems, which include training, participation, and performance‐related pay. This study samples 811 employees working in 11 call centers. Our findings support the idea that HR systems can help reduce burnout in call centers by verifying that HR control systems associated with more emotional dissonance and less autonomy increase burnout. On the other hand, an HR involvement system decreases workers' burnout because it alleviates the job demands of emotional dissonance and quantitative demands. This study fills a gap in the literature between HR systems and burnout by demonstrating the role job demands and autonomy play in explaining how HR systems improve or decrease workers' exhaustion and cynicism. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Measuring the set of blocking coalitions in infinite dimensional economies

The classical core-Walras equivalence is investigated via the measurement of the set of blocking coalitions. In the framework of continuum economies with an infinite dimensional space of commodities, we find the measure of the set of coalitions that block a non-competitive Pareto optimal allocation. Then, from the relation between coalitions of a continuum economy with a finite number of types and fuzzy coalitions of an economy with finitely many agents, the previous results are translated as results on the measure of blocking fuzzy coalitions. Both results imply classically formulated core-Walras equivalence theorems. Finally, the measure of blocking "social communication structures" is determined.     

Survival Modelling for Data From Combined Cohorts: Opening the Door to Meta Survival Analyses and Survival Analysis Using Electronic Health Records

Non-parametric estimation of the survival function using observed failure time data depends on the underlying data generating mechanism, including the ways in which the data may be censored and/or truncated. For data arising from a single source or collected from a single cohort, a wide range of estimators have been proposed and compared in the literature. Often, however, it may be possible, and indeed advantageous, to combine and then analyse survival data that have been collected under different study designs. We review non-parametric survival analysis for data obtained by combining the most common types of cohort. We have two main goals: (i) to clarify the differences in the model assumptions and (ii) to provide a single lens through which some of the proposed estimators may be viewed. Our discussion is relevant to the meta-analysis of survival data obtained from different types of study, and to the modern era of electronic health records.