Design vs. Content: A Study of Adolescent Girls' Website Design Preferences

This study considered the utility of gender schema theory in examining girls' website design preferences. It built on a previous study which identified eight website evaluation criteria related to biological sex: collaboration, social connectivity, flexibility, motility, contextuality, personal identification, inclusion, and graphic/multimedia concentration. Eleven fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-old girls participated in the study. The participants completed the short form of the Children's Sex-Role Inventory (CSRI). Following 50-minute Web searching sessions, they were divided into a feminine-high group and a masculine-high group based on their CSRI scores. Each group then participated in interviews concerning their website evaluation and design preferences. Data analysis identified relationships between gender schema and five of the proposed criteria: social connectivity, flexibility, motility, inclusion, and graphic/multimedia concentration. More generally, members of the feminine-high group favored evaluation criteria relating to graphic and multimedia design, whereas members of the masculine-high group favored evaluation criteria relating to subject content. These results indicate that gender schema theory can indeed serve as a framework for making website design more appealing to female adolescent users. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A proposed method to evaluate the quality of services using Fuzzy sets theory

This paper seeks to provide the services sector with a focus on the assessment of quality and for this purpose, a technique that may able a quantitative approach to evaluating quality is proposed. The use of the fuzzy sets theory to process data was used, thus allowing a more flexible and suitable insight into the characteristics of the service sector. An extension of the technique for order performance by similarity to the ideal solution was used. This informs managers of the distance from the company $\prime $ s current level of quality, if compared to a company of perfect quality by means of an overall evaluation. The same technique was used to detect changes in the level of quality during the period surveyed by using a stratified assessment. Finally, a practical application of the approach proposed is presented.     

Three Corrected Score Tests for Generalized Linear Models with Dispersion Covariates

We develop three corrected score tests for generalized linear models with dispersion covariates, thus generalizing the results of Cordeiro , Ferrari and Paula (1993) and Cribari-Neto and Ferrari (1995) . We present, in matrix notation, general formulae for the coefficients which define the corrected statistics. The formulae only require simple operations on matrices and can be used to obtain analytically closed-form corrections for score test statistics in a variety of special generalized linear models with dispersion covariates. They also have advantages for numerical purposes since our formulae are readily computable using a language supporting numerical linear algebra. Two examples, namely, iid sampling without covariates on the mean or dispersion parameter oand one-way classification models, are given. We also present some simulations where the three corrected tests perform better than the usual score test, the likelihood ratio test and its Bartlett corrected version. Finally, we present a numerical example for a data set discussed by Simonoff and Tsai (1994) .     

A study of biotechnology start-ups undergoing leadership change: Antecedents of change and endogenous performance consequences

One of the most important decisions that a new biotechnology firm faces is whether to replace its founding CEO, who often has been involved with the invention of the firm's core technology, with a more professional manager, who has broader commercialization skills to help the firm to grow into a viable business. In this paper, we argue that leadership change away from the founding CEO is influenced strongly by the interests of key stakeholders and that the endogeneity inherent in the change (or non-change) influences firm performance. As the context surrounding decision-making changes from pre-patent to post-IPO, key stakeholders often may not view what is best for the firm and best for self-interest in the same way. Using data on change in leadership at 135 U.S. biotechnology equipment firms, we find evidence that the context in which decisions are being made influences which of the various competing interests will take precedence. The results further confirm the importance of controlling for endogeneity in decision-making when examining firm performance.     

Reciprocity in Ranked Relationships: Does Social Structure Influence Social Reasoning?

Many economic and evolutionary theories have modeled cooperation as the evolutionary outcome of decisions made by autonomous, self-interested agents operating in a social vacuum. In this paper we consider the implications for cooperative interactions when prior social structures and corresponding social norms exist. In particular we investigate the influence of social rank/status on perceptions of fairness and tolerance of cheating. We review evidence from a series of experiments employing the Wason selection task (a test of conditional reasoning) and the ledger task (a decision making task) suggesting that people cued to adopt a perspective of high social rank are more tolerant of cheating and simultaneously believe that they have been more fairly treated (even when cheated) than people cued to adopt a perspective of low social rank. However, the evidence also suggests interesting cross-cultural differences in perceptions of fairness and tolerance of cheating in ranked relationships. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Strategic tariffs, tariff jumping, and heterogeneous firms

The majority of research to date investigating strategic tariffs in the presence of multinationals finds a knife-edge result where, in equilibrium, all foreign firms are either multinationals or exporters. Utilizing a model of heterogeneous firms, we find equilibria in which both pure exporters and multinationals coexist. We utilize this model to study the case of endogenously chosen tariffs. As is standard, Nash equilibrium tariffs are higher than the socially optimal tariffs. Unlike existing models with homogeneous firms, we find that non-cooperative tariffs promote the existence of low-productivity firms relative to the socially optimal tariffs. This highlights a new source of inefficiency from tariff competition not found in models of homogeneous firms. In addition, we find that in many cases the Nash equilibrium tariff when FDI is a potential firm structure is lower than when it is not. As a result, FDI improves welfare by mitigating tariff competition.