Canadian and American Reactions to Drug and Alcohol Testing Programs in the Workplace

We investigated U.S. and Canadian reactions to workplace drug and alcohol testing programs. Canadian truck drivers (n = 183) deemed drug and alcohol testing policies less fair, and were less accepting of these policies, than their American counterparts (n = 153). We also compared the perspectives of recipients versus third-party observers with regard to their reactions to a drug testing program. Unlike the pattern observed among American observers, the responses by Canadian observers were highly similar to those of the recipients. Canadian observers were more inclined to file a formal protest regarding the implementation of a drug and alcohol testing program than were U.S. observers. The results also showed that procedural and interactional justice principles contributed to the program's fairness, acceptance, and lower levels of protest intentions in both Canada and the United States. We propose that scholars and practitioners can gain a better understanding of multinational reactions to drug and alcohol testing by considering not only cultural but also historical, social, political, and other environmental factors that can shape reactions to personnel practices.     

Assessment of Interjudge Reliability in the Open-Ended Questions Coding Process

In the process of coding open-ended questions, the evaluation of interjudge reliability is a critical issue. In this paper, using real data, the behavior of three coefficients of reliability among coders, Cohen’s K, Krippendorff’s α and Perreault and Leigh’s I _r are patterned, in terms of the number of judges involved and the categories of answer defined. The outcome underlines the importance of both variables in the valuations of interjudge reliability, as well as the higher adequacy of Perreault and Leigh’s I _r and Krippendorff’s α for marketing and opinion research.     

Pseudo empirical likelihood method in the presence of missing data

In this paper, we propose an estimator for the population mean when some observations on the study and auxiliary variables are missing from the sample. The proposed estimator is valid for any unequal probability sampling design, and is based upon the pseudo empirical likelihood method. The proposed estimator is compared with other estimators in a simulation study.     

Delegation and polarization of platforms in political competition

Summary. We consider a model of political competition among two ideological parties who are uncertain about the distribution of voters. The distinguishing feature of the model is that parties can delegate electoral decisions to candidates by nomination. It is shown that if the credible platform commitments of the candidates is feasible, then at least one of the parties nominates in equilibrium to a candidate who has an ideology that is more radical than the delegating party's ideology. In a variety of circumstances, this, in turn, yields a polarization of equilibrium policy choices of the candidates. It is thus argued formally here that strategic nomination of the candidates may well be one of the major reasons behind the well documented observation that the platforms associated with the political parties in two-party democracies are often surprisingly polarized. Received: January 10, 2002; revised version: May 8, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" We thank Alberto Alesina, Levent Ko?kesen, Antonio Merlo, Ronny Razin, Vijay Krishna, Alessandro Lizzeri, and seminar participants at Alicante, Columbia, Copenhagen, and NYU for helpful comments. We also thank an anonymous referee for its useful suggestions. A good fraction of this research was conducted while Ok was a visitor in the Department of Economics at University of Alicante; he thanks for the kind hospitality of this institution. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education through grant CICYT BEC2001-0535 (Faulí-Oller) and BEC2001-0980 (Ortu?o-Ortín). Correspondence to:I. Ortu?o-Ortin     

Self-enforcing international environmental agreements with a stock pollutant

In this paper the stability of an International Environmental Agreement (IEA) among N identical countries that emit a pollutant are studied using a two-stage game. In the first stage each country decides noncooperatively whether or not to join an IEA, and in the second stage signatories jointly against nonsignatories determine their emissions in a dynamic setting defined in continuous time. A numerical simulation shows that a bilateral coalition is the unique self-enforcing IEA independently of the gains coming from cooperation and the kind of strategies played by the agents (open-loop or feedback strategies). We have also studied the effects of a minimum participation clause finding that for this case a self-enforcing IEA just consists of the number of countries established in the clause.JEL Classification: C73, D62, Q28 Corresponding author : Santiago J. RubioThis paper is based on chapter four of Begoña Casinos Ph. Dissertation. Financial support from the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología under grant BEC2000-1432 and Fundación BBVAis gratefully acknowledged. We also appreciate the helpful comments of three anonymous referees, whose suggestions improved the paper. Regarding any remaining inadequacies, the usual caveat applies.     

Embedded industrial production systems: Lessons from waste management in zinc production

To meet the sustainability challenge private companies must implement corporate strategies and adopt novel technologies. The technical and social embeddedness of industrial production systems, however, complicates these systems' transition towards sustainability. In the paper, mechanisms and conditions are reported for the development and implementation of waste management options in embedded industrial production systems. The focus is on the Dutch zinc production industry, which had to deal with a major waste problem; the generation of jarosite. The industry's options were to increase the jarosite waste storage capacity, to develop a jarosite treatment process or to switch to a zinc-ore of low-iron content whereby no jarosite waste would be generated anymore. Required conditions appeared to be a combination of technological capability and technical embedding and favourable economics. Case study research, however, revealed that adequate stakeholder management is crucial to address social pressure exerted and to obtain external acceptance for any transition strategy. Whilst appropriate, internal technological capabilities are important, effective interactions with and enrolment of various firm-external actors are crucial. In the case of zinc, access to the heterogeneous external actor network was critical for the development of the jarosite treatment solution direction. In conclusion, both the technical, organizational and social embedding of new technologies are crucial for successful implementation.     

Incentive Alignment,CEO Pay Level,and Firm Performance: A Case of “Heads I Win,Tails You Lose”?

In recent years, rewarding CEOs with long‐term forms of compensation (e.g., stock options, performance plans, restricted stock) has become more popular than using year‐end pay adjustments. Surprisingly, there is little empirical evidence to support the benefits of this trend. This study found that the benefits of long‐term compensation flowed primarily to CEOs as they received significantly greater levels of total compensation than CEOs in firms that emphasized year‐end pay adjustments. Paradoxically, however, firms that emphasized year‐end pay adjustments performed significantly better than firms that were heavy users of long‐term forms of contingent compensation. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Component efficient solutions in line-graph games with applications

Recently, applications of cooperative game theory to economic allocation problems have gained popularity. We investigate a class of cooperative games that generalizes some economic applications with a similar structure. These are the so-called line-graph games being cooperative TU-games in which the players are linearly ordered. Examples of situations that can be modeled like this are sequencing situations and water distribution problems. We define four properties with respect to deleting edges that each selects a unique component efficient solution on the class of line-graph games. We interpret these solutions and properties in terms of dividend distributions, and apply them to economic situations. This research has been done while the third author was visiting Tinbergen Institute at the Free University, Amsterdam. The research is part of the Research Programme “Strategic and Cooperative Decision Making” at the Department of Econometrics. Financial support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in the framework of the Russian-Dutch programme for scientific cooperation, is gratefully acknowledged. The third author also appreciates partial financial support from the Russian Leading Scientific Schools Fund (grant 80.2003.6) and Russian Humanitarian Scientific Fund (grant 02-02-00189a). We thank three anonymous referees for their valuable comments.