Price Equilibria in Pure Strategies for Homogeneous Oligopoly

For a homogeneous product oligopoly market, possibilities for pure strategy Nash equilibria in prices are studied. Consumers, who each nonstrategically purchase one unit up to a common reservation price, are hypothesized to be more concerned with large price differences (and therefore buy from the cheapest firm) than slightly different prices. For the duopoly case, existence, uniqueness, and characterization results are provided. Linear examples are given with 2 and n firms.     

Making nursing-sensitive quality indicators real in ambulatory care

Pay-for-performance initiatives are changing the quality landscape. Gaps exist in quantifying and linking ambulatory care quality indicators to care provided by nurses in ambulatory care. Ambulatory care quality indicators that are sensitive to nursing care, standardized, and tested need to be identified and adopted by ambulatory care nurses, ambulatory care provider organizations, professional organizations, and endorsed by a consensus organization.     

What are ‘unpopular causes’ and how can they achieve fundraising success?

• Recent efforts to grow and strengthen the culture of philanthropy in the UK have largely focused on two dimensions: the total amount of money donated and the effectiveness of philanthropic spending. This paper explores a third dimension: the destination and distribution of donations. A defining characteristic of charitable giving is that it is voluntary rather than coerced, and the resulting respect for donor autonomy makes people wary of promoting one cause above another or implying that any beneficiary group is more or less ‘worthy’ of support. However, the absence of much comment on, or significant research into, the destination of donations does not alter the fact that some groups succeed in attracting significant philanthropic funds whilst others struggle to secure many—or any—donations. This paper explores the concept of ‘unpopularity’ in the charity sector, especially in relation to its impact on fundraising. We unpack what this loaded phrase means, identify good practice by those seeking support and present case studies of charities that have overcome perceived unpopularity to achieve success in raising voluntary income. We suggest that by investing organisational resources and effort in fundraising, by framing the cause to maximise the arousal of sympathy and minimise concerns about beneficiary culpability and by avoiding the unintended negative consequences of self‐labelling as ‘unpopular’ no charity need assume it is their destiny to languish at the bottom of the fundraising league tables.

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A comparison of American and international prototypes of successful managers

In the present study, similarities and differences between prototypes of successful managers were examined across four cultural groups: Americans, Europeans, Asians, and Latin Americans. Managers from the hospitality industry (N = 366) used an 84–item attribute inventory to rate a successful middle manager. In addition, Americans' stereotypes of ethnic managers were compared with prototypes held by managers from those ethnic cultures. Specifically, American managers' perceptions of Asian and Hispanic managers were compared against Asian and Hispanic/Latin American managers' prototypes. A high level of correspondence in prototype characteristics was found across the four cultural groups. In addition, American‐defined ethnic manager stereotypes also contained profiles similar to cultural prototypes. However, important differences were also detected on many managerial characteristics. Implications of the findings for cross‐cultural congruence and areas for future research are discussed.     

Regulating Information Disclosure in Mutual Fund Advertising in the United States: Will Consumers Utilize Cost Information?

Consumer decision making with regard to mutual funds is less than rational. Consumers tend to focus on past performance and virtually ignore a variable which has a more definite (and negative) impact on wealth—cost. FINRA, the mutual fund industry’s self-regulatory body in the USA, has recently changed its regulations for fund advertising to require that cost information be reported when performance information is present. We conducted an exploratory conjoint study to examine whether consumers might, in fact, use the additional information, and found that despite the highly salient presence of expense information, consumers overwhelmingly continue to use past performance when forming mutual fund preference.     

Impact of first birth career interruption on earnings: evidence from administrative data

This article makes use of unique administrative data to expand the understanding of the role women’s intermittency decisions play in the determination of her wages. We demonstrate that treating intermittency as exogenous significantly overstates its impact. The intermittency penalty also increases in the education level of the woman. The penalty for women with a high school degree with an average amount of intermittency during 6 years after giving birth to her first child is roughly half the penalty for college graduates. We also demonstrate the value of making use of an index to capture multiple dimension of the intermittency experience, and illustrate the importance of firm dynamics in the determination of a woman’s wage.     

Supply chain technology: the role of environment in predicting performance

The research examines the moderating effect of environmental unpredictability on the relationships of two supply chain information technologies (IT) on operational and financial performance. The results show that the greater the environmental unpredictability, the weaker the effect of B2B e-commerce that integrates the firm with supply chain members on operational and financial performance. In contrast, the greater the environmental unpredictability, the stronger the effect of supply chain analytic IT that fosters operational and strategic decision-making on operational and financial performance.     

Governance Structures, Insider Status, and Boundary Maintenance

If legal enforcement of contracts were omnipresent, omniscient, and costless, the identity and history of one's partners would be irrelevant, since any problems caused by unreliable partners could be remedied effectively. However, when legal enforcement is localized, imperfect, and costly, different governance structures for contracts carry implications for the sets of acceptable contracting partners. When legal enforcement for contracts is based on national law, whose reach is coterminous with a state's territory, acceptable partners tend to be defined territorially. When state enforcement of contract law is weak or nonexistent or when a contract is so vulnerable to nonperformance that it requires auxiliary support, actors must devise an alternative or supplement to state enforcement. The most relevant contracting boundaries then will be ones defining groups that can efficaciously create and maintain intertemporal, inter-issue, and inter-actor linkages. We examine just three of many possibilities: family-based, function-based, and ethnicity- or religion-based groups. These different systems of governance affect which entities are recognized as members in the club of actors, as well as how actors define their contracting boundaries and distinguish between those with whom they contract relatively freely and those with whom their contracting is more circumscribed.     

Neighboring information and distributions of agents' characteristics under uncertainty

This paper proposes a topological structure for information. Specifically, information is considered an arbitrary sub-σ-field of the σ-field (of measurable subsets of states of the world) which represents events. A complete metric is defined on the space of all equivalence classes of sub-σ-fields; its uniformity is the same for all probability measures (on the abstract measurable space of states of the world and events) which are uniformly absolutely continuous. With this topology, economic behavior depends continuously on the agent's information; demand functions under uncertainty are jointly continuous in utilities, endowments, and information. Moreover, the value of information is a continuous function of the information sub-σ-field. Technical properties of the topology are also given.