COOPERATIVE GAMES WITH GENERAL DEVIATION MEASURES

Cooperative games with players using different law‐invariant deviation measures as numerical representations for their attitudes towards risk in investing to a financial market are formulated and studied. As a central result, it is shown that players (investors) form a coalition (cooperative portfolio) that behaves similar to a single player (investor) with a certain deviation measure. An explicit formula for that deviation measure is obtained. An approach to optimal risk sharing among investors is developed, and a “fair” division of the cooperative portfolio expected gain, belonging to the core of a corresponding cooperative game, is suggested.     

Rhetorical aspects of tour guiding: the Polish case

ABSTRACT

Tour guides are a significant group of stakeholders in the tourism industry. They are responsible for the quality of communication during excursions and ultimately determine the level of satisfaction of tour participants. Therefore, they use a particular language and ways of influencing tourists. This paper investigates whether the particular language of guides contains persuasive means that are crucial for building an effective interpersonal communication. The authors focused on the question of how guides try to create positive relationships with guided groups. They conducted an examination on a group of Wroc?aw city guides during guided walking city tours. In order to complete the research project, qualitative non-participant observation and rhetorical analysis of audio-visual recordings of the guided tours were carried out. This study enabled the key areas of city guides’ communication influence to be specified, and it highlighted deficiencies in their use of some persuasive means. The results may serve as guidelines for improving the communication skills of tourism practitioners.     

Graduate Employability and the Principle of Potentiality: An Aspect of the Ethics of HRM

The recruitment of the next generation of workers is of central concern to contemporary HRM. This paper focuses on university campuses as a major site of this process, and particularly as a new domain in which HRM??s ethical claims are configured, in which it sets and answers a range of ethical questions as it outlines the ??ethos?? of the ideal future worker. At the heart of this ethos lies what we call the ??principle of potentiality??. This principle is explored through a sample of graduate recruitment programmes from the Times Top 100 Graduate Employers, interpreted as ethical exhortations in HRM??s attempt to shape the character of future workers. The paper brings the work of Georg Simmel to the study of HRM??s ethics and raises the uncomfortable question that, within discourses of endless potentiality, lie ethical dangers which bespeak an unrecognised ??tragedy of culture??. We argue that HRM fashions an ethos of work which de-recognises human limits, makes a false promise of absolute freedom, and thus becomes a tragic proposition for the individual.     

Export characteristics and output volatility: comparative firm-level evidence for CEE countries

The literature shows that openness to trade improves long-term growth but also that it may increase exposure to high output volatility. In this vein, our paper investigates whether exporting and export diversification at the firm level have an effect on the output volatility of firms. We use large representative firm-level databases from Estonia, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia over the last boom–bust cycle in 2004–2012. The results confirm that exporting is related to higher volatility at the firm level. There is also evidence that this effect increased during the Great Recession due to the large negative shocks in export markets. We find that export diversification mitigates volatility only in some cases. Exporting more products or serving more markets does not necessarily result in higher stability of firm sales.     

eGovernment—The Next Step Toward Efficient Public Administration

This study analyzes the development level of electronic public services by means of portal <www.e-guvernare.ro>, the single point of access for specific Romanian electronic public services. At the same time, a comparative analysis was conducted having as a purpose an emphasis on the evolution on eGovernement development in Romania within the period of March 2011–August 2012. The results showed lack of commitment of the public administration in Romania in using an entire force offered by the information technology and communication field in supplying public services.     

Intriguing behavior when testing the impact of quotation marks usage in Google search results

Quality & Quantity - Internet research on search engine quality and validity of results demand much concern. Thus, the focus in our study has been to measure the impact of quotation marks usage...     

A critique of mises’s theory of monopoly prices

Conclusion Built on Rothbardian insights, our attempt to show the peculiarities of Misesian monopoly theory results in a few conclusions. First of all, in Mises’s theory of monopoly two of the three conditions for the emergence of monopoly prices belong to different realms of scientific inquiry. On the one hand, Mises points out the idea of a counterfactual comparison between competitive price and monopoly price; on the other hand, he stresses the importance of an empirical method to discover monopoly prices. The latter, even if it describes a true statement about market conditions, i.e., the entrepreneurs do not know (beforehand) the market demand curve, does not help us to identify the monopoly price on market. Second, Mises erroneously founds his welfare arguments on value theory. His utilitarian endeavor to show that “consumers’ sovereignty” is infringed by monopolistic restriction of production does not succeed. He based his arguments on nonscientific interpersonal and intertemporal comparisons of utility. Third, Mises is not consistent in the use of a standard of comparison for “monopoly prices”: on the one hand, the market prices are not distinguishable from “monopoly prices”; on the other hand, the transfer of the discussion to the equilibrium framework does not help us either, as we try to explain real market phenomena. Thus, Mises’s attempts to incorporate the neoclassical concept of monopoly price into the framework of the market process, as depicted by Austrians, do not succeed. Our inquiry supports the largely shared opinion among Austrian economists that monopoly price (at least in its present definition) does not exist on the free market; it appears only, and is logically identifiable, as a result of a privilege given by the State.     

The insulation argument in neoclassical international economics: A critique

Conclusion In this paper I have tried to prove that the insulation argument for independent fiat currencies is flawed, both because of its lack of sound theoretical foundation, and because of its empirical irrelevance. We have seen that the confusion about essential monetary notions makes the case for monetary independence look intuitively appealing. However, the occurrence of asymmetric trade shocks cannot be a good reason in its favor, for such shocks are more an illusion due to an incomplete knowledge of economic history and to a weak understanding of the adjustment mechanism in a worldwide integrated economy. Moreover, regardless of the importance of such trade changes, devaluation cannot offset the need for relative prices and wages adjustment to match the impact of the change. And by the additional inflationary effects it entails, devaluation harms the structure of production and makes the adjustment even more difficult. Finally, we have seen that even if it is desirable to insulate a region against a foreign shock-when this shock is the manifestation of a boom—it is impossible to do it. The insulation idea should therefore be eliminated from the field of international monetary economics, together with the policies advocated on its behalf.     

Transaction costs, strategic interaction, and farm restructuring

This article offers a transaction cost explanation for the different paths of organizational adjustment in the case of the former state and collective farms in Czech Republic after 1989. The focus is the strategic interaction among the stakeholders in the agricultural organization undergoing restructuring. In the presence of a neutral institutional environment, the number of players involved in the intraorganizational process, their ability to make collective decisions, and their perceived payoffs in alternative farming structures determine the restructuring outcome. These factors influence the choice between maintaining the inherited deployment of assets and the creation of a deeply restructured organization. Empirical results based on a farm‐level data set support this basic idea.