Action Teams That Work

A growing awareness of workplace hazards and identification of airborne contaminants, coupled with a changing safety and health regulatory environment, created an unexpected demand for new and innovative respirators in the early 1980s. 3M's Occupational Health and Environmental Safety Division broke new ground by taking the team concept further than ever before in the company. The division's Action Teams successfully designed, built and introduced products in less than half the time it would have taken previously. Robert Hershock, Charles Cowman and Douglas Peters describe how 3M learned important lessons about team selection, training, performance and motivation, the importance of project sponsors, and the role of middle management.     

Emotional intelligence and resilience as predictors of leadership in school administrators

This mixed‐method study of 48 P–12 school administrators across three southeastern states was done to begin investigation of the impact of nontraditional leadership factors. As evidenced by the results, there is a strong correlation between the factors of emotional intelligence and resilience and leadership success.     

Polarities between Naturalism and Non-Naturalism in Contemporary Economics: An Overview

We provide a dynamic model of banking competition, in which bounded rationality of some competitors explains how the credit cycle is intensified. We model the economic cycle following Tobias F. Rötheli (2012b), who argues that boundedly rational banks, in their Bayesian learning, overestimate the probability of success during booms and underestimate it during recessions. We obtain three main results. First, the model suggests that pessimism/underconfidence is not a powerful driver of credit cycles. Instead, it supports the conclusion that it is euphoria during large upswings that leads to the next crunch. Second, the dynamization of the model provides further insight into the way boundedly rational competition intensifies the credit cycle. Third, it additionally predicts that the effects of behavioral biases are more pervasive when the quality of the niche markets is lower.     

Labour contracts in a stock market economy

In this paper, labour contracts are examined in the context of a general stock market economy where all shareholders are risk averse, and firms act in shareholders interest. The problem considered is whether some firm can offer a wage contract that will make all its shareholders better off. We show by example that, contrary to the arguments in the partial equilibrium framework, it is possible that no such contract will exist, even when there are potential gains to risk sharing. A sufficient condition for the existence of a feasible pareto improving contract is given. It is shown that contract trading will arise provided some firm has no large shareholders.     

Two characterizations of the uniform rule for division problems with single-peaked preferences

Summary The uniform rule is considered to be the most important rule for the problem of allocating an amount of a perfectly divisible good between agents who have single-peaked preferences. The uniform rule was studied extensively in the literature and several characterizations were provided. The aim of this paper is to provide two different formulations and corresponding axiomatizations of the uniform rule. These formulations resemble the Nash and the lexicographic egalitarian bargaining solutions; the corresponding axiomatizations are based on axioms of independence of irrelevant alternatives and restricted monotonicity.The authors are grateful to Jeffrey Banks, Steve Ching, Vincent Feltkamp, Bezalel Peleg, Sang-Young Sonn, William Thomson and an anonymous referee for helpful comments.     

Debt contract strictness and auditor specialization

The conflicts of interest among managers, shareholders and creditors resulting in agency costs, can be mitigated by restricting managers’ adverse behavior, through financial covenants to better align the various stakeholder interests. Thus, debt contract strictness represents an important aspect of agency costs between creditors, shareholders, and management that is not always captured by interest rates. The contract setting provides a unique opportunity to investigate how creditors may rely on auditors to alleviate information uncertainty stemming from reliance on management's financial reporting and thus alleviate the creditor's potential loss of invested capital. After controlling for borrower risks, loan characteristics, and audit factors, we show that auditor industry specialization is significantly associated with a reduction in the strictness of debt contracts, consistent with creditors viewing certain industry expert auditors as effective monitors against financial reporting manipulation aimed at the avoidance of debt covenant triggers that protect creditors against potential loss. Further, we find that the association between loan strictness and auditor specialization is attenuated by stronger corporate governance systems, external monitors, and prior lender relationships.     

THE LIMITS OF INFRASTRUCTURE: Public Transport in a Post-colonial City

Since the 1940s, the people of the neighbourhoods (kampungs) around Surabaya's derelict Ngagel industrial estate have made a living by repurposing the remains of what was once one of Asia's most modern road, rail and industry networks. The remains—in the form of leftover fuel, labour and factory parts—are used to rebuild and repair improvised transport vehicles like bicycle-taxis (becak), minibuses (bemo) and motorbike-taxis (ojek). The repurposing happens at the limits of a capital-intensive heavy infrastructure of factories, trams and buses. The limits are those points where such infrastructure fails and a household-funded mosquito-fleet of light vehicles succeeds. Repurposing gives those who do it a right to infrastructure by providing the city with much-needed public transport. In Surabaya, public transport begins at its limits through the improvisations of people who live in the productive remains of capital-intensive heavy infrastructure. These people live in Surabaya's deindustrialized urban core, where life is made in the ruins of infrastructure through the breaking-down of it, the reworking of it, the right to it, and the leakage of it—the means through which rank-and-file people rather than states and corporations forge infrastructure.     

Competing mechanisms

The recent literature on competing mechanisms has devoted a lot of effort at understanding a very complex and abstract issue. In particular, an agent's type in a competitive environment is hard to conceptualize because it depends on information the agent has about what is going on in the rest of the market. This paper explains why this is such an important practical problem and illustrates how the literature has “solved” it.