Alternative measures of political efficacy: models and means

In the 1982 and 1984 American national election surveys the CPS deleted a subset of its longstanding measures of political efficacy. This paper employs covariance structure analysis to test a two-factor measurement model based on alternative indicators. The model has an excellent fit for data from the 1964–84 national surveys as well as for different educational, gender, and racial groups in the 1984 study. Consistent with previous theorizing, the internal efficacy factor is significantly more stable than the external factor. Also, the two efficacy factors correlate as expected with measures of general personal competence and political trust. The paper is the first to use LISREL structured means tests to test group differences in levels of efficacy or other important political attitudes. Since this technique is not well-known, a tutorial appendix describing its implementation in LISREL VI is included to facilitate future research.     

Penetrating Canada's industrial markets

For many U.S. manufacturers, the Canadian marketplace can have a delightful incremental impact on the bottom line. And for low-cost, fast penetration of the Canadian market, independent sales reps may be the best approach.     

THE HOUSE THAT NBS BUILT *

In a suburban house in Maryland researchers at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) are studying the behaviour of people in a residential setting. This house, on the NBS campus outside Washington, has been turned into a laboratory equipped with 12 T.V. cameras, three observation booths, two kitchens, a computer and several miles of communications wiring.     

Strategic bargaining for the control of a dynamic system in state-space form

The partition of a pie model is integrated into a two-player difference game in state-space form with a finite horizon, in order to derive strategic bargaining outcomes in the framework of difference games. It is assumed that agreements are binding. In contrast to the model for the partition of a pie, the outcomes are not necessarily Pareto-efficient. For one-dimensional, linear-quadratic difference games, the subgame perfect bargaining outcome is unique, Paretoefficient, and analytically tractable. However, for higher dimensions the linear-quadratic structure breaks down and one has to resort to numerical methods.The authors thank Joseph Plasmans, Jacob Engwerda, and Herbert Hamers for valuable suggestions. A large part of this research is financed by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research, grant 450-228-018.     

Technical Development and the Innovation Process

Independent and small-business inventors face enormous difficulties as they attempt to commercialize new technologies. Harold Livesay, Marcia Rorke and David Lux share a number of their useful insights based on their experience. They find that many inventors wish to focus only on certain aspects of their emerging programs. In fact, these inventors resist the need to develop a balanced program involving not only technical development but also marketing and the creation of sustaining business structures. This article provides a systematic elaboration of these difficulties, suggests a more balanced approach and thus describes a process of education and communication that may increase overall effectiveness.     

Supervision and cost efficiency in banking

This paper suggests a link between bank operating efficiency and federal supervisor. Since supervisory priorities can vary by the context in which the supervisor was conceived, resulting differences in supervisory policies and procedures may underlay differences in the operating efficiency of their supervised banks. The effect on bank operating expenses is estimated at the individual bank level for each of four size strata using a translog cost function, controlling for bank characteristics and the impact of scale and scope economies. Results generally support a conclusion that bank operating cost differences exist by supervisor, except in the largest size stratum.The authors gratefully acknowledge helpful comments and suggestions from Seungmook Choi, Cary Collins, Curt Hunter, Bradford D. Jordan, Richard H. Pettway, John D. Stowe, Larry Wall, and Jim Wansley, and others at the University of Missouri and Northern Illinois University.     

On continuous-time Markov processes in bargaining

For bilateral stochastic bargaining procedures embedded in stable homogeneous continuous-time Markov processes, we show unusual limit results when time between rounds vanish. Standard convergence results require that some states are instantaneous.