Articulation work from the middle—a study of how technicians mediate users and technology

This article studies the work performed by technicians in a large demonstration project, EcoGrid 2.0, in the Danish island Bornholm. Based on observations of household visits conducted by technicians, we demonstrate how these act as ‘middlemen’, mediating and linking together the smart technology of the demonstration and the involved users. Formally, technicians’ work is to keep users online; however, they also perform a number of invisible tasks to keep users engaged and active. Our ethnographic study shows two broad categories of invisible work: first, technicians continually facilitate the willingness of users, recurrently affirming the social contract between users and demonstration project. Second, technicians facilitate the abilities of users by improvising informal training sessions of how to operate the system. These findings are used to discuss the importance of invisible articulation work of technical service workers in large scale real‐world experiments.     

THE DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME ANOMALY IN STOCK RETURNS: FACT OR FICTION?

Stock market returns in 22 markets around the world show no evidence of a daylight saving time effect. Returns on the days following a switch from or to daylight saving time do not behave any differently from stock market returns on any other day of the week or month. These results reject earlier conclusions in the literature—based on less data—that investors’ mood changes induced by changes in sleep patterns significantly affect stock returns.     

Alignment of strategy and structure in local government

ABSTRACT

Strategic positioning and structural alignment in the public sector is a neglected area of research. This paper analyses the strategic positions of prospectors, defenders and reactors and structural alignment in Norwegian municipalities. Top managers responding to a survey perceived that the municipalities did align their organizational structures to the strategic positions for prospectors and defenders, but not for reactors, as hypothesized, but these relationships were modest. The top managers often found it difficult to provide consistent responses on their organizations’ choices of strategic positions.     

Fictitious Play in Extensive Form Games

This article analyzes the fictitious play process originally proposed for strategic form games by Brown (1951) and Robinson (1951). We interpret the process as a model of preplay thinking performed by players before acting in a one-shot game. This model is one of bounded rationality. We discuss how fictitious play should then be defined for extensive form games and conclude that this is somewhat problematic. We therefore study two alternative definitions. For either of these, under a weak condition of initial uncertainty, a convergence point of a fictitious play sequence is a sequential equilibrium. For generic games of perfect information initial uncertainty also implies convergence of fictitious play.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Number: C72.     

Dual labour markets and nominal rigidity

The conventional menu cost framework performs poorly with realisticlabour supply elasticities: the menu costs required for pricerigidity are very high and the welfare consequences of monetarydisturbances are negligible. We show that the presence of duallabour markets greatly improves the performance of the frameworkboth by reducing the minimum effective menu costs and by boostingthe welfare consequences. In addition, the introduction of duallabour markets provides an explanation of procyclical productivityand the shrinking of wage differentials during booms, in linewith stylized facts on business cycles.     

Are There Income Effects on Global Willingness to Pay for Biodiversity Conservation?

This paper is concerned with the empirical relationship between biodiversity conservation values and income. We use random effects panel models to examine the effects of income, and then GDP per capita, on willingness to pay for habitat and biodiversity conservation. In a meta-analysis, 145 Willingness To Pay estimates for biodiversity conservation where existence value plays a major role were collected from 46 contingent valuation studies across six continents. Other effects included in the meta-analysis were the study year; habitat type; continent; scope as presented to respondents; whether WTP bids were for preventing a deterioration or gaining an improvement in conservation, whether a specific species or specific habitat was protected; whether the questionnaire used a dichotomous choice or an open-ended format; distribution format; and the choice of payment vehicle. GDP per capita seemed to perform as well as an explanatory variable as respondent’s mean stated income, indicating that it is wealth in society as a whole which determines variations in WTP. Even if large variation, our main conclusion is, that the demand for biodiversity conservation rises with a nation’s wealth, but the income elasticity of willingness to pay is less than one.     

De zelfstandige winkelier en de afbetaling

In dit artiket zijn alle nitgangs-n's weggelaten.     

The death of the deal: Are withdrawn acquisition deals informative of CEO quality?

To examine the market response to positive revelations of chief executive officer (CEO) quality, this study focuses on CEOs who withdraw acquisition bids when the price becomes increasingly expensive. Firms that withdrawal for price-related reasons earn higher withdrawal returns than firms that withdraw for other reasons. This relation is stronger when CEO uncertainty and discretion is high. CEOs unwilling to increase the offer price are less likely to be replaced and more likely to advance to a larger firm than a control group of CEOs. The finding that the market attaches value to CEO-specific information suggests that unobservable manager characteristics can meaningfully impact firm outcomes.     

Energy Demand,Structural Change and Trade: A Decomposition Analysis of the Danish Manufacturing Industry

This paper examines the relation between trade patterns and energy consumption in manufacturing industries. An input-output decomposition method is used to decompose the change in industrial energy consumption for Denmark into six components, of which three are trade-related. Trade-induced changes in energy consumption have important implications for issues such as international distribution and regulation of energy consumption and emissions. It is shown that a structural change in foreign trade patterns can increase domestic energy demand. This is contrary, however, to what might be expected for a small industrialized country, which is presumed to export products that intensively use inputs of skilled manpower as well as research and development. Finally, calculations carried out at different levels of aggregation are compared. The findings here demonstrate the importance of large variations in energy intensities among subsectors for the calculation results.     

Leading public service organizations: how to obtain high employee self-efficacy and organizational performance

Concerns are sometimes raised that transactional leadership harms public organizations’ performance because demands thwart employees’ self-efficacy. However, the opposite may be argued – conditional rewards strengthen feelings of competence because they provide positive feedback on performance. We study ninety-two high school principals’ reported use of contingent rewards and sanctions and self-efficacy among their 1,932 teachers. The results indicate that contingent rewards strengthen self-efficacy, and that sanctions are not negatively related with self-efficacy or performance. Furthermore, the teachers’ self-efficacy can be linked positively to organizational performance. This suggests that rewards can be an important tool for managers in the public sector.