What is professional attire today? A conjoint analysis of personal presentation attributes

Personal presentation attributes have long been understood to affect perceptions of competence and capabilities. To that end, this study investigates seven attributes associated with favorable interview presentation, including overall physical attractiveness, neatness and grooming, clothing color, conservative versus trendy attire, professional versus casual attire, and body modification (including tattoos and piercings). Participants (n = 108), including students, faculty, and hospitality industry professionals, sorted an orthogonal array of 16 full-color, laminated cards that contained photos so that respondents could see levels of clothing color, clothing conservativeness, and degree of professional attire. The remaining attributes and their corresponding levels were shown on respective analog indicators. The conjoint analysis results indicate that grooming and professional attire are the most important attributes in shaping favorable perceptions. Furthermore, faculty perceived conservative clothing to be better while students and industry professionals indicated that trendy clothing creates a more favorable presentation on the part of a job candidate.     

Risk Management,Corporate Governance,and the Search for Long-Term Investors

This discussion explores a number of ways that more effective risk management, corporate governance, and communication with investors can help companies increase their effciency and long-run value. According to one of the panelists, recent surveys of corporate directors suggest that companies should devote more time and attention to three issues—strategy, risk management, and succession planning—and that strategy and risk are the “flipsides of the same coin.” As the panelist argues, “You can't talk about strategy without talking about what risks you're going to take—and what risks you decide to take has to depend on the core competencies that drive the corporate strategy.” In addition to making risk management a critical part of corporate strategy, another notable recommendation is to communicate a company's strategy and business plan as clearly as possible to investors, with the aim of attracting more sophisticated, long-term shareholders. Contrary to popular belief, such a group may well include some hedge funds and other activist shareholders. According to a newly released report on shareholder activism (produced and cited by another panelist), corporate boards should work harder to identify and engage the “largest 10 shareholders in the organization,” with the ultimate goal of cultivating a shareholder base that buys into the company's strategy.     

Testing for the bivariate Poisson distribution

This paper studies goodness-of-fit tests for the bivariate Poisson distribution. Specifically, we propose and study several Cramér–von Mises type tests based on the empirical probability generating function. They are consistent against fixed alternatives for adequate choices of the weight function involved in their definition. They are also able to detect local alternatives converging to the null at a certain rate. The bootstrap can be used to consistently estimate the null distribution of the test statistics. A simulation study investigates the goodness of the bootstrap approximation and compares their powers for finite sample sizes. Extensions for testing goodness-of-fit for the multivariate Poisson distribution are also discussed.     

Housing tenure choice and the dual income household

Housing tenure choice has been the subject of a very large literature. Many treatments have sought to estimate the effect of household income on the likelihood of home ownership. To date, no study has ever disaggregated the household income of married couples into the separate labor income components to see if one partner’s income has a different effect than the other. Using a derived likelihood function to control for censoring in the wife’s income, this paper estimates the effect of separate incomes on housing tenure choice, accounting for possible endogeneity of the wife’s income. To compare the results of this estimation method, the paper also estimates the standard IV models, 2SLS and IV probit. While the results show that there is no endogeneity of the wife’s income, ignoring the censoring of the endogenous variable (when a large fraction of observations are censored) can possibly lead to biased coefficient estimates. Also, this paper confirms the importance of total household income, which has a larger effect than the total disaggregated components.     

Modelling the Risks Associated with the Increased Importation of Fresh Produce from Emerging Supply Sources Outside the EU to the UK

The risk of non‐indigenous plant pests entering the UK via international trade in fresh produce is increasing. The objective of this article is to identify existing and emerging supply sources for UK fresh produce importers and examine the extent to which they could provide invasion pathways. We tested the hypothesis that increased imports of fresh produce from new sources outside the European Union could increase the risks of non‐indigenous insect pests. We use a bio‐economic model approach in which the number of species arrivals is a function of the volume of imports, whereas the volume of imports itself is a function of gross domestic product, relative import prices and seasonality. The study has identified clear trends, which show import volumes of fresh produce and species detections increasing from new supply sources. If this trend continues in the future, then the UK inspection agency should expect to confront species from new suppliers in much greater numbers, given that import volumes of fresh produce are income elastic.     

Cost-effectiveness of subdermal implantable buprenorphine versus sublingual buprenorphine to treat opioid use disorder

Aims: Subdermal implantable buprenorphine (BSI) was recently approved to treat opioid use disorder (OUD) in clinically-stable adults. In the pivotal clinical trial, BSI was associated with a higher proportion of completely-abstinent patients (85.7% vs 71.9%; p?=?.03) vs sublingual buprenorphine (SL-BPN). Elsewhere, relapse to illicit drug use is associated with diminished treatment outcomes and increased costs. This study evaluated the cost-effectiveness of BSI vs SL-BPN from a US societal perspective.

Methods: A Markov model simulated BSI and SL-BPN cohorts (clinically-stable adults) transiting through four mutually-exclusive health states for 12 months. Cohorts accumulated direct medical costs from drug acquisition/administration; treatment-diversion/abuse; newly-acquired hepatitis-C; emergency room, hospital, and rehabilitation services; and pediatric poisonings. Non-medical costs of criminality, lost wages/work-productivity, and out-of-pocket expenses were also included. Transition probabilities to a relapsed state were derived from the aforementioned trial. Other transition probabilities, costs, and health-state utilities were derived from observational studies and adjusted for trial characteristics. Outcomes included incremental cost per quality-adjusted-life-year (QALY) gained and incremental net-monetary-benefit (INMB). Uncertainty was assessed by univariate and probabilistic sensitivity analysis (PSA).

Results: BSI was associated with lower total costs (?$4,386), more QALYs (+0.031), and favorable INMB at all willingness-to-pay (WTP) thresholds considered. Higher drug acquisition costs for BSI (+$6,492) were outpaced, primarily by reductions in emergency room/hospital utilization (?$8,040) and criminality (?$1,212). BSI was cost-effective in 89% of PSA model replicates, and had a significantly higher NMB at $50,000/QALY ($20,783 vs $15,007; p?Conclusions: BSI was preferred over SL-BPN from a health-economic perspective for treatment of OUD in clinically-stable adults. These findings should be interpreted carefully, due to some relationships having been modeled from inputs derived from multiple sources, and would benefit from comparison with outcomes from studies that employ administrative claims data or a naturalistic comparative design.     

Comment

A Comment on “Marketing Planning and Corporate Culture: A Conceptual Framework Which Examines Management Attitudes in the Context of Marketing Planning” by John W. Leppard and Malcolm H. B. McDonald.     

Planning in the Dark: Why Major Engineering Projects Fail to Achieve Key Goals

The arguments, analysis and observations in this paper are based on 10 years of research with partners in the European and US aerospace and defence industries. During this period, the authors were part of a team of researchers who were seeking to develop a new methodology and tool set for project management, particularly aimed at large aerospace projects. The research was motivated by the seemingly ubiquitous reality of project failure, with large engineering projects apparently always late and over budget. Here the authors focus on aerospace and defence, but the problems are generic across all branches of engineering. In their view, aerospace and defence have more excuses than most, because not only are the projects huge, but also they are globally distributed and highly complex. As work progressed, a fundamental conundrum emerged. Through discussions with project managers and assessment of the teams that were undertaking the projects, it became obvious that they were well educated, intelligent, highly motivated and very capable people. So why were so many projects going wrong? And it was not just aerospace and defence, as projects were failing in many different sectors and in numerous geographic locations. Obviously the problems were not to do with incompetence, as they were clearly so generic. As a result, the authors focused their analysis on factors inherent in the way all major projects are undertaken. The ultimate finding has been that the very technology available for managing projects today is inadequate. As argued within the paper, modern, complex projects cannot be planned and executed using 50-year-old project management tools. The paper tells the story of what is wrong with the current technology and how and why it needs to change. The authors are well aware that there are also cultural problems in project management, but many of these are exacerbated by the use of inadequate tools.     

The Relationship between Output and Unemployment with Efficiency Wages

Abstract. We construct a stylised model of the supply side with goods and labour market imperfections to show that an economy can rationally operate at a low-effort state in which the relationship between output and unemployment is positive. We examine data from the G7 countries over 1960–2001 and find that only German data strongly favour a persistent negative relationship between the level of output and rate of unemployment. The consequence of this is that circumstances exist in which market imperfections could pose serious obstacles to the smooth working of expansionary and/or stabilisation policies and a positive demand shock might have adverse effects on employment.