Individual Priming in Virtual Team Decision-Making

Virtual teams have different interactions than face-to-face teams because they rely on information and communication technologies, which can impede or assist certain human cognitive processes. Past research has shown that although virtual teams exchange more information than face-to-face teams, poor decisions often result, because team members do not consider the unique information they receive from others. Drawing from cognitive psychology, our research explored a unique way to improve team decision-making through the use of cognitive priming. We proposed that priming group members to pay attention to others or to engage in counterfactual thinking would improve team members’ cognition and, therefore, team performance. Prior research with individuals and brainstorming teams has shown these forms of priming to improve performance; however, no research has attempted to use priming to improve the outcomes of virtual team decision-making, which requires deeper interaction and cognitive involvement than brainstorming. We performed two lab experiments using primes that have been found to improve the individual decision-making process. We found that priming had some impact, but it did not significantly improve decision quality. Various reasons are discussed to explain why priming techniques may not be as powerful in teams as in individuals, and future research ideas are suggested to build on our initial work on priming in virtual team decision-making.     

Lobbying and discretion

When interest groups compete to influence legislators, the resulting legislation is often vague, and thus obliges the groups to continue their fight in the executive. On its face, this seems inefficient—at least from the point of view of the groups. We explore this intuition in a model of “nested lobbying” in which interest groups first compete to influence a legislative agenda setter, then compete to influence legislative votes over the resulting agenda. If the resulting legislation grants discretion to the executive, the final prize is allocated in yet one more contest in the bureaucracy. We find that when the status quo is non-discretionary, competition over the agenda never results in an agenda that includes discretion. Surprisingly, however, a discretionary status quo can stand with probability 1 if the preferences of the bureaucracy, the legislature, and the agenda setter are arranged in an “iron triangle”. Specifically, the bureaucracy and agenda setter must be biased in favor of one group, while the legislature is biased in favor of the other.     

Narrowing the scope of failure prediction using targeted fault load injection

As society becomes more dependent upon computer systems to perform increasingly critical tasks, ensuring that those systems do not fail becomes increasingly important. Many organizations depend heavily on desktop computers for day-to-day operations. Unfortunately, the software that runs on these computers is written by humans and, as such, is still subject to human error and consequent failure. A natural solution is to use statistical machine learning to predict failure. However, since failure is still a relatively rare event, obtaining labelled training data to train these models is not a trivial task. This work presents new simulated fault-inducing loads that extend the focus of traditional fault injection techniques to predict failure in the Microsoft enterprise authentication service and Apache web server. These new fault loads were successful in creating failure conditions that were identifiable using statistical learning methods, with fewer irrelevant faults being created.     

Some Inflationary Aspects of Distributive Conflict:Reassessing Canadian Inflation,Part I

This is the first installment of a two-part article, in which we explore the empirical validity of the post-Keynesian “conflict inflation” theory for Canada. By documenting the numerous points of contact between Canadian inflation, on one hand, and institutional power and distributive conflict, on the other, we argue that inflation may be validly understood as a power process insofar as it feeds on social conflict and is systematically associated with the redistribution of income between different income groups. Over the past century, Canadian inflation has tended to redistribute income from capital to labor, from large to small firms, and from the upper to the lower income brackets. Given these facts, Canadian inflation must be understood as a political phenomenon.     

The Politics of Canadian Monetary Policy: Reassessing Canadian Inflation,Part II

This is the second installment of a two-part article on Canadian inflation. This article builds on the traditional conflict theory of inflation by applying insights from the post-Keynesian and micro-politics theories of money and central bank policy. It argues that the Bank of Canada’s inflation targets — not just inflation itself — have to be understood in terms of social conflict and power. This analysis extends the evidence on the distributive implications of Canadian inflation offered in Part I.     

Strategy and Financial Policy in UK Small Firms

There is growing evidence that capital structure and firm strategy are linked but most studies to date have focused on large, publicly quoted firms, with little attention given to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). A major proposition of the study is that both strategic and financial factors are necessary to explain chosen debt levels. The empirical question adopted for this work, given the best financial model of capital structure, is – does strategy provide any additional explanatory power? Hence strategy and financial variables are seen as complementary rather than competing determinants of capital structure. There appears to be strong evidence supporting the proposition that competitive strategy affects the capital structure of SMEs, but there is little evidence of any impact from corporate strategic factors. The study also supports the notion that there is a 'pecking order' in SME financing and that variability in profits results in 'distress' borrowing. This study provides important empirical evidence to support work on the capital structure puzzle and the funding problems of SMEs.     

Sterling's farewell symphony: The end of the Sterling Area revisited

When and why did Sterling Area countries stop holding sterling as the majority of their foreign exchange reserves? This paper takes a comparative approach to examine the relative importance of various determinants of adherence to sterling in its declining years as an international currency. Using an original cross-national panel dataset covering the period 1965–79, we conduct survival analysis which systematically evaluates a comprehensive set of economic and political factors, at the country level as well as in international relations, about when and why countries chose to diversify their reserves away from sterling. Our results highlight the significance of international transactional factors in influencing adherence to sterling, while the effects of British geopolitical retrenchment, Commonwealth cultural ties, and distributional issues were more ambiguous and sensitive to local conditions. We also find that domestic political and historical factors, such as democracy and imperial legacy, played a role in sterling's international unravelling. Finally, we use our results to examine the experience of individual sterling countries and their decisions to diversify.     

From creating to confronting racial hierarchies: The evolving role of the US state in land policy

From systemically dispossessing Indigenous people of their territory for Euro-American settlement to routinely denying African American farmers operating loans in the 20th century, the US government's complicity in creating racial hierarchies in terms of land access is well documented. Less understood is how land policies oriented towards racial equity, namely, the Justice for Black Farmers Act (JBFA), and other initiatives that deal with land access as well as addressing racism more broadly, emerged during recent decades. In this article, we argue that such initiatives resulted from Black-led organizations and other farmer advocacy allies responding to neoliberal policy reforms. Concretely, even as these reforms destabilized farm economies, they also led to a decentralization of agricultural policy administration, which, in turn, created opportunities for community-based organizations to influence land governance. We make this argument after presenting a three-part periodization of the evolution of US land policy, starting with the emergence of racial hierarchies, then the period of partial reforms that began during the New Deal and, finally, the era of neoliberal reform.