WORK DESIGN：风尚办公,右脑制胜

导刊书香三月品读：别墅洋楼、霓裳丽影、锅碗瓢盘……设计的体味已经渗透到生活的周遭。然而我们生活中的大部分时间都交给了工作,下一站设计天堂：WORK DESIGN,无疑将成为这个时代的重大课题。你是在上班,还是在坐牢？对于一家企业来说,谁能充分开发员工的创造力,谁就抢占了发展先机。而一个以右脑制胜、激发智慧的办公空间将改写既有规则,重新丰富员工对工作的想象,作为企业CEO,你收获的,不仅仅是企业环境的风尚形象,更有领先一步的运营效率。     

Expected Option Returns

This paper examines expected option returns in the context of mainstream asset-pricing theory. Under mild assumptions, expected call returns exceed those of the underlying security and increase with the strike price. Likewise, expected put returns are below the risk-free rate and increase with the strike price. S&P index option returns consistently exhibit these characteristics. Under stronger assumptions, expected option returns vary linearly with option betas. However, zero-beta, at-the-money straddle positions produce average losses of approximately three percent per week. This suggests that some additional factor, such as systematic stochastic volatility, is priced in option returns.     

Consumer Behavior, Public Policy, and Country-of-Origin Labeling

Recent work by agricultural economists has failed to adequately identify why consumers desire country-of-origin labeling, a key piece of information needed to determine whether a market-failure exists. This paper brings to the attention of agricultural economists a sizable body of literature on country-of-origin effects from the marketing and business disciplines. Based on this literature, we draw a distinction between several consumer motivations for origin labels and we identify which of these is cause for public policy. We propose several research questions that require answers if the consequences of country-of-origin labeling policy are to be fully understood.     

Integrated Market-Immersion Approach To Teaching New Product Development In Technologically-Oriented Teams

This article presents a market immersion methodology for teaching NPD in technologically-oriented teams. This methodology was developed during the early 1990s at the Lally School of Management and Technology of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Since then, it has been successfully utilized to train in excess of one hundred MBA-level student teams. The NPD course is taught by a 5-member cross-functional team of faculty with backgrounds in marketing, manufacturing operations, and accounting. The course is modeled on Cooper's stage gate process, and the course is designed to provide a combination of classroom and apprenticeship experiences. The 6-credit, year-long course requires students to work in self-directed teams of approximately 5 to 6 members. Each student team chooses its own industry or technology domain in which to concentrate its efforts, and students undertake intensive market and field research in order to assess any existing market opportunities. Once a specific target market and market need have been identified, students are then required to design a product and an organization to meet that need. In specific, students must produce a detailed marketing, manufacturing, operations, advertising, distribution, and financial plan that can bring their product to market. During the process, students create multiple potential product designs, build mock-ups of their products, and field test the mock-ups. At every phase of the course, the teams are continuously immersed in real customer markets. As a result, teams must struggle to incorporate new market information and learning into their project in a consistent and holistic manner. The following article presents the curriculum content and tools, lessons learned, and student reactions to this original pedagogical approach to teaching NPD. Due to the length of the course, particular attention is paid to the teaming issues that naturally arise when teams work together on long-run projects. © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.     

Give Them Something to Smile About: A Marketing Strategy for Recruiting and Retaining Volunteers

Using a marketing perspective, this study investigates whether the issue of “fun at work” would appeal to volunteers as a part of an effort to enhance recruitment and retention. Specifically, we examined volunteers' attitudes toward fun, their perceptions of what kinds of activities are fun and what are not, and the relative importance of workplace fun in what they perceive as an ideal volunteer position. In general, we found that volunteers had positive attitudes towards fun and experiencing fun at work was associated with higher job satisfaction and lower turnover intentions. Although “a fun workplace” was ranked relatively low in importance relative to other reasons why they volunteer, creating such an environment could enhance retention. Some age and gender differences were found in the perceptions of whether certain activities are fun or not. The implications of these results and directions for future research are discussed.     

The Delisting Bias in CRSP's Nasdaq Data and Its Implications for the Size Effect

We investigate the bias in CRSP's Nasdaq data due to missing returns for delisted stocks. We find that the missing returns are large and negative on average, and that delisted stocks experience a substantial decrease in liquidity. We estimate that using a corrected return of −55 percent for missing performance-related delisting returns corrects the bias. We revisit previous work which finds a size effect among Nasdaq stocks. After correcting for the delisting bias, there is no evidence that there ever was a size effect on Nasdaq. Our results are inconsistent with most risk-based explanations of the size effect.     

Monitoring Job Search as an Instrument For Targeting Transfers

Redistribution programs are constrained because those not working may be either unable to work, voluntarily unemployed or involuntarily unemployed. The inability to distinguish among these three cases inhibits the targeting of transfers to those most in need. Enabling the government to monitor whether unemployed individuals are searching for work and accepting any offered jobs increases its ability to redistribute income. We show that these monitoring activities are complementary, and consider how a minimum wage might be a useful adjunct to monitoring contingent tax-transfer policies.     

The Accuracy of Owner-Provided House Values: The 1978–1991 American Housing Survey

The American Housing Survey (AHS) includes the owner's valuation of the house as a measure of the house's value. If owner-stated values are accurate, the AHS (as well as other survey instruments) can be used by researchers studying a variety of topics. In this study we use the metropolitan version of the AHS for three cities over fourteen years to compare owners' valuations with sales prices of houses that sold in the twelve months prior to an interview. We find that, on average, recent buyers report house values that are 8.4% higher than the stated sales prices. Further analysis indicates that these recent buyers, when compared with owners with longer tenure, overvalue their houses by 3.3%, on average. Thus, we find that the average owner overvalues his house by 5.1%. Also, differences between sales prices and owners' valuations are not related to particular characteristics of the house, occupants (other than length of tenure), or neighborhood. Thus, the use of the owners' valuations will result in accurate estimates of house price indexes and will provide reliable estimates of the prices of house and neighborhood characteristics.     

The nature of local area social exclusion in England and the role of the labour market

The creation of the Social Exclusion Unit by the present governmentin 1997 is just one example of the increased desire by bothacademics and policy-makers to understand more about the factorsthat lead to individuals and communities becoming excluded frommainstream society. Of the many aspects of social exclusionwhich have featured in recent debate, this article focuses ontwo. The first is to describe the nature and the extent of socialexclusion in the areas in which it is concentrated in the UnitedKingdom. The second is to examine the role that labour-marketfactors play in creating, reducing, or sustaining geographicalconcentrations of social exclusion. The article draws upon theresults of social surveys conducted in deprived areas and discussesthe arguments for tackling local concentrations of social exclusionthrough area-based initiatives.