Planning with great uncertainty: A review and case study of the safe drinking water controversy

Since 1974, monitoring the water for dangerous contaminants and judging the impact of low levels of contamination on human health have become highly controversial environmental planning issues in the United States. This paper overviews the chemical, ecological correlation, and case control literatures to establish a baseline and then focuses on New Jersey, the state with the highest cancer mortality rates in the United States from 1950 to 1969, for a case study. While estimates of cancer incidence from consuming contaminated water are made, the scientific results are inconclusive. When combined with economic and political questions, the overall result is to highlight an issue frought with uncertainty presenting serious dilemmas for scientific planning.     

DEBIASING STRATEGIES IN SUPPLY MANAGEMENT DECISION‐MAKING

Human judgment and decision making under uncertainty are vulnerable to decision biases leading to deviations from the standard assumptions of the rational paradigm in economics. This fact is currently not widely reflected by research on decision making in sourcing contexts. However, supply managers are aware of the judgment and decision challenges that result from existing and increasing levels of uncertainty in the external, upstream supply chain, and deploy decision supporting strategies for debiasing their judgments. The analysis of supply management decisions using 441 data units from 133 embedded cases from 15 buying organizations revealed high levels of such debiasing strategies. However, the seemingly most effective mitigation strategy recommended in the general debiasing literature ‐ creating awareness of the underlying mechanics causing decision biases ‐ was only employed by one buying organization, indicating a need to further investigate debiasing strategies specifically in supply management contexts.     

Asymmetric responses of money demand to oil price shocks in Saudi Arabia: a non-linear ARDL approach

Saudi Arabia is an open oil-based economy with fixed exchange rates; therefore, it has limited monetary policy autonomy. Using non-linear autoregressive distributed lag approach, this article investigates the asymmetric effects of oil price shocks on the demand of money in Saudi Arabia over the period 1990:Q1–2014:Q4. The empirical results show evidence of positive long run but asymmetric effects of oil price shocks on the money demand. In particular, we find that the positive oil price shocks are more important than negative shocks. Therefore, two policy responses can be considered: either sustaining the fixed exchange rate regime and following an economic diversification policy or switching towards a flexible exchange rate regime to achieve price stability. In that case, the existence of a stable money demand function in Saudi Arabia is a necessary precondition for adopting a monetary policy strategy targeted to price stability using instruments like money targeting.     

Monitoring, Implicit Contracting, and the Lack of Permanence of Leveraged Buyouts

We present a possible explanation for the lack of permanenceof the very high levels of concentration of ownership that accompanyleveraged buyouts. We first argue that some diffusion of ownershipcan be beneficial to the shareholders of a firm by encouragingthe employees of the firm to enter into implicit contracts withthe firm. The level of concentration of ownership that maximizesfirm value is therefore that which trades off the well-knowngains from monitoring with the gains from implicit contracting.We then argue that, in the process of concentrating the ownershipof a firm that has excessively diffuse ownership to a levelthat maximizes firm value, investors in leveraged buyouts willchoose an initial level of concentration of ownership that isvery high. They will do so in order to put pressure on managersto breach existing implicit contracts. Following the breachof these contracts, investors will decrease the level of concentrationof ownership to the level that maximizes firm value. There willbe no further breach of implicit contracts, for such breachis incidental to the transformation of the firm from one thathas excessively diffuse ownership to one that has the optimallevel of diffusion of ownership. No change in the concentrationof ownership therefore occurs once the level of diffusion ofownership that maximizes firm value has been attained. JEL Classification:G30.     

Reported and secret interventions in the foreign exchange markets

Using a new approach relying on news wire reports, we estimate the proportion of secret interventions (i.e., unreported official interventions) in the foreign exchange markets that have been conducted by the three major central banks since 1985. We therefore revisit the estimation of conditional probabilities of secret operations and compute them by both central bank and operation type. The proportion of secret interventions is found to be lower for concerted operations and to display a great deal of variability over time as well as across the three major central banks. Our analysis reveals that the Bank of Japan has recently adopted an intervention policy more based on secret operations.     

The effect of production uncertainty on the labor-managed firm

The effects of production uncertainty on the behavior of the labor-managed, cooperative firm are examined and it is shown that they generally differ from the case of certainty and the case of the entrepreneurial, profit-maximizing firm. In particular, it is shown that the risk-averse (risk-seeking) cooperative will have a larger (smaller) ratio of labor to nonlabor input employed in production than the risk-neutral cooperative.     

哈佛商学院“违规潜规则”

软件工程师、航班机组成员、工人、邮递员、卡车司机、医院护士……这些人有什么共同点？Michel Anteby教授会告诉你。他们的行业都存在一个“道德灰色地带”（moralgrayzone）,即工作中有一些明令禁止的行为,但即使员工触犯,管理者也会睁一只眼闭一只眼,见怪不怪。     

Canadian consumption and portfolio shares

In this paper we gauge consumption and portfolio shares, rather than the traditional pricing implications. We study both aggregated (financial, tangible, and human) and disaggregated (deposits, stocks, insurance, and pensions) assets. The empirical shares are computed from recent aggregate Canadian data. The theoretical shares are constructed from a flexible specification of both investors' preferences and investment opportunities. Our results reveal that the theoretical shares statistically match observed consumption and aggregated assets, but not disaggregated assets. Also, our findings for corporate stocks are consistent with the empirical asset returns literature. Finally, our findings for other assets highlight several new striking features. JEL classification: G11
Consommation et parts de porte feuille au Canada. Cette recherche analyse la consommation et les parts de portefeuille, plutôt que les prix des actifs. Nous étudions les actifs agrégés (i.e., financiers, tangibles et humains) ainsi que désagrégés (i.e., dépôts, actions et caisses de retraite et assurance). Les parts empiriques sont calculées pour des données agrégées canadiennes récentes. Les parts théoriques sont construites à partir d'un modèle flexible en ce qui a trait aux préférences et aux possibilités d'investissement. Nos résultats démontrent que les parts théoriques reproduisent la consommation et les parts agrégées, mais pas les parts désagrégées. Aussi, nos résultats sont cohérents avec ceux de la littérature empirique sur les rendements. Nos résultats concernant les autres actifs identifient d'autres aspects caractéristiques.