CONFLICT APPROACHES OF EFFECTIVE AND INEFFECTIVE PROJECT MANAGERS: A FIELD STUDY IN A MATRIX ORGANIZATION[1]

The conflict approaches used by project managers in a matrix organization were described by 135 project team engineers. In project teams where the managers used a combination of co-operative and confirming approaches to conflict, conflicts were judged to have a constructive impact and management was judged to be effective. Conflicts were seen as counterproductive and management was seen as ineffective when the project manager relied upon a combination of competitive and avoiding approaches to conflict. These results provided field data support for a theory of conflict management which has been tested and refined through extensive laboratory research.     

The effect of incentives on customer evaluations of service bundles

Effects of service bundle incentives on perceived value, search intentions, and switching intentions are assessed in two independent studies. The first study demonstrates that service bundling influences switching and search intentions through perceived value. Results related to bundle incentives support the salience of the convenience associated with consolidating charges onto one bill. Further analysis reveals that explicit valuation of savings creates higher perceived value than convenience alone; however, search and switching intentions are unaffected by incentives or valuation thereof beyond the convenience effect. A second study replicates key parts of these results. Research and practical implications are discussed.     

Higher-order improvements of the parametric bootstrap for long-memory Gaussian processes

This paper determines coverage probability errors of both delta method and parametric bootstrap confidence intervals (CIs) for the covariance parameters of stationary long-memory Gaussian time series. CIs for the long-memory parameter _d0$d_0$ are included. The results establish that the bootstrap provides higher-order improvements over the delta method. Analogous results are given for tests. The CIs and tests are based on one or other of two approximate maximum likelihood estimators. The first estimator solves the first-order conditions with respect to the covariance parameters of a “plug-in” log-likelihood function that has the unknown mean replaced by the sample mean. The second estimator does likewise for a plug-in Whittle log-likelihood.     

Devolution and Economic Governance in the UK: Uneven Geographies, Uneven Capacities?

Recent academic debates have suggested that the capacity of any given territory to embed increasingly global processes of economic development partly rests on sub-national social, cultural and institutional forms and supports. In this context, devolution has the potential to alter the institutional architecture of the UK state and this paper interrogates the various ways in which the devolved bodies in the four territories--England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales--have begun to remake their institutional architectures of economic development. The paper also draws out some initial implications of these changes for the emerging uneven geographies and uneven capacities of economic development with the UK, post-devolution. The paper concludes by linking these observations to academic debates on the 'new regionalism'.     

Performance of conditional Wald tests in IV regression with weak instruments

We compare the powers of five tests of the coefficient on a single endogenous regressor in instrumental variables regression. Following Moreira [2003, A conditional likelihood ratio test for structural models. Econometrica 71, 1027–1048], all tests are implemented using critical values that depend on a statistic which is sufficient under the null hypothesis for the (unknown) concentration parameter, so these conditional tests are asymptotically valid under weak instrument asymptotics. Four of the tests are based on k-class Wald statistics (two-stage least squares, LIML, Fuller's [Some properties of a modification of the limited information estimator. Econometrica 45, 939–953], and bias-adjusted TSLS); the fifth is Moreira's (2003) conditional likelihood ratio (CLR) test. The heretofore unstudied conditional Wald (CW) tests are found to perform poorly, compared to the CLR test: in many cases, the CW tests have almost no power against a wide range of alternatives. Our analysis is facilitated by a new algorithm, presented here, for the computation of the asymptotic conditional p-value of the CLR test.