Michael Redclift. Chewing Gum: The Fortunes of Taste

Chewing gum was foremost an American invention, Michael Redclifttells us in Chewing Gum: The Fortunes of Taste, a brief yetserious and engaging book that details how chewing gum cameto occupy a distinct place in the rise of American consumerism.Perhaps nothing signified the triviality of consumerism as chewinggum. It possessed what Redclift calls an "ephemeral quality,"it was an easily replicable mass product, and provided instantgratification. This ephemerality was complicated by     

Meta-level Coordination for Solving Distributed Negotiation Chains in Semi-cooperative Multi-agent Systems

A negotiation chain is formed when multiple related negotiations are spread over multiple agents. In order to appropriately order and structure the negotiations occurring in the chain so as to optimize the expected utility, we present an extension to a single-agent concurrent negotiation framework. This work is aimed at semi-cooperative multi-agent systems, where each agent has its own goals and works to maximize its local utility; however, the performance of each individual agent is tightly related to other agents’ cooperation and the system’s overall performance. We introduce a pre-negotiation phase that allows agents to transfer meta-level information. Using this information, the agent can improve the accuracy of its local model about how other agents would react to the negotiations. This more accurate model helps the agent in choosing a better negotiation solution for a distributed negotiation chain problem. The agent can also use this information to allocate appropriate time for each negotiation, hence to find a good ordering of all related negotiations. The experimental data show that these mechanisms improve the agents’ and the system’s overall performance significantly.     

PERIODIC SEQUENCES OF ARBITRAGE: A TALE OF FOUR CURRENCIES

This paper investigates arbitrage chains involving four currencies and four foreign exchange trader‐arbitrageurs. In contrast with the three‐currency case, we find that arbitrage operations when four currencies are present may appear periodic in nature, and not involve smooth convergence to a ‘balanced’ ensemble of exchange rates in which the law of one price holds. The goal of this article is to understand some interesting features of sequences of arbitrage operations, features which might well be relevant in other contexts in finance and economics.     

Disease management programs: program intervention, behavior modification, and dosage effect

Disease management programs provide highly personalized self- management support to consumers afflicted with chronic illnesses. Program interventions include the provision of health information, ongoing motivation, and support for behavior change, adherence to pharmacotherapy, development of self-efficacy, and the distribution of self-care tools. Interactions between program and patients are structured and repetitive over time. Consumer behavior change can result in measurable improvements in quality and medical cost savings from postponement or avoidance of preventable complications. We evaluated the impact on cost and quality of a comprehensive Diabetes Disease Management Program (DDMP) across ten US urban markets. A staggered implementation allowed for ten pre–post and five pair-wise comparisons. The DDMP demonstrated significant improvements in six diabetes-related quality indicators, lower cost, and a dose-response with greater than 6 months participation. We conclude that a DDMP improves quality of care and reduce overall medical costs.     

Berger, Dina. The Development of Mexico's Tourism Industry: Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night

Dina Berger's The Development of Mexico's Tourism Industry:Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night traces the historical foundationsof the tourism industry in México from 1928 to the earlypost–WW II period. The author argues that during thisperiod tourism became a medium for the modernization and economicdevelopment of México. According to Berger, the "creationof a tourist industry emerged as the cornerstone to state-ledmodernization programs in the late 1920s at the height of revolutionary     

Taking agricultural technologies to scale: experiences from a vegetable technology dissemination initiative in Tanzania

One of the widely suggested approaches to meet the increasing food demand of a substantially growing world population is sustainable intensification. We present a unique agricultural research and scaling programme in Tanzania, focusing on the key elements necessary for results related to: gender analysis; private sector engagement; social capital; improvement and adaptation; and programme performance monitoring and evaluation. Since 2014, more than 6000 farmers have benefited from either the adaptive research or the scaling component of the programme. Preliminary impact analysis results from six pilot locations indicate that programme participants realized significantly higher yields compared to non-participants. In addition to productivity improvements, introducing resistant and drought-tolerant elite vegetable varieties improved the resilience of the existing farming systems. Finally, considering the needs of both male and female participants had a positive impact on technology adoption rates and reach.     

Direct and Multiplicative Effects of Ethical Dispositions and Ethical Climates on Personal Justice Norms: A Virtue Ethics Perspective

From virtue ethics and interactionist perspectives, we hypothesized that personal justice norms (distributive and procedural justice norms) were shaped directly and multiplicatively by ethical dispositions (equity sensitivity and need for structure) and ethical climates (egoistic, benevolent, and principle climates). We collected multisource data from 123 companies in Hong Kong, with personal factors assessed by participants’ self-reports and contextual factors by aggregations of their peers. In general, LISREL analyses with latent product variables supported the direct and multiplicative relationships. Our findings could lay the groundwork for justice research from a morality perspective in future.     

Glass Houses? Market Reactions to Firms Joining the UN Global Compact

We examine market reactions to publicly held multinational firms announcing their affiliation with the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC). The UNGC is a voluntary initiative to support four areas of United Nations viz. Human Rights, Labor, Environmental, and Anti-Corruption. Because firms must file annual Communication on Progress (COP) reports toward these initiatives, we argue this creates a differentiating transparency of interest to stakeholders. Using a sample of 175 global firms, we find support to the theory for joining the UNGC. Returns differ markedly, however, between multinational firms headquartered in the United States (negative) and Europe (positive). We also find that failing to complete the annual COP generates a negative market reaction.     

Weak Disposability in Nonparametric Production Analysis: Reply to Färe and Grosskopf

Färe and Grosskopf (this issue) claim that a single abatement factor suffices for modeling weak disposability in nonparametric production models, and that the Kuosmanen (2005) technology that uses multiple abatement factors is larger than necessary. This article demonstrates by a numerical example that a single abatement factor does not suffice to capture all feasible production plans, and that its use leads to the violation of convexity, one of the maintained assumptions of the model. We also prove that the Kuosmanen technology is the correct minimum extrapolation technology under the stated axioms.