Hypothetical Bias in Risk Preferences as a Driver of Hypothetical Bias in Willingness to Pay: Experimental Evidence

This study provides new insight on the established issue of elicitation bias in hypothetical choice settings. In particular, using an experiment that elicits real and hypothetical willingness to pay for the protection of otters, we provide evidence that the observed bias is driven by those who are both uncertain about their value and exhibit hypothetical bias in risk attitudes. This finding provides a reason why calibration approaches based on follow-up certainty questions have proven useful, but also suggests a degree of caution in applying the approach. Our results favour combining uncertainty calibration with CVM-X in which hypothetical bias in risk attitudes is also taken account to correct for hypothetical bias in WTP.     

The changing dynamics of regionalism in South Korea's elections

One of the most persistent areas of discussion regarding South Korea's party and election systems is the continued elevation of regional personalities over political institutions. We seek to pour new wine into old bottles, however, by challenging a seldom‐considered assumption in Korean studies; that regionalism has exerted constant pressures across regime, province, and personality. There is a void in studying how transition to democracy has affected the dominance of personality‐based regionalism in Korean politics. We investigate democratization's impact on this phenomenon by examining the provincial distribution of legislative and presidential voting from 1971–2002. We employ a new indicator for personality‐based disproportionality, apply it to election outcomes at the provincial level, and find that the electoral impact of regionalism has changed over time across regimes, provinces, and political personalities. We find that regional voting disproportionality 1) increased immediately after transition; 2) has varied depending on personality and type of election; 3) is indeed low in provinces traditionally labeled as neutral; and 4) increased in the 2000 legislative election while declining in the 2002 presidential election.     

Market reactions to announcements of corporate downsizing actions and implementation strategies

This study examines the effects of downsizing actions and implementation strategies on market performance. While downsizing actions reduce costs, they also produce a loss of valuable human capital that can exceed the benefits resulting from the lay‐offs. In support of this argument, the results showed that downsizing had a negative effect on market returns and the effects grow increasingly negative with larger downsizing actions. However, the market reacts more positively to downsizing actions when reallocation strategies are used and to large downsizing actions when disengagement incentives are applied. The results of this research suggest the importance of carefully managing valuable resources to create positive returns. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A fuzzy logic-driven multiple knowledge integration framework for improving the performance of expert systems

To maintain a high performance in an ill-structured situation, expert systems should depend on multiple sources of knowledge rather than a single type. For this reason, we propose multiple knowledge integration by using a fuzzy logic-driven framework. Types of knowledge being considered here are threefold: machine, expert and user. Machine knowledge is obtained by a back- propagation neural network model from historical instances of a target problem domain. Expert knowledge is related to interpreting the trends of external factors that seem to affect the target problem domain. User knowledge represents a user’s personal views about information given by both expert knowledge and machine knowledge. The target problem domain of this paper is one-week-ahead stock market stage prediction: Bull, Edged-up, Edged-down, and Bear. Extensive experiments with real data proved that the proposed fuzzy logic-driven framework for multiple knowledge integration can contribute significantly to improving the performance of expert systems. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

To Ban or Not to Ban: Foreign Lobbying and Cross‐National Externalities

This paper studies the costs and benefits of foreign lobbying. We show how and when foreign lobbying can help internalize cross‐national externalities. We argue that this is an often overlooked benefit of foreign lobbying. We also study under what conditions a constitutional rule banning foreign lobbying is in the national interest of a country. A key factor in this calculus is whether the interests of foreign lobby groups and domestic unorganized groups coincide or not. We illustrate the logic with examples from trade policy and environmental regulation.     

Hang on to Your Ego: The Moderating Role of Leader Narcissism on Relationships Between Leader Charisma and Follower Psychological Empowerment and Moral Identity

We develop and test a process model demonstrating how leader charisma and constructive and destructive forms of narcissism interact to influence follower psychological empowerment and moral identity, using survey data from 667 direct reports of leaders from 13 different industries. Study results revealed that leader narcissism moderates the relationship between leader charisma and follower psychological empowerment such that when leaders possess a more constructive and less destructive narcissistic personality, their charisma has a stronger positive relationship with follower psychological empowerment. Study results also revealed that follower psychological empowerment mediates the differential interactive effects of leader charisma and constructive and destructive narcissism on follower moral identity. Implications of these results for future theory development, research, and practice are discussed.