The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization

Abstract . ‘Savages,’ as Europeans considered the Americans of ancient times, never built the great Mayan centers. The builders of great cities in Meso-America were a well-organized group with an adequate land base and a rather sophisticated technology. From 300 B.C. to 900 A.D. the Maya developed and perfected an agriculture-based economy with a well developed commerce, writing, art, science, religion and government, as well as an advanced architecture of monuments, palaces, temples and pyramids. Their civilization reached intellectual heights unique in the Western Hemisphere. What conditions caused its decline and fall? Interpreting the geographic and historical record in the light of the relevant social sciences, one can say a complex of circumstances: ecological abuse, exploitation of the working population, mismanagement, militarism, bad weather, famines, and epidemics.     

Ranking Research Productivity in Accounting for Asia-Pacific Universities

Using a set of 18 accounting journals and a sub-set of top five journals from 1991 to 2002, we rank the research productivity in accounting for a total of 119 Asia-Pacific universities. For the whole sampling period, the top five universities are the University of New South Wales, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Nanyang Technological University, the University of Sydney, and City University of Hong Kong. A number of prominent universities with long school history are not ranked in the top 20. During the second half of the sampling period, Hong Kong and Singaporean universities have shown the most improvement while some Australian universities have exhibited decline in research output. Also, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology replaces University of New South Wales as the first-ranked university in the period of 1997–2002. When compared with other North American universities, the accounting productivity of the top 20 Asia-Pacific institutions is comparable with that of leading universities in North America. The comparison is even more favorable to the Asia-Pacific universities during the period of 1997–2002.     

ORGANIZATIONAL DECISION-MAKING AS HIERARCHICAL LEVELS OF DRAMA*

In conducting a longitudinal examination of eight long-term complex decision processes in two Fortune 500 heavy manufacturing companies the authors developed a six-level framework of decision complexity. The levels range from: (1) instantaneous decision choices to (2) decision actions (3) decision events (4) mini-decision processes (5) decision processes and (6) decision theatres. They vary in time, numbers of participants, and in the integrative effort required to formulate and implement them. Thus, one problem with the word ‘decision’is that it is used to mean many different things in organizational settings. Each lower level of ‘decision’was found to combine with ‘decisions’of the same level and to be embedded within higher levels, resulting in a nested hierarchy of simultaneously occurring processes.     

Risk aversion and framing effects

We present a new experimental evidence of how framing affects decisions in the context of a lottery choice experiment for measuring risk aversion. We investigate framing effects by replicating the Holt and Laury’s (Am. Econ. Rev. 92:1644–1655, 2002) procedure for measuring risk aversion under various frames. We first examine treatments where participants are confronted with the 10 decisions to be made either simultaneously or sequentially. The second treatment variable is the order of appearance of the ten lottery pairs. Probabilities of winning are ranked either in increasing, decreasing, or in random order. Lastly, payoffs were increased by a factor of ten in additional treatments. The rate of inconsistencies was significantly higher in sequential than in simultaneous treatment, in increasing and random than in decreasing treatment. Both experience and salient incentives induce a dramatic decrease in inconsistent behaviors. On the other hand, risk aversion was significantly higher in sequential than in simultaneous treatment, in decreasing and random than in increasing treatment, in high than in low payoff condition. These findings suggest that subjects use available information which has no value for normative theories, like throwing a glance at the whole connected set of pairwise choices before making each decision in a connected set of lottery pairs.