Effects of degrees of acceptance and awareness on a rate system for lowering mobile bills

South Korea has the highest mobile bills among the OECD countries, and there is strong public demand in the country to reduce expenditure amounts. In response, the South Korean government and mobile carriers have implemented measures such as a “Smart Choice Service,” data-centered plan, and 20% discount scheme in order to reduce mobile bills. However, it is unclear whether these systems have actually led to such a reduction. The present study analyzes quantitatively how people's acceptance and awareness toward rate systems reduce or do not reduce mobile bills, based on the results of a survey conducted here. More specifically, to solve the endogeneity problem of saving behavior's effect on mobile bills, the study adopts the instrumental variables of degree of acceptance and awareness of systems relating to mobile bills. The results show that acceptance and awareness of the system do affect savings behavior and thus mobile bills. If the degree of savings behavior (affected by acceptance and awareness) goes up one step on a seven-point Likert-type scale, there is an average 8.28% savings effect on mobile bills. Thus, this study shows that degrees of acceptance and awareness of the rate system do affect mobile bills.     

Labour market consequences of a high school diploma

This article compares the labour market outcomes of high school dropouts to high school graduates who did not enrol into higher education, but immediately entered the labour market. Using parental educational background as an instrument on a rich administrative dataset in the Flemish Region of Belgium, we find no returns to a high school diploma on average. However, these results hide considerable heterogeneity by gender and educational track. While females and individuals in vocational education may benefit from a diploma, male graduates and students holding a general education diploma may even be worse off on the labour market than dropouts. We show that sectoral heterogeneity acts as an underlying mechanism in the returns to a high school diploma.     

Modeling complex systems

Empirical observations suggest that linear dynamics are not an adequate representation of ecological systems and that a realistic representation would require adoption of complex nonlinear dynamical systems with characteristics encountered in complex adaptive systems (CAS). Adequate modeling should include and combine elements, such as strategic interactions among economic agents, nonconvexities induced by nonlinear feedbacks, separate spatial and temporal scales and modeling of spatiotemporal dynamics, and allowance of alternative time scales. Ignoring these characteristics might obscure very important features that we observe in reality, such as bifurcations and irreversibilities or hysteresis. As a consequence, the design of policies that do not take CAS characteristics into account might lead to erroneous results and undesirable states of managed economic–ecological systems.     

Facets of Trust in Relationships – A Literature Synthesis of Highly Ranked Trust Articles

This article offers a literature synthesis of 800 highly ranked trust articles published between 1966 and 2006. The literature synthesis is a tool for the development of a general trust model. The empirical findings support eight main clusters gained from forty identified key variables and three trust interaction types: trust between persons, trust between organizations, and trust between a person and an organization.     

Graphics for the Minimal Sufficient Cause Model

Graphical representations of causation have been usedfor at least seventy years, and the modern developmentof directed acyclic graphs to portray causal systemscontinues the trend. It is sometimes difficult tounderstand, however, what it is about these diagramsthat is `causal'. The approach to causal graphicsthat is taken here is to base the development ofgraphics on the concepts of an underlying causaltheory, the minimal sufficient cause model. Thisleads to defining a Boolean `and' for arrows thatrepresent causal pathways, and a Boolean `or' forcollections of pathways. Complementation is a morecomplex operation in the minimal sufficient causetheory than simply inverting the sense of a causalrelationship, and this also is represented in thegraphics. By using diagrams that are more faithful tounderlying causal systems, and using a coherent causaltheory, both the perception of causation and itsanalysis might be enhanced.     

组织公民行为和反生产行为前因变量的对比研究

组织公民行为指有益于组织,但在组织正式的薪酬体系中尚未得到明确或直接确认的行为。反生产行为是指从组织角度来看,员工有意违背所在组织合法利益的任何行为。作为组织环境下性质截然不同的两种个体行为,已引起国内外众多学者的研究兴趣。本文拟对组织公民行为和反生产行为的研究进行文献回顾,综合对比分析两者前因变量的异同,展望未来该领域的研究重点,以期为管理实践提供参考依据。     

Stochastic Cooperative Games: Superadditivity, Convexity, and Certainty Equivalents

This paper extends the notions of superadditivity and convexity to stochastic cooperative games. It is shown that convex games are superadditive and have nonempty cores, and that these results also hold in the context of NTU games. Furthermore, a subclass of stochastic cooperative games to which one can associate a deterministic cooperative game is considered. It is shown that such a stochastic cooperative game satisfies properties like nonemptiness of the core, superadditivity, and convexity if and only if the corresponding deterministic game satisfies these properties.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Number: C71.     

Interindustry wage differentials in dummy variable models

Normalized interindustry wage differentials à la Krueger and Summers [Krueger, A.B., Summers, L.H., 1988. Efficiency wages and the inter-industry wage structure. Econometrica 56, 259–293] derive from a general specification of wage equations with dummy variables which cannot be directly estimated. This note illustrates how they can be obtained from the coefficients of a more specific parameterization and how their estimated variances can be transformed accordingly.     

The Effect of Corporate Status on External Audit Fees: Evidence From the UK

Abstract:  This paper simultaneously examines, for the first time, the determinants of external audit fees of UK companies drawn from the quoted sector (Main Market, the Alternative Investment Market and Ofex), and the unquoted sector (public and private limited companies). The paper also provides new evidence on the effects of corporate failure and the persistence of the big four and mid-tier auditor premiums across the public and private corporate sectors. After controlling for firm size, audit risk and complexity, we find that quoted and unquoted public limited companies have significantly higher audit fees than their private limited counterparts. Our estimates imply that relative premiums for market/corporate form are as follows: Main Market over AIM, 6.8%; AIM over Ofex, 19.5%; Ofex over unquoted plc, 15.5%; and unquoted plc over private, 16.7%. However, despite indications in prior US research to the contrary, we find no evidence that insolvent firms that failed were charged higher audit fees in the year preceding failure. A positive relationship is also found between audit and consultancy fees – a result that persists using an instrumental variables approach to control for endogeneity.