Party Discipline and Environmental Policy: The Role of “Smoke‐filled Back Rooms”*

We adopt the view that greater party discipline induces legislators to commit to promised policies after being elected. We then develop the hypothesis that the effect of party discipline on the stringency of environmental policy is conditional on the degree of government corruption. Our empirical work suggests that greater party discipline results in more stringent environmental policies when the level of corruption is relatively low, but in weaker policies when the level of corruption is comparatively high.     

A Perspective‐Based Understanding of Project Success

Answering the call for alternative approaches to researching project management, we explore the evaluation of project success from a subjectivist perspective. An in‐depth, longitudinal case study of information systems development in a large manufacturing company was used to investigate how various project stakeholders subjectively perceived the project outcome and what evaluation criteria they drew on in doing so. A conceptual framework is developed for understanding and analyzing evaluations of project success, both formal and informal. The framework highlights how different stakeholder perspectives influence the perceived outcome(s) of a project, and how project evaluations may differ between stakeholders and across time.     

Perceptions of facilitators of a keypad‐based group support system

Organizations are using Group Support Systems (GSSs) to improve the quality of group meetings. Keypad‐based GSSs are a widely used form of this technology, yet there has been little research on their use and effects. This paper reports the findings of a survey of facilitators of a particular keypad GSS. Facilitators indicate that keypad technology improves the quality of meetings for a variety of tasks in a range of group settings and cultures. The findings are in general agreement with field studies of workstation‐based systems.     

国资国企改革典型经验研究与启示——央企和部分省市典型经验对上海“十二五”期间国资国企改革的启示

国有经济和国有企业伴随着中国30年的改革开放，有了重大的变化。中央企业和各省市探索出许多国资国企改革方面值得总结和借鉴的宝贵经验。这些经验也将给上海市“十二五”期间进一步深化国资国企改革带来有益的启示，促进新一轮国资国企的改革发展。     

Economic corollaries of personalized recommendations

The impact of recommendation systems (RSs) on the diversity of consumption is not transparent or well understood. Available studies, whether experimental or theoretical, show inconsistent and even opposite results, which manifests as debate in the literature. In this paper, we investigate the impact of two main recommender systems, neural collaborative filtering and deep content filtering, on sales diversity via a randomized field experiment. Our results confirm the capability of recommender engines in increasing or decreasing aggregate sales diversity. Nonetheless, they amplify homogenization and reduce individual-level consumption diversity. In conclusion, our research reconciles seemingly contradict previous findings and illustrates that the design of the RS is the decisive factor in homogenizing or diversifying product sales.     

Search reduction in hierarchical distributed problem solving

Knoblock and Korf have determined that abstraction can reduce search at a single agent from exponential to linear complexity (Knoblock 1991; Korf 1987). We extend their results by showing how concurrent problem solving among multiple agents using abstraction can further reduce search to logarithmic complexity. We empirically validate our formal analysis by showing that it correctly predicts performance for the Towers of Hanoi problem (which meets all of the assumptions of the analysis). Furthermore, a powerful form of abstraction for large multiagent systems is to group agents into teams, and teams of agents into larger teams, to form an organizational pyramid. We apply our analysis to such an organization of agents and demonstrate the results in a delivery task domain. Our predictions about abstraction's benefits can also be met in this more realistic domain, even though assumptions made in our analysis are violated. Our analytical results thus hold the promise for explaining in general terms many experimental observations made in specific distributed AI systems, and we demonstrate this ability with examples from prior research.This research has been sponsored, in part, by the National Science Foundation under grants IRI-9015423 and IRI-9010645, by the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School, and by a Bell Northern Research Postgraduate Award.     

我国低效资本市场的负面影响及应对策略

长期以来 ,以证券市场为代表的我国资本市场一直处于低效弱效状态 ,这一市场态势已成为当前提升我国金融体系国际竞争力、深化经济体制、社会保障改革与金融市场应对加入WTO的最大障碍。我们的社会各界特别是政府部门应在借鉴外国高效的资本市场监管基础上 ,从立法与政策上采取得力措施进一步完善市场参与主体约束机制 ,改进入市股权所有制成份结构 ,准许国有法人股入市流通 ,健全市场信息披露制度 ,充分发挥市场价值规律 ,形成内在的价格均衡机制 ,降低平均交易成本 ,增强投融资效率 ,从而提高我国的资本市场效率 ,为提高我国金融体系国际竞争力、深化经济体制、社会保障改革 ,为应对加入WTO后的金融环境扫清障碍。     

环境管理新五项制度对我国水污染减排贡献研究

提出了命令-控制型环境保护政策效果定量评估方法,对我国实行环境管理新五项制度的水污染减排贡献开展了研究.结果表明:新五项制度对1981～2008年间我国工业废水累计减排量贡献约为43.3%;在不同地区,新五项制度的工业废水减排贡献存在着较为明显的空间分异特征;除西藏、海南外,各省份的贡献率基本在14.8%～80.5%之间;东北老工业基地的贡献率依次高于东部地区、中部地区和西部地区.这反映了各地区在新五项制度执行上的差异性.     

应用轨迹灵敏度计算临界切除时间的新方法研究

文章提出了一种可以描述故障后系统稳定程度的灵敏度指标,根据系统稳定性逐渐恶化指标趋于零的特点,计算了系统部分参数的临界值;根据稳定指标与故障切除时间在一定范围内的良好线性关系,估算了系统故障临界切除时间;并在单机无穷大系统与10机典型新英格兰系统下进行验证,证明了该方法的正确性。