Does the Delphi process lead to increased accuracy in group-based judgmental forecasts or does it simply induce consensus amongst judgmental forecasters?

We investigate the relative impact of internal Delphi process factors - including panelists' degree of confidence, expertise, majority/minority positioning - and an external factor, richness of feedback - on opinion change and subsequent accuracy of judgmental forecasts. We found that panelists who had low confidence in their judgmental forecast and/or who were in a minority were more likely to change their opinion than those who were more confident and/or in a majority. The addition of rationales, or reasons, to the numeric feedback had little impact upon panelists' final forecasts, despite the quality of panelists' rationales being significantly positively correlated with accurate forecasts and thus of potential use to aid forecast improvement over Delphi rounds. Rather, the effect of rationales was similar to that of confidence: to pull panelists towards the majority opinion regardless of its correctness. We conclude that majority opinion is the strongest influence on panelists' opinion change in both the ‘standard’ Delphi, and Delphi-with-reasons. We make some suggestions for improved variants of the Delphi-with-reasons technique that should help reduce majority influence and thereby permit reasoned arguments to exert their proper pull on opinion change, resulting in forecast accuracy improvements over Delphi rounds.     

The Assimilative and Contrastive Effects of Word-of-Mouth Volume: An Experimental Examination of Online Consumer Ratings

The popularity of online rate-and-review websites has increased the importance of word-of-mouth (WOM) volume (number of ratings) yet the retail literature has not paid adequate attention to understanding its impact. This paper highlights WOM volume as a high-scope, decision-making cue upon which the influence of other WOM-relevant characteristics on a WOM message's persuability depends. We begin, via a pretest, by demonstrating the intuitive expectation that high volume, relative to low volume, accentuates or assimilates perceptions of positivity or negativity of WOM targets. Then, through two experimental studies, we show that depending upon how high volume interacts with WOM consensus and consumer decision precommitment, it can contrast preference away from the valence of a target also. In our third and final experimental study, we demonstrate that consumers differ in their susceptibility to the influence of high volume. Those with a higher desire to be different from others, compared to those with a higher desire to be similar, are resistant to high volume's assimilative sway and do not show the valence-accentuating effects demonstrated in the pretest. Retail managers and researchers should find these insights about the different roles of WOM volume beneficial.     

Guidelines For Pre-College Economics Education: A Critique

While economists of all persuasions undoubtedly agree that universal economic literacy would be desirable, there appears to be substantial disagreement over what economic literacy is, what problems most need to be addressed, and how they can best be solved. These differences are clearly reflected in their diverse views as to what the goals should be for teaching economics in secondary schools. This paper specifically examines the recommendations offered in a paper on economic content standards by leaders of the economic education movement in the U.S. and finds them seriously wanting.     

供应链企业间战略共识如何影响技术创新绩效——知识共享与供应链协同的作用

在动态复杂的市场环境中,企业不仅要重视内部创新力量,同时需要依托外部力量,充分发挥外部知识资源在创新过程中的作用。基于认知行为理论,采用多元层次回归和Bootstrap方法,分析供应链企业间战略共识、知识共享和供应链协同对企业技术创新绩效的作用。结果发现：供应链企业间战略共识对知识共享和企业技术创新绩效具有促进作用;知识共享在供应链企业间战略共识与技术创新绩效间起中介作用;供应链协同正向调节供应链企业间战略共识与知识共享的关系,并正向调节知识共享的中介作用。     

Brief Discussion on News Crisis and Reputation Risk Management in Banking Industry

随着新闻舆论环境的逐步开放,声誉风险管理作为银行全面风险管理体系的重要内容,受到了各家商业银行的普遍关注和重视。本文拟通过对新闻危机与银行声誉风险之间的关系进行实证分析,找寻新闻危机发生的规律以及找出商业银行可采取的应对措施,进而提高商业银行声誉风险掌控能力,确保银行业务和谐稳健发展。     

How to derive consensus among various marketing journal rankings?

Despite the increasing popularity of journal rankings to evaluate the quality of research contributions, the individual rankings for journals that ranked below the top tier of publications usually feature only modest agreement. Attempts to merge rankings into meta-rankings suffer from some methodological issues, such as mixed measurement scales and incomplete data. This paper addresses the issue of how to construct suitable aggregates of individual journal rankings, using an optimization-based consensus ranking approach. The authors apply the proposed method to a subset of marketing-related journals from a list of collected journal rankings. Next, the paper studies the stability of the derived consensus solution, and the degeneration effects that occur when excluding journals and/or rankings. Finally, the authors investigate the similarities/dissimilarities of the consensus with a naive meta-ranking and with individual rankings. The results show that, even though journals are not uniformly ranked, one may derive a consensus ranking with considerably high agreement with the individual rankings.     

Anonymous social influence

We study a stochastic model of influence where agents have “yes” or “no” inclinations on some issue, and opinions may change due to mutual influence among the agents. Each agent independently aggregates the opinions of the other agents and possibly herself. We study influence processes modeled by ordered weighted averaging operators, which are anonymous: they only depend on how many agents share an opinion. For instance, this allows to study situations where the influence process is based on majorities, which are not covered by the classical approach of weighted averaging aggregation. We find a necessary and sufficient condition for convergence to consensus and characterize outcomes where the society ends up polarized. Our results can also be used to understand more general situations, where ordered weighted averages are only used to some extent. Furthermore, we apply our results to fuzzy linguistic quantifiers, i.e., expressions like “most” or “at least a few”.     

Opinion dynamics and wisdom under conformity

We study a dynamic model of opinion formation in social networks. In our model, boundedly rational agents update opinions by averaging over their neighbors’ expressed opinions, but may misrepresent their own opinion by conforming or counter-conforming with their neighbors. We show that an agent׳s social influence on the long-run group opinion is increasing in network centrality and decreasing in conformity. Concerning efficiency of information aggregation or “wisdom” of the society, it turns out that misrepresentation of opinions need not undermine wisdom, but may even enhance it. Given the network, we provide the optimal distribution of conformity levels in the society and show which agents should be more conforming in order to increase wisdom.     

The evolving 5G case study in United States unilateral spectrum planning and policy

This paper tracks increasingly aggressive initiatives by the United States government to reallocate spectrum on an expedited and unilateral basis well before conclusion of inter-governmental coordination. Rather than embrace the customary commitment to achieve consensus on global spectrum allocations at the International Telecommunication Union (“ITU”), the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) has auctioned off large blocks of frequencies for the next generation (“5G”) of wireless services.The FCC might have framed its first 5G auction, reassigning Ultra High Frequency (“UHF”) spectrum, as a one-time deviation from compliance with long standing, intergovernmental coordination procedures. These frequencies have ideal signal propagation characteristics and the Commission could use financial incentives—unavailable in most nations—to expedite “repacking” by incumbent broadcasters willing to move, share or abandon spectrum in exchange for ample financial compensation. However, the FCC has continued to auction off 5G spectrum on grounds that it must find ways to abate an acute shortage of wireless bandwidth and doing so will regain or maintain global leadership in wireless technologies. This paper offers a critical rebuke to unilateral spectrum management, because the short-term benefits expected by the U. S. government likely will be offset by countervailing harms to 5G manufacturers, carriers and consumers. The paper tracks fractious preparation for the ITU's 2019 World Radio Conference by the U.S. delegation and the mixed record achieved there. Additionally, the paper explains how injecting trade, industrial policy and national security issues at the ITU can trigger more delays and disputes, including possible retaliation by nations displeased with U.S. efforts to subvert traditional technology optimization goals.A worst case scenario has the ITU deadlocked and unable to reach closure on “mission critical” spectrum planning issues at World Radio Conferences, convened every four years. The paper concludes that costs and likely challenges to the efficacy and legitimacy of the ITU will reduce the benefits accruing from the FCC's unilateral, spectrum planning campaign.     

共识、合作、自我和谐：构建和谐单位的三重奏

和谐社会是一种理念,是我们社会的追求、目标和共识,包含了团结、公平、共识、理解、包容等观念。单位是社会的细胞,本文从事业、团队和个人三个层面论述了构建和谐单位的着眼点,即事业要发展,团队要合作,心态要阳光,并以激励措施为例,提出了构建和谐单位的一些做法设想。