The decision game: a serious game approach to understanding environmental risk management decisions

Abstract

Here we describe the implementation of an experimental research tool called the Decision Game that we used to collect data on household flood risk management decisions. Participants using this tool play an interactive game that involves making household decisions about place of residence and a variety of household expenditures, including spending on flood insurance and private flood risk mitigation. Participants also answer survey questions before and after playing the game; the pre-game survey collected demographic information, and the post-game survey collected information about participant experiences with flooding and flood mitigation. Online and face-to-face participants showed similar engagement with the experiment, and most participants appeared to have made deliberate and considered decisions about risk mitigation. Online study participants had similar responses to those who participated in person, although face-to-face participants seemed slightly more likely to mitigate against risk. Overall, participants in this research were younger, more educated and more likely to rent a home than the average Canadian. Serious games may be useful for augmenting existing data gathering strategies used in understanding environmental decision making, particularly for rare catastrophic events for which stated preference surveys may be less informative. Serious games allow for sharing a mixture of information with study participants, including maps, video clips, text and even immersive 3D experiences, and can be administered online to increase participation levels. Future research will consider longer duration online experiments and more immersive interaction frameworks.     

Economics at the FTC: Deceptive Claims,Market Definition,and Patent Assertion Entities

In 2015, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) imposed common carriage regulation—so-called Title II requirements—on previously unregulated broadband Internet service providers. The regime shift was premised on the FCC’s findings that such rules had demonstrably yielded economic gains. This paper evaluates the FCC’s empirical arguments and finds them uncompelling. Adjustments for inflation or general economic trends eliminate the effects cited by the FCC. Moreover, contrary to the Commission’s assessment, mobile services and broadband markets have shown notable growth in response to deregulatory events that reduce Title II requirements.     

Impacts of climate change on lower Murray irrigation*

This article evaluates irrigated agriculture sector response and resultant economic impacts of climate change for a part of the Murray Darling Basin in Australia. A water balance model is used to predict reduced basin inflows for mild, moderate and severe climate change scenarios involving 1, 2 and 4°C warming, and predict 13, 38 and 63% reduced inflows. Impact on irrigated agricultural production and profitability are estimated with a mathematical programming model using a two‐stage approach that simultaneously estimates short and long‐run adjustments. The model accounts for a range of adaptive responses including: deficit irrigation, temporarily following of some areas, permanently reducing the irrigated area and changing the mix of crops. The results suggest that relatively low cost adaptation strategies are available for a moderate reduction in water availability and thus costs of such a reduction are likely to be relatively small. In more severe climate change scenarios greater costs are estimated. Adaptations predicted include a reduction in total area irrigated and investments in efficient irrigation. A shift away from perennial to annual crops is also predicted as the latter can be managed more profitably when water allocations in some years are very low.     

Managing radical innovation: an overview of emergent strategy issues

Despite differences in definitions, researchers understand that radical innovation within an organization is very different from incremental innovation , and and that it is critical to the long-term success of firms. Unfortunately, research has also shown that it is often difficult to get support for radical projects in large firms [14], where internal cultures and pressures often push efforts toward more low risk, immediate reward, incremental projects. Interestingly, we know considerably less about the effective management of the product development process in the radical than in an incremental context. The purpose of this study is to explore the process of radical new product development from a strategic perspective, and to outline key observations and challenges that managers face as they move these projects to market. The findings presented here represent the results of a longitudinal (since 1995), multidisciplinary study of radical innovation projects. A multiple case study design was used to explore the similarities and differences in management practices applied to twelve radical innovation projects in ten large, established North American firms. The findings are grouped into three high-level strategic themes. The first theme, market scope, discusses the challenges associated with the pursuit of familiar versus unfamiliar markets for radical innovation. The second theme of competency management identifies and discusses strategic challenges that emerge as firms stretch themselves into new and unfamiliar territory. The final theme relates to the people issues that emerge as both individuals and the project teams themselves try to move radical projects forward in organizations that are not necessarily designed to support such uncertainty.A breadth of subtopics emerge within and across this framework relating to such ideas as risk management, product cannibalization, team composition, and the search for a divisional home. Taken together, our observations reinforce the emerging literature that shows that project teams engaging in radical innovation encounter a much different set of challenges than those typically faced by NPD teams engaged in incremental innovation.     

Studying (Small) businesses with the Michigan Employment Security Commission longitudinal data base

This paper addresses the usefulness of a longitudinal data file constructed from records on employers from the Michigan Employment Security Commission. We describe the main features of the data file, which includes quarterly (and in some cases, monthly) data from the third quarter of 1978 through the first quarter of 1983, plus the fourth quarters of 1983–87. We then illustrate the uses of the data with two examples: (1) studying changes in the Michigan economy, in particular the early growth and survival of new units of different sizes; and (2) studying the behavior of wages and employment following changes in ownership.Judith Connor and Steven Heeringa are primarily responsible for Section II and the Appendix, John Jackson for Section III, and Charles Brown for Section IV.     

Evaluating the Ethics of Inversion

In the last five years, a number of U.S. companies have either moved their locus of incorporation to countries with more favorable tax laws, or announced such moves. Given this trend toward “inversions”, and the polemics that have accompanied it, we offer two ways in which the ethics of such a move can be evaluated. We provide multinational executives with two applications of ethics to inversion: Kant’s deontological theory and the consequentialist perspective of utilitarianism.     

Behavioral agency and corporate entrepreneurship: CEO equity incentives & competitive behavior

Scholars have long studied drivers of entrepreneurial behavior among established firms. Yet little is known about how individual factors shape a firm’s choice to pursue entrepreneurship. We draw on behavioral agency theory to explore the role of equity incentives in driving corporate entrepreneurship. Our findings suggest CEOs avoid corporate entrepreneurial behaviors as their option wealth increases. However industry dynamics also prove to be an important contingency when predicting the effects of both restricted stock and stock options on the likelihood that the CEO engages in corporate entrepreneurship. Our findings provide a theoretical platform for predicting dimensions of entrepreneurial behavior and highlight effects of CEO equity ownership.