The impact of governance and transparency on firm investment in Vietnam

A large literature asserts a causal relationship between the quality of economic governance and economic performance. However, attempts to establish such a link at an aggregate level have met with considerable methodological criticism. This paper seeks to overcome this limitation. We match a panel of Vietnamese enterprises from 2006 to 2010 with a unique panel dataset measuring sub‐national economic governance to estimate a relationship between local governance and private investment. We do not find a significant relationship between investment and most traditional forms of governance. However, there is one important exception – transparency, especially the public posting of planning documents, is strongly associated with higher investment across a range of different specifications. Our results have significant implications for policy, given the prevailing theory that changes in the quality of local economic governance will spur improved economic performance.     

Making Drones to Kill Civilians: Is it Ethical?

A drone industry has emerged in the US, initially funded almost exclusively for military applications. There are now also other uses both governmental and commercial (in the US and abroad). Many military drones are still being made, however, especially for surveillance and targeted killings. Regarding the latter, this essay calls into question their legality and morality. It recognizes that the issues are complex and controversial, but less so as to the killing of non-combatant civilians. The government using drones for targeted killings maintains secrecy and appeals to non-traditional justifications. Most scholars who assess these killer drone practices support citizen immunity, either by favoring a modified just war theory that prioritizes civilians’ right to life or by challenging official deviations from applicable laws. They accordingly declare such killing immoral if not a war crime. The manufacturers of these killer drones are not themselves the killers, but they are abetters, i.e., sine qua non facilitators. So, I argue that any company concerned about its corporate social responsibility should cease manufacturing them.     

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.     

The nexus between sustainable practices in hotels and future Gen Y hospitality students’ career path decisions

This study explored tertiary hospitality students’ attitudes and overall perceptions about green and sustainable practices; and how these may impact their future career paths in the hotel industry. A thematic analysis with data from 12 semi-structured interviews with students in a hotel management school in Australia was used to identify patterns and interpretive themes. Results revealed positive attitudes among Generation Y hospitality students towards working in a green and sustainable hotel environment. Implications highlight the need for sustainability education in the curriculum of tertiary education providers and strong emphasis on sustainability practices in employee training programs. The results also suggest possible impacts of sustainability practices in recruiting and hiring in the hospitality industry and how this may affect future hospitality employees and leaders.     

Basic needs or comprehensive development: Should the UNDP have a development strategy?

The basic needs strategy turns out, on examination, not to be a development strategy at all. Most versions neglect the most basic of all development needs–the need for structural transformation as well as a quantum jump in modern industry and modern technology. Considerations of equity, indispensable as they are, do not require that consumption goals be placed ahead of all others. A society is entitled to set its priorities for consumption as part of an overall programme for comprehensive change and development, recognizing that a choice may have to be made between the earliest possible attainment of minimum standards of living and a more rapid and secure advance in such standards in future. International agencies should not take strong positions on such matters, and should concentrate their efforts in the areas where their experience and competence lie.     

Post-privatization performance and organizational changes: Case studies from Ghana

A significant number of less developed countries (LDCs), including Ghana, have embraced the World Bank/IMF led economic reforms. Ghana has been implementing these reforms since the early 1980. One of the conditions of the reforms is the privatization of former state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Such privatization activities have however generated debates among academics, practitioners, and policy makers. Research findings so far have been mixed. This paper analyzes the performance of two large privatized companies in Ghana. Both companies have been paraded by the Ghanaian authorities and the international financial community as success stories of privatization. Our objective is to examine how and why these firms have been claimed to be successful. Drawing on the dimensions of the balanced scorecard, we examine the performance of the firms from five main perspectives—financial, customers, internal business process, learning and growth, and the community. The analysis is based on data gathered from diverse sources, namely, semi-structured interviews and discussions with managers of the selected companies and with personnel from key government departments, and analysis of internal and external documents. We conclude that, overall the performance of both organizations improved after privatization under all the performance dimensions examined. These improvements were also accompanied by certain organizational changes, including changes in the accounting and control systems. However we are not claiming that all privatization programs in Ghana have been successful. In fact there are stories in the Ghanaian media of several other privatization failures in the country. Instead what we have demonstrated is the need to explain the performance of privatized firms beyond the myopic macro-level and financial analysis which has been widely adopted by the international financial community and policy makers and we encourage other researchers to adopt such multidimensional approaches.     

NFL 球队围绕质量列队

美式橄榄球比赛中，四分卫在场上与其他球员蜷缩在一起，等候排列地点指令时，总是喜欢在沙子上进行着某种创作，或是画着某种曲线图案。     

A Formal Study of Distributed Meeting Scheduling

Automating routine organizational tasks, such as meeting scheduling, requires a careful balance between the individual (respecting his or her privacy and personal preferences) and the organization (making efficient use of time and other resources). We argue that meeting scheduling is an inherently distributed process, and that negotiating over meetings can be viewed as a distributed search process. Keeping the process tractable requires introducing heuristics to guide distributed schedulers' decisions about what information to exchange and whether or not to propose the same tentative time for several meetings. While we have intuitions about how such heuristics could affect scheduling performance and efficiency, verifying these intuitions requires a more formal model of the meeting schedule problem and process. We present our preliminary work toward this goal, as well as experimental results that validate some of the predictions of our formal model. We also investigate scheduling in overconstrained situations, namely, scheduling of high priority meetings at short notice, which requires cancellation and rescheduling of previously scheduled meetings. Our model provides a springboard into deeper investigations of important issues in distributed artificial intelligence as well, and we outline our ongoing work in this direction.