Workers' Participation in Decision–Making Processes and Firm Stability

This paper argues that firm efficiency and stability, as well as workers' satisfaction, can be achieved through participatory decision–making rules. It offers theoretical rationales and empirical illustrations based on the framing and operation of European works councils. Employees should take part in establishing the rules; otherwise managers will make rules that allow them to retain control of the key points in the decision–making process. In constructing such rules the involvement of unions is required; however, once rules are set union activity becomes marginal. Government intervention remains marginal throughout.     

The graph of Lindahl correspondence as the unique von Neumann-Morgenstern abstract stable set

In this paper, we consider a continuum economy with a finite number of types of agent, and several private and public goods. The main result of the paper is that the graph of the equal-treatment Lindahl equilibria mapping is the unique abstract stable set with respect to the dominance relation in economies with crowding effects introduced by Vasil'ev et al. in 1995. The external stability of this mapping implies that, for any equal-treatment allocation x in , that is not a Lindahl equilibrium, there exists a subeconomy of such that one of its equal-treatment Lindahl allocations blocks x. This result is a counterpart of the theorem of Mas-Colell for Aumann's atomless market with private goods.     

On the theory of cost sharing

This paper investigates efficiency and equitability issues given a cost sharing method in an economy with a public commodity. We study the concept of a -cost share equilibrium and examine the set of all equilibrium allocations. Finally, we devise a mechanism to implement -cost share equilibria as strong equilibria of an associated non-cooperative game.This paper was written while Shlomo Weber was visiting the University of Bonn. Financial support from theSonderforschungsbereich 303 is gratefully acknowledged. We also would like to thank Dieter Bös for valuable comments.     

Rawlsian pricing of access to public facilities: A unidimensional illustration

We consider a setting where citizens using a public facility face an idiosyncratic private access cost and must also contribute to the costs of facility. We show that if the population is uniformly spread over the real line, the cost of a facility is independent of location and access costs are linear in distance, the Rawlsian access pricing is the unique cost sharing solution that satisfies the “core property” of secession-proofness. The latter amounts to the voluntary participation principle under which no group of citizens should be charged more than the cost incurred if it had acted on its own.     

行动学习:只要你去做

正我们需要改革各级教育,包括大学研究,培养个人的创造性思维。我们相信,改革教育以刺激创造性思维可以从研究生和本科生水平的创业教育开始。中国制造了一切——每年生产3.2亿台计算机(全球产出的91%)、1.09亿台空调(80%)、3.20亿盏节能灯(80%)、22吉兆太阳能蓄电池、18亿吨水泥(60%)、0.52亿吨猪肉(50%)、18亿吨煤炭(48%)……同时,从官方数据看,城市工人的年平均工资在过去十年涨了三倍多,因此,一些公司正在将其生产工厂搬到亚洲其他国家。体育用品公司耐克在越南雇佣的工人数量已经超出中国的雇佣人数。一些东南     

Analysis of travel behavior in Arab communities in Israel: a comparison of household surveys

This paper analyzes the main characteristics of travel behavior by the Arab minority community in Israel and discusses two issues related to household travel surveys: data collection among minorities and under-reporting of mid-day trips.Household travel surveys are generally designed and conducted for the majority population and, therefore, lack a proper accounting of minorities and miss many of their less-frequent trips. An alternative approach to conducting household surveys is presented, with the aim of improving data quality for transportation planning. The survey was designed for and conducted in three Arab towns in Israel. The main improvement of the survey involves better interaction between interviewer and interviewee, which should materialize into a relaxed environment that allows for obtaining detailed, reliable results within a reasonable amount of time.The results of the survey employing the alternative approach were compared to a sub-sample of the same towns taken from a regional survey conducted by the regional planning agency at the same time. The paper presents simple statistics on the main variables for each survey. Significant differences are found in the two data sets, mostly regarding the frequency of less frequent, non-home-based trips. A plausible explanation for these differences relates to the more detailed and improved data collected in the new survey.     

Interpreting the sources of market value in a capital goods market: R&D management in industrial sensors

This paper presents an integrated model for evaluating purchasers' perceptions of science-based products. The model combines a new approach to benchmarking, known as technometrics, that provides a quantitative profile of a product's key attributes, with direct and indirect methods for measuring buyers' perceptions regarding the relative importance of product attributes as a source of value. A new measure for the demand orientation is proposed, which shows the extent to which a product's 'supply' of characteristics matches the 'demand' for them in the market place. The model is illustrated using several types of industrial pressure sensors. The paper also demonstrates how the integrated model may be made effective for quality function deployment (QFD) during the R&D phase.     

Evaluating,Comparing, Monitoring,and Improving Representativeness of Survey Response Through R‐Indicators and Partial R‐Indicators

Non‐response is a common source of error in many surveys. Because surveys often are costly instruments, quality‐cost trade‐offs play a continuing role in the design and analysis of surveys. The advances of telephone, computers, and Internet all had and still have considerable impact on the design of surveys. Recently, a strong focus on methods for survey data collection monitoring and tailoring has emerged as a new paradigm to efficiently reduce non‐response error. Paradata and adaptive survey designs are key words in these new developments. Prerequisites to evaluating, comparing, monitoring, and improving quality of survey response are a conceptual framework for representative survey response, indicators to measure deviations thereof, and indicators to identify subpopulations that need increased effort. In this paper, we present an overview of representativeness indicators or R‐indicators that are fit for these purposes. We give several examples and provide guidelines for their use in practice.     

A comparison of ranking,rating and reservation price measurement in conjoint analysis

This paper empirically compares the traditional preference measures of ranking and rating in conjoint analysis with a direct monetary measure of product value — reservation prices. Experimental results are as expected. While reservation prices do very well in terms of fit, they are inferior in terms of predicting choice on a holdout sample. In addition, surprisingly little difference is found in the performance of ranks and ratings.     

The value of PL 480: A fresh look at PL 480, Title II

The main purpose of US Public Law 480 is to make food available to deficit countries on concessional or credit terms by using domestic US agricultural surpluses. Food aid under Title I is intended to provide a resource transfer to resource-poor countries; Title II (Food for Peace) shipments are intended for famine relief, the alleviation of malnutrition, and are generally targeted at the neediest people, especially children, in poor countries. Under Title III, sales proceeds are earmarked for programmes for agricultural development. The following three articles illustrate differing beliefs held about the effectiveness of PL 480 food aid, and particularly the value of Food for Peace. Table 1 shows the total shipments and budgeted acquisitions under Title II.