Negligence,capture, and dependence: safety regulation of the design of India’s Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor

This article contributes a case study of regulation of the design of India’s Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR). This reactor is the first of its kind in India, and perceived by the nuclear establishment as critical to its future ambitions. Because fast breeder reactors can experience explosive accidents called core disruptive accidents whose maximum severity is difficult to contain, it is difficult to assure the safety of the reactor’s design. Despite the regulatory agency’s apparent misgivings about the adequacy of the PFBR’s design, it eventually came to approve construction of the reactor. We argue that the approval process should be considered a case of regulatory failure, and examine three potential factors that contributed to this failure: institutional negligence, regulatory capture, and dependence on developers and proponents for esoteric knowledge. This case holds lessons for nuclear safety regulation and more generally in situations where specialized, highly technical, knowledge essential for ensuring safety is narrowly held.     

Neo‐Rawlsian Fringes: A New Approach to Market Segmentation and New Product Development*

Prior research into the link between new product development and market segmentation has focused on two main approaches: (1) design, segment, and do limited competitive evaluation; and (2) segment first, design second. This paper proposes a third approach, which is to simultaneously design, perform segmentation according to benefit and to evaluate against competitive designs. This research uses a benefit segmentation technique based on conjoint analysis (or other techniques that relate product attributes to consumer utility) in which the segments emerge simultaneously with the design based on certain design principles or “strategies.” Herein a method is proposed to narrow down the many possible feasible designs (combinations of attributes) to a finite set and to examine the appeal of each design. Five distinct design strategies are proposed for modeling and studying competitive reaction. These include “traditional” ones such as differentiation and new ones whose fringe customers have high utility. The paper shows that these five strategies are adequate for modeling competitive reaction using simulation. Another contribution of the paper is the way competitive reaction is modeled. In generating and evaluating a design the desire herein is also to assess the defensibility of the design and include it in the evaluation criteria. These issues are addressed by decomposing the solution procedure into two phases. In the first phase, different optimal designs are created based on predefined product development strategies. In the second, these optimal designs are compared against one another with regard to market share and potential to secure market leadership. This work shows that the nature of competition as well as the variability of customer preferences are critical to how a strategy performs. This process uncovers a surprisingly robust design strategy—developing attributes such that a “lower fringe” is most satisfied—that even achieves market dominance under certain conditions. This methodology is also applied to partworth data on refrigerators, which provides a concrete example of the concepts and demonstrates results consistent with the propositions developed earlier in the paper.     

Equity and efficiency effects of redistributive policies

How do various forms of redistribution affect the distributions of earnings and consumption and their intergenerational mobility? Do redistributive policies enhance efficiency by mitigating market imperfections? Or do they create a trade-off between equity and efficiency? To address these issues, a dynamic general equilibrium model is constructed and solved numerically. The effects of the degrees of targeting of money transfers and educational transfers and the relative performance of the two types of transfers are examined.     

Engines of Liberation

Electricity was born at the dawn of the last century. Households were inundated with a flood of new consumer durables. What was the impact of this consumer durable goods revolution? It is argued here that the consumer goods revolution was conducive to liberating women from the home. To analyse this hypothesis, a Beckerian model of household production is developed. Households must decide whether or not to adopt the new technologies, and whether a married woman should work. Can such a model help to explain the rise in married female labour-force participation that occurred in the last century? Yes.     

The Need for Japanese Firms to Formalise Ethical Business Practises

Since the Second World War, Japanese firms have gone from being ridiculed in the West for poor quality products to being highly praised and imitated for their success in manufacturing innovation, quality standards and management philosophy. Arguably, however, one area in which Japanese firms can be said to lag behind their western counterparts is in the development and articulation of policies mandating ethical business practices. In its own markets, but particularly abroad, Japanese business has been accused of a variety of ethical shortcomings, including racial and sexual discrimination, bribery, environmental irresponsibility and the flouting of local laws and customs. This article will consider the reasons for the apparent lag in conduct, examine the issues involved, consider the likelihood of imminent change and offer some personal observations on the subject.     

Outlet ownership in franchising systems: an agency based approach

Building on prior agency theoretic explanations of the franchisor–franchisee relationship, this paper introduces the franchise system manager in the traditional dyadic channel. This allows us to link the franchisors internal agency problems of providing incentives to managers to their external agency problems of acquiring and extracting rents from franchisees. I find preliminary empirical support for this approach in a structural equations model estimated on a franchise system data set. I then develop and analyze an agency‐theoretic model with agency tradeoffs. An explicit rationale for mixed ownership in franchising emerges from the model, where the share of company owned outlets is endogenously determined as the tradeoff between franchisee rents and managerial compensation. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ethical Decision Making: Panama–United States Differences in Consumer and Marketing Contexts

ABSTRACT

Results show that significant differences, both statistical and practical, exist between Panamanians and U.S. nationals in how they intend to behave in various consumption-related and marketing-related ethical situations. As cross-national marketing increases, the need to understand marketing and consumer ethics across countries becomes more critical. Additionally, as Robertson, Brady, and Hoffman (2001) Robertson, C. J., Brady, M. K. and Hoffman, J. J. 2001. Moral and marketing differences between the United States and Ecuador. International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior, 4(1–2): 75–98.  [Google Scholar] point out, there has been a genuine lack of emphasis in the marketing-related ethics literature in Latin America. This study partially addresses that need by examining and contrasting the intended behaviors in ethical situations of Panamanians and Americans as consumers and marketers. The study contributes to marketing ethics knowledge on several fronts: (i) increasing understanding of ethics of Panamanians in consumer and marketing contexts, (ii) adding to the extant cross-country literature in the area of ethical decision making by consumers, and (iii) incorporating effect sizes, which is very rarely reported, to complement the significance values. Results show that significant differences exist between Panamanians and U.S. nationals in how they intend to behave in various consumption-related and marketing-related ethical situations. Managerial implications are also discussed.     

Efficient Investment in Children

Many would say that children are society's most precious resource. So, how should we invest in them? To gain insight into this question, a dynamic general equilibrium model is developed where children differ by ability. Parents invest time and money in their offspring, depending on their altruism. This allows their children to grow up as more productive adults. First, the efficient allocation is characterized. Next, this is compared with the outcome that arises when financial markets are incomplete. The situation where child-care markets are also lacking is then examined. Additionally, the consequences of impure altruism are analyzed. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D1, D31, D58, I2.     

More on connections between Wishart and matrix GIG distributions

The paper is devoted to relations between the matrix GIG and Wishart distributions. Our basic tool in the first part is a version of the Matsumoto-Yor property for matrix variables. This approach covers the following issues: the Herz identity for the Bessel function of matrix variate argument, characterization of a class of Wishart matrices and linear transformations of the matrix GIG distribution. The Bayesian Wishart model, studied in the second part, gives an alternative definition of the matrix GIG distribution. Such a model is characterized by linearity of conditional expectations and matrix GIG conditional distribution. It is also extended to Bayesian matrix GIG models, in the framework of which an interesting independence property is proved.     

Outsourcing of front-end business processes: Quality,information, and customer contact

We examine the recent supply chain phenomenon of outsourcing front-end business processes in this paper. Few, if any, of the existing theories provide satisfactory explanation for the rapid growth in this area. We use a model proposed by Sridhar and Balachandran [Sridhar, S.S., Balachandran, B.V. 1997. Incomplete information, task assignment, and managerial control systems. Manage. Sci. 43(6), 764–778] to determine the factors that might contribute to this phenomenon. Our analysis reveals that the ability of the vendor to forecast the task environment without bias and to gain sophistication in interpreting contract terms might make the firm indifferent between outsourcing and retaining front-end processes in-house. We validate our findings against the work of Apte and Mason [Apte, U.M., Mason, R.O., 1995. Global disaggregation of information-intensive services. Manage. Sci. 41(7), 1250–1262], who develop a theoretical framework to identify criteria for companies to select services to be outsourced. They base their decisions predominantly on the nature of “customer contact.” The combined theories are shown to provide a rich framework for identifying customer-facing tasks that can be outsourced.