The treatment of racial and sexual discrimination in economics journals and economics textbooks: 1972 to 1987

This article examines two decades of scholarly literature on discrimination and two decades of discussion of discrimination in economics textbooks. At first discrimination was taken seriously and policy responses adequate to the problem were advocated. Today this is a minority position. The article first traces the way thatJEL policies concerning indexing and abstracting have contributed to this change. Next textbooks are analyzed to show how this change is manifested in commonly used curricular materials. Finally, political preferences are shown to undergird crucial arguments like those concerning minimum wages. Conclusions linking ideology to research agendas are put forward.     

On the Geometry of Constant Returns

Imports are modeled as a fixed proportion of spending rather than as a function of total or disposable income. With this formulation, the import component of spending shifts must be netted out in order to predict the initial autonomous change in domestic spending. In addition, the formulation should provide a clearer understanding than current formulations of how leakages influence the multiplier process.     

Corporate Control and the Decapitalization of Subsidiary Corporations: The Looting of the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is examined from the perspective of experimental methods in economics and complex adaptive systems simulations. This paper first discusses the justice principle selection process in Rawls's representation of it as a hypothetical experiment. This hypothetical experiment fails to satisfy reasonable experimental controls, particularly as reflects the conception of the individual it employs. The second section of the paper discusses the differences between Rawls's two conceptions of rational persons associated with his distinction between thin and full theories of the good. The third section uses his fuller conception of rational persons, life plans, and psychological laws in the third part of the book to offer an alternative view of the selection process understood as a complex adaptive system. The fourth section turns to a topic raised by this complex system approach, the status of normative reasoning in political-economic systems. The fifth section summarizes.     

Self-interest, sympathy and the origin of endowments

We explore whether the recent laboratory findings that suggest the origin of endowment matters in simple bargaining games are actually due to contextual shifts of relative effort and deservingness. Results support previous findings of endowment origin yielding more self-interested behavior.     

A critical evaluation of alternative methods and paradigms for conducting mediation analysis in operations management research

Mediation as a theory testing approach has witnessed considerable adoption among Operations Management (OM) researchers. Although mediation-testing methods have evolved tremendously in the past decade, their dissemination in the OM field has not seen parallel growth. These advanced techniques facilitate the testing of existing and complex hypotheses in a more precise manner. With the intent of critically evaluating existing and alternative methods for conducting mediation analysis needed to support sophisticated empirical research, this paper first reviews OM studies that tested for mediation in the past eleven years (2002–2012) from top-tier OM journals. Four commonly used mediation approaches were identified. Based on principles of good theory building, type of mediation model, and properties of empirical data, we evaluate the existing methodologies and make recommendations on how to improve the rigor of OM mediation testing. Using published OM studies in top journals as examples, we then illustrate the relevance and advantages of these recommendations, as well as their ease of use. Furthermore, we empirically show that more robust and insightful results can be achieved by adopting these techniques, which in turn have the promise of leading to better theory building and testing in the field of operations management.     

Perception and attitude of Hong Kong hotel guest‐contact employees towards tourists from Mainland China

In recent years, the majority of arrivals to Hong Kong, which were once dominated by the Western and Japanese markets, were replaced by arrivals from Mainland China. The number of tourists from Mainland China has overtaken others to become the largest single market for the territory. With its increasing significance, providing quality service to these visitors becomes crucial to the success of the tourism industry and of the hotel industry in particular. Unfortunately, the satisfaction rating of the Mainland visitors on hotel services in Hong Kong is reported to be relatively low when compared to those given by other major markets. It is suspected that the perception and attitudes of the service staff may influence their behaviour in serving customers. As such, this study conducted a survey questionnaire with 228 guest‐contact employees of hotels in Hong Kong. Results indicate that most respondents have a fairly positive perception towards the Mainland tourists in relation to the economic and financial benefits that they bring to Hong Kong. However, a majority of the respondents express negative perception and attitudes towards these tourists in respect to their appearance, personalities and behaviour. Despite some respondents indicating that they exhibit different service behaviour towards visitors from Mainland China and other countries, no major significant differences in their perception and attitudes were found in this study. It is recommended that various types of cross‐cultural training, such as sensitivity training and role playing, would be helpful to guest‐contact employees in enhancing their ability to be more objective and more tolerant of other people's behaviour. This study concludes that hotel employees, especially those who work as front‐line staff, must remain aware of their subjective judgments when dealing with guests and be more accepting of others. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How Firms Use Director Networks in Setting CEO Pay

We examine how firms use the network of overlapping directorships to determine chief executive officer (CEO) compensation. We contribute to related work by empirically exploring two competing hypotheses. In the first hypothesis, networks propagate relevant information used to establish good pay practices. In the second hypothesis, director networks are used opportunistically to benefit the CEO. The empirical findings are generally consistent with the first hypothesis. Yet, the importance of director networks is reduced when the CEO is entrenched and when management hires a compensation consultant. The latter finding is especially pronounced when director networks predict a reduction in CEO pay.