Some Cracks in the Empire of Chance (Flaws in the Foundations of Reliability)

Making quantified statements about the uncertainty associated with the lifelength of an item is one of the most fundamental tasks of reliability assessment. Most practitioners routinely do this using one of the several available statistical techniques. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. The first is to give the user an overview of the key tenets of two of the most commonly used parametric approaches. The second is to point out that these commonly used approaches involve strategies that are either ad hoc, or are in violation of some of the underlying tenets. A method that is devoid of logical flaws can be proposed, but this method is difficult to implement. The user must therefore resign to using that technique against which the fewest objections can be hurled.     

自然资源型区域经济和福利协调发展的特点探索——中国榆林市与科威特经济、福利发展的比较

本文通过榆林市与科威特经济、福利发展的比较,探讨了自身资源型区域经济和福利协调发展的特点。就榆林市产业发展来看,目前的问题是中央与地方产权平衡与管理问题;中央对地方的环境补偿援助平衡问题;地方可持续发展经济激励问题;地方群众“根”文化教育与崛起问题。     

Subjective recursive expected utility

We axiomatize a subjective version of the recursive expected utility model. This development extends the seminal results of Kreps and Porteus (Econometrica 46:185–200 (1978)) to a subjective framework and provides foundations that are easy to relate to axioms familiar from timeless models of decision making under uncertainty. Our analysis also clarifies what is needed in going from a represention that applies within a single filtration to an across filtration representation.Part of this research was conducted when Ozdenoren visited MEDS in Fall 2003. We thank Tapas Kundu, Costis Skiadas, Jean-Marc Tallon and Tan Wang for helpful discussions and also thank audiences at Koc University, Northwestern University, the CERMSEM conference “ Mathematical Models in Decision Theory” at Universite Paris I, and the FUR XI conference on foundations and applications of utility, risk and decision theory     

Non-commitment in performance evaluation and the problem of information distortions

Auditing is modeled in a sequential game without commitment. The manager must decide whether and where to audit a worker's output, taking into account all interim information he has obtained. The worker will work just hard enough (and show it) to divert the manager from making an audit or cover up, withholding information about his work to make an audit more difficult. This usually raises the costs of setting work incentives, so incentives are softened, sometimes drastically. Moreover, when a worker's on-the-job information is valuable for entrepreneurial decisions, work incentives must be softened to improve the internal flow of information.     

Revisiting Savage in a conditional world

Summary. I present an axiomatization of subjective expected utility and Bayesian updating in a conditional decision problem. This result improves our understanding of the Bayesian standard from two perspectives: 1) it uses a set of axioms which are weak and intuitive; 2) it provides a formal proof to results on the relation between dynamic consistency, expected utility and Bayesian updating which have never been explicitly proved in a fully subjective framework. Received: December 1, 2000; revised version: February 26, 2001     

阻碍资本外流契约对区域经济的影响

阻碍资本外流契约不仅影响资本优化配置,也削弱代理人在优惠回报契约中的谈判力,从而使区域经济难以实现效用最大化.同时,在存在代理人道德风险的情况下,阻碍资本外流契约所规定的撤资高额违约金会妨碍区域经济总效用最大化的实现.应从制度上消除区域内外资本的等级差别,规定区域融资契约合理的法定有效期,并制定强有力的法律来制止区域融资主体迫使投资者与之签订只体现自己意愿的阻碍资本外流契约.     

Cultural vs. operational market orientation and objective vs. subjective performance: Perspective of production and operations

The relationship between market orientation and organizational performance has been the focus of many studies for the last few years. The conclusions reported are very diverse and even contradictory. This ambiguity is reinforced to some extent by the high degree of methodological heterogeneity in the definition and measure of market orientation and organizational performance and the empirical formalization of the relationship between both concepts. This study tackles this question by comparing different methodological approaches. Three key aspects are considered: (1) cultural and operational approaches for measuring market orientation; (2) objective and subjective measures of performance; and (3) the source of information in the organization, specifically the perspective of production and operations. The results obtained from a sample of Spanish industrial firms show a stronger positive relationship for operational market orientation and subjective performance. Moreover, the adoption of ‘operational recipes’ of market orientation by the production and operations function seems to improve organizational performance regardless of the existence of any cultural support for market orientation.     

Do monetary subjective well-being evaluations vary across space? Comparing continuous and discrete spatial heterogeneity

Using subjective well-being estimations, this study analyzes whether compensating variations vary across space using a cross-sectional data set from Chile. To achieve this goal, it describes and compares two econometric ways of modelling unobserved spatial heterogeneity. Both approaches allow compensating variations to vary across spatial units by assuming some distribution a priori. One method assumes that the spatial heterogeneity can be represented by a discrete distribution (a group of regions that share the same coefficient) and the other that the preferences can be represented by a continuous distribution (each region has a different coefficient). The results show that focusing just on the average estimates of compensating variations, as the applied studies have done so far, masks useful local variation. More empirical studies are needed to assess the advantages and disadvantages of both econometric approaches and how their results compare across a wide range of conditions and samples.     

“With a young spirit,we will be young forever”: Exploring the links between tourism and ageing well in contemporary China

This research explores the entangled relationships between tourism, ageing and well-being in later life. We challenge the universal connotations of old age and “ageing well” and see their relationships with tourism as dynamic processes, in which older people are continuously producing different meanings and fulfilling personal quests over life courses. Using the contextualist and temporal lens, four scenarios of the evolving relationships between tourism and ageing well were identified from the lived experiences and travel histories of 48 Chinese senior travelers. The results demonstrate that how tourism affects ageing well are shaped by senior travellers' early life and travel experiences, the personalised conceptions attached to tourism and well-being, which are indeed complex responses to their personal, social and cultural contexts. This research unveils vivid pictures of Chinese older adults’ leisure lives, and highlights the urgency to develop relevant tourism policies and marketing strategies to cater for their changing needs.     

“This is a holy place of Ama Jomo”: buen vivir,indigenous voices and ecotourism development in a protected area of Bhutan

Common definitions of ecotourism address the need to benefit the well-being of local people; in reality, ecotourism is often supported or dominated by external agents. Local ideological, social and cultural values may be overlooked, thereby disenfranchising local and indigenous stakeholders. This paper examines indigenous perceptions of ecotourism and well-being, and how they relate to ecotourism practices in three Brokpa communities of the first protected area in Bhutan to become a special tourism destination. A range of methods (e.g. semi-structured interviews, participatory mapping) was used and data analysis was couched in the context of buen vivir (living well), an indigenous concept of well-being. Findings indicate that: (1) perceptions of ecotourism vary between community members and contrast with the official park definition; (2) well-being is conceived in diverse ways but corresponds to key features of buen vivir; (3) indigenous worldviews are pervasive, and shape social values and spiritual beliefs in connection to nature; and (4) indigenous cosmologies and traditional values may be strengthened through their integration into modern policies and institutions. This research contributes more non-Western voices to the literature, a concept and mode of analysis for well-being that embraces an indigenous ontology, and empirical insights on indigenous communities in protected areas.