BIASED INFORMATION AND EFFORT

We study the impact of information manipulation by a principal on the agent's effort. In a context of asymmetric information at the principal's advantage, we test experimentally the principal's willingness to bias (overestimate or underestimate) the information she/he gives to her/his agent on her/his ability in order to motivate her/him to exert more effort. We find that (1) principals do bias information, and (2) agents trust the cheap‐talk messages they receive and adjust their effort accordingly. Therefore, biased messages improve both the agent's performance and thus the principal's profit. This, however, does not increase efficiency. We also find that overestimation occurs much more often than underestimation. Making the signal costly in an additional treatment reduces this effect. (JEL D83, C92, M12)     

Conformists & mavericks: introducing IT-enabled plurilingual pedagogy informed by the CEFR in high school French immersion

This exploratory case study investigates pathways taken by a Canadian French immersion high school teacher invested in pedagogical change. To fairly evaluate the successfulness of her attempt to effect change, Cummins’ ‘framework of coercive and collaborative relations of power manifested in macro- and micro-interactions’ was employed. Its use shed light on the structural adaptations needed for the innovation she was attempting to introduce to succeed. The teacher wanted to introduce plurilingual pedagogy informed by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) into a French-medium content-based course by drawing on student ease with using technology such as i-Movie. The findings gained through an analysis of classroom-based observation, interviews, documents and artefacts suggest the structural challenges she faced led her to make decisions at odds with her beliefs and goal of implementing innovative pedagogy (she modified a key aspect of a social justice task). They further suggest a mismatch between what she anticipated student reactions to the innovation would be as compared to their actual reactions. Students welcomed the chance to draw on their out-of-school digital knowledge to reflect their (linguistic) identity through their work, suggesting IT-enabled plurilingual pedagogy informed by the CEFR merits further exploration.     

WELL‐INFORMED INTERMEDIARIES IN STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION

A privately informed sender may influence the decision maker through an intermediary who is better informed than him. I assume that the objective sender and intermediary pass on their best information, while the biased ones prefer a particular action but also have reputational concerns. I show that the biased intermediary selectively incorporates the sender's information to push his agenda, and his truth‐telling incentives always decrease in those of the biased sender. Hence, measures making it more costly for the sender to lie worsen the biased intermediary's distortion, and may make the decision maker strictly worse off. (JEL C70, D82, M31)     

The Resistible Rise of Sarah Palin: Continuity and Paradox in the American Right Wing1

Sarah Palin clearly holds a powerful appeal for a right‐wing constituency although even her most fervent followers may doubt that she is electable. This article examines the basis of her appeal. We argue that it can be summed up as an appeal to American authenticity, which consists of several elements: the valorization of small town ordinary life takes second place to faith and religious commitment; an equal faith in American exceptionality implies that Americans should never be apologetic about their country and never waver in their belief in its special greatness; the final elements are a foundational libertarian creed and a peculiar brand of right‐wing populism. However, for all her affinities with classical right‐wing sentiment, Sarah Palin, we argue, brings something new to the mix: a genuinely maverick right‐wing feminism. That is why in the end, we call the Palin phenomenon a paradoxical one.     

Resistance Is Not Futile: Liberating Captain Janeway from the Masculine‐Feminine Dualism of Leadership

相似文献   

Stopped in our tracks: From ‘giving an account’ to an ethics of recognition in feminist praxis

When the Western Australian government announced in 2010 that Indigenous people would be compensated for unpaid wages, a Yindjibarndi woman named Bigali Hanlon submitted an application to access her government files so that she could lodge a claim. At the age of four, Bigali was taken from her home in Mulga Downs, Western Australia to live in a church‐run hostel for ‘fair‐skinned’ Indigenous children until she was sent into indentured domestic service as a teenager. Three large files document her history. These files, combined with in‐depth interviews, and a film about Bigali and other Indigenous Australian people, Walking Tracks Back Home, form the basis of this article. In reflecting on the issues raised by Bigali's story, we draw on feminist writing on the costs associated with being called to give an account of oneself, considering how listening might form the basis of an ethics of recognition in feminist praxis.     

McCance‐Katz urges school reopenings

During a week when more and more schools decided not to open up classes for this fall, concerns about the welfare of children isolated at home, without the benefit of their peers or teachers, mounted as well. Elinore McCance‐Katz, M.D., Ph.D., assistant secretary for mental health and substance abuse of the Department of Health and Human Services, opined in USA Today that not opening schools would harm the mental health of children. In the limelight due to many changes in substance use disorder treatment due to the pandemic, McCance‐Katz sided with President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in saying that ignoring these casualties would harm children more than the risks of COVID‐19. The schools should reopen, and parents should decide for themselves whether they want their children to attend, she wrote.     

Exploring How an Elementary Teacher Plans and Implements Social Studies Inquiry

Social studies continues to be marginalized in elementary grades, yet the C3 Framework and its Inquiry Arc offer possibilities for high-quality elementary social studies instruction. However, the C3 Framework requires that teachers possess an adequate understanding of how to implement inquiry within the various social studies disciplines, which we argue is an aspect of the pedagogical content knowledge necessary for effective elementary social studies instruction. This single-case study follows an elementary teacher through her use of the C3 Framework, Inquiry Arc, and a related curriculum approach called the Inquiry Design Model as she conceptualized, planned, and implemented inquiries in her fifth-grade classroom. By incorporating this new knowledge into her existing understanding of social studies pedagogy, as well as her knowledge of her students and specific educational context, the teacher was able to successfully navigate some of the challenges associated with implementing social studies inquiry in elementary classrooms.     

Young women who underwent induced abortion

Premarital sex is becoming increasingly more common in China. As a result, there is a greater need for pregnancy termination, often in very young women. This paper presents case vignettes of 4 Chinese women who were forced, by a variety of circumstances, to undergo induced abortion. C, a 23-year-old shop assistant, was planning marriage and had obtained housing when she discovered she was pregnant. However, her shop manager, whose sexual advances she had spurned, refused to give her a letter of reccommendation for a marriage certificate. M came from the countryside to Shanghai, hoping that through her work as a maid, she would be able to amass modern possessions such as a television and stereo. When this proved impossible on her wage of 40 yuan/month, she engaged in prostitution for 10 yuan/night and did not even know the name of the man who impregnated her. W, a 13-year-old aspiring actress, found that having sexual relations with the director of her theater troupe was the only way to get a leading role. She won the role, but was unable to perform due to her pregnancy. B, a college woman, planned to marry when she learned she was pregnant but broke off the relationship when she discovered the extent of her financee's possessiveness. She became engaged to another man, but he rejected her when she revealed that she was not a virgin. These vignettes demonstrate the extent to which modernization has placed Chinese women in complex psychological situations as they struggle to liberate themselves from traditionalism.     

GENDER MATCHING AND COMPETITIVENESS: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE

This paper experimentally investigates if and how people's competitiveness depends on their own gender and on the gender of people with whom they interact. Participants are given information about the gender of the co‐participant they are matched with, they then choose between a tournament or a piece rate payment scheme, and finally perform a real task. As already observed in the literature, we find that significantly more men than women choose the tournament. The gender of the co‐participant directly influences men's choices (men compete less against other men than against women), but only when the gender information is made sufficiently salient. A higher predicted competitiveness of women induces more competition. Giving stronger tournament incentives, or allowing the participants to choose the gender of their co‐participant, increases women's willingness to compete, but does not close the gender gap in competitiveness. (JEL C70, C91, J16, J24, J31, M52)     

Detecting Two-Spirit erotics: The fiction of Carole laFavor

ABSTRACT

This article examines the life and novels of Carole laFavor, arguing for her importance to and influence in Two-Spirit studies. Along with being a writer, laFavor was a powerful voice for social justice and Indigenous health sovereignty in Minnesota and the nation. Her two novels, Along the Journey River and Evil Dead Center, which both focus on Anishinaabe lesbian detective protagonist Renee LaRoche, are the first lesbian detective fiction published by a Native author. Renee's embrace of a specifically Two-Spirit erotics anchors her to family and brings her tribal community a powerful healing when she employs her skills to protect her people from instances of racism, abuse, and injustice. This article, then, reads these novels as the first of an emerging genre of texts that claim an overtly Two-Spirit erotic as well as vital precursors to the present embrace of sovereign erotics in Indigenous studies.     

Portraits and collaborations: a reflection on the work of Wendy Ewald

This reflection on the work of Wendy Ewald as a photographer, storyteller and teacher highlights Ewald's methodology, her manner of presenting work and her images. First, in describing Ewald's artistic practice, I discuss the innovative ways she collaborates with children, sharing control over the process of visually representing children's lives, their stories and their faces. I also describe her influence as an educator and suggest that researchers as well may benefit from Ewald's approach to exploring individuals' social realities. Next, I propose that Ewald's body of work provides a rich source of material for those interested in the analysis of visual culture. As an example, I focus on Ewald's American Alphabets, which presents four visual alphabets and deals with questions of identity and language. The collaborative images simultaneously address and raise sociological questions and offer a compelling visual example of the confluence of gender, race and social class. I finish with a discussion of Ewald's two latest collaborations—In Peace and Harmony: Carver Portraits in Richmond, Virginia and Towards a Promised Land from Margate, England. In these new works, Ewald places larger‐than‐life portraits in symbolically meaningful public spaces. Her public art involves a complicated and conceptual exploration of context.     

Keynote Address: Making Campuses Safer Communities for Students

As a chief spokesperson for a national movement to prevent violence and a frequent speaker in national media and public forums, Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith is a nationally recognized public health leader. In 1987, she was appointed the first woman Commissioner of Public Health for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In that role, she established the first Office of Violence Prevention in a state department of public health, expanded prevention programs for HIV/AIDS, and increased drug treatment and rehabilitation programs. Dr. Prothrow-Stith currently serves as Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Professor of Public Health Practice at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and founding director of the Division of Public Health Practice.

Dr. Prothrow-Stith supports the application of rigorous scientific methods to strengthen violence prevention programs. She developed and wrote The Violence Prevention Curriculum for Adolescents, a forerunner of violence prevention curriculum for schools and communities. She is the author of Deadly Consequences, the first book to present the public health perspective on violence to a mass audience. She has authored and co-authored more than 80 publications on medical and public health issues.

Dr. Prothrow-Stith was the keynote speaker for the annual meeting of American College Health Association in May 2006. The Editors of The Journal of American College Health have revised her speech to share her comments in this issue and thought her words would be a proper introduction to the ACHA White Paper on Domestic Violence.     

Adolescents Prefer More Immediate Rewards When in the Presence of their Peers

Adolescents take more risks in the presence of their peers, but the mechanism through which peer presence affects risky decision‐making is unknown. We propose that the presence of peers increases the salience of the immediate rewards of a risky choice. The current study examined the effect of peer presence on reward sensitivity in a sample of 100 late adolescents ages 18 through 20 (M=18.5) using a delay discounting task, which assesses an individual's preference for immediate versus delayed rewards. Participants were randomly assigned to complete the task alone or with 2 same‐age, same‐sex peers observing. Consistent with our prediction, adolescents demonstrated a greater preference for immediate rewards when with their peers than when alone. Heightened risk taking by adolescents in the company of their friends may be due in part to the effect that being with one's peers has on reward sensitivity.     

SATISFICING AND PRIOR‐FREE OPTIMALITY IN PRICE COMPETITION

We apply a model of satisficing to oligopoly markets with price competition. Sellers have profit aspirations reflecting their conjectures about their competitors' behavior and search for a price guaranteeing these aspirations. Because it seems implausible that people have detailed priors on the others' actions, we postulate that sellers entertain multiple conjectures to which no probabilities can be assigned. This allows us to propose a theory of “prior‐free” optimality and to examine experimentally whether people comply with it. We find that decision makers have difficulties in making prior‐free optimal choices. Most are content to just satisfice, although ways to aspire to more ambitious profits were obviously available. (JEL C92, C72, D43)     

“A Woman's Nature is Like a Great House Full of Rooms”: Edith Wharton's Personal and Fictional Representation of Homes

ABSTRACT

All of her life, the turn-of-the-century American novelist Edith Wharton was extremely sensitive to her environment. This preoccupation resulted in a professional interest in houses and their interior decoration. She created homes for herself, both in America and in France, in which she ensured the conditions for the development of her authorship. She moreover published books in which she expressed her opinions on how a home should be constructed and decorated, which contributed to her reputation as a professional author, but also as an intellectual, a connoisseur, and a cosmopolitan. The average American bourgeois home, which she abhorred, formed a source of inspiration for her literary imagery in the depiction of characters who find themselves entrapped in patriarchal society.     

ENDOGENOUS TIMING IN CONTESTS WITH DELEGATION

We study two‐player contests in which each player hires a delegate, and the delegates decide endogenously when to expend their effort. First, we look closely at the delegates' decisions on when to expend their effort, given contracts between the players and the delegates, and look at the players' decisions on their contracts. Then, we compare the outcomes of the endogenous‐timing framework with those of the simultaneous‐move framework. We show that the higher‐valuation player offers her delegate greater contingent compensation than her opponent, the delegate of the higher‐valuation player chooses his effort level after observing his counterpart's, the equilibrium expected payoff of the delegate of the higher‐valuation player is greater than that of his counterpart, and economic rent for each delegate exists. We show that, in the endogenous‐timing framework, each player offers her delegate better contingent compensation, each delegate's expected payoff is greater, and each player's expected payoff is smaller, as compared with the simultaneous‐move framework. (JEL D72)     

A Bionian Reading of the Mother in Anne Enright’s The Green Road

ABSTRACT

Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015a) centers on the mother, Rosaleen. When she leaves her children and her home in the West of Ireland to walk the Green Road, Rosaleen asks herself, “Where did it begin?,” which is “more a cadence than a question” (p. 259). Her journey echoes that described by Wilfred Bion, with reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “like one that on a lonesome road, doth walk in fear and dread” (Bion, 1970, p. 46). Rosaleen is attempting to escape the feeling that she does not exist. As she travels, reality gives way to fantasy as time and space appear to merge. Eventually, she is frightened to turn back because “she had fallen into the gap” (Enright, 2015a, p. 266). This may be read as the emotional state of transformation in O. Bion (1970, p. 43) exhorts us to forget what we think we know: memory, desire, and understanding. Applying this to a consideration of Rosaleen, whose children know her by so many names (“Mammy,” “Mama,” “Ma,” “Rosaleen,” and “Dark Rosaleen”), provides for an exploration, alongside Rosaleen, not of who she was in the past or who we might wish her to be but beyond preconceived ideas of Irish motherhood to a place where new meaning may emerge.     

STEREOTYPE THREAT AND THE STUDENT‐ATHLETE

Achievement gaps may reflect the cognitive impairment thought to occur in evaluative settings (e.g., classrooms) where a stereotyped identity is salient (i.e., stereotype threat). This study presents an economic model of stereotype threat that reconciles prior evidence on how student effort and performance are influenced by this social‐identity phenomenon. This study also presents empirical evidence from a framed field experiment in which students at a selective college were randomly assigned to a treatment that primed their awareness of a negatively stereotyped identity (i.e., student‐athlete). This social‐identity manipulation reduced the test‐score performance of athletes relative to non‐athletes by 12%. These negative performance effects were concentrated among male student‐athletes who also responded to the social‐identity manipulation by attempting to answer more questions. (JEL I2, C9, D0)     

Nineteen‐Month‐Olds' Understanding of the Conventionality of Object Labels Versus Desires

We assessed 19‐month‐olds' appreciation of the conventional nature of object labels versus desires. Infants played a finding game with an experimenter who stated her intention to find the referent of a novel word (word group), to find an object she wanted (desire group), or simply to look in a box (control group). A 2nd experimenter then administered a comprehension task to assess infants' tendency to extend information to a 2nd person who was not present at the time of learning. Results indicate that infants chose the target object when the 2nd experimenter asked for the referent of the novel label but not when she requested the referent of her desire. These findings demonstrate that 19‐month‐olds understand that words are conventional, but desires are not.