Managing Risk as a Duality of Harm and Benefit: A Study of Organizational Risk Objects in the Global Insurance Industry

This study examines how organizations construct and manage risk objects as a duality of harm–benefit within their normal operations. It moves beyond the existing focus on accidents, disasters and crisis. We study the risk‐transfer processes of 35 insurers where they navigate the tension of retaining risk in their insurance portfolio to increase the benefit of making profit and transferring risk to reinsurance to reduce the harm of paying claims. We show that organizations’ constructions of risk are underpinned by everyday risk management practices of centralizing, calculating and diversifying. Through variation in these practices, not all organizations seek balance and we in turn uncover the sensemaking processes of abstracting and localizing that enable organizations to prioritize harm or benefit. This contributes to the risk literature by illuminating the co‐constitutive relationship between risk sensemaking processes and everyday risk management practices. Following the complex linkages involved in the construction of risk objects as sources of harm–benefit, our analysis also contributes to the literature on dualities. It shows that while immediate trade‐offs between harm–benefit occur, prioritizing one element of the duality is ultimately a means for attaining the other. Thus, while initial imbalance is evident, prioritization can be an enabling approach to navigating duality.     

Merging information for semiparametric density estimation

Summary.  The density ratio model specifies that the likelihood ratio of m −1 probability density functions with respect to the m th is of known parametric form without reference to any parametric model. We study the semiparametric inference problem that is related to the density ratio model by appealing to the methodology of empirical likelihood. The combined data from all the samples leads to more efficient kernel density estimators for the unknown distributions. We adopt variants of well-established techniques to choose the smoothing parameter for the density estimators proposed.     

An experimental test of the predictive power of dynamic ambiguity models

Journal of Risk and Uncertainty - In this paper we report results from an economic experiment where we investigate the predictive performance of dynamic ambiguity models in the gains domain....     

An emerging transnational industrial relations? Exploring the prospects for cross‐border labour bargaining

Global union federations (GUFs) and multinational enterprises (MNEs) have been concluding “international framework agreements” (IFAs) to protect their interests amidst the globalizing economic landscape. By modelling the underlying bargaining processes, the authors show that IFAs can be expected when both sides exhibit risk aversion, although the agreement will favour the less risk‐averse side. Since globalization has created fewer vulnerabilities for MNEs than for GUFs, IFAs have so far typically delivered only minimal benefits for labour. But this should change in the future if strengthened transnational union capacities and abilities to threaten MNEs with reputational costs bring greater equalization of attitudes towards risk.     

Geographic labour mobility and unemployment insurance in Europe

Conventional wisdom suggests that the generous provision of UI in Europe can account for the low regional mobility rates. Emphasizing the disincentive effect, this hypothesis ignores that UI might also have a positive effect by relaxing liquidity constraints in the presence of mobility and search costs. This paper investigates empirically the effect of UI on geographic labour mobility for five European countries. Overall, the findings suggest that receiving benefits is not associated with lower mobility, and they indicate that the effects might vary depending on the institutional characteristics and the incentive structure of the UI system of each country.      

Risk management: a competitive advantage in the purchasing function

This paper aims to explore the purchasing function on behalf of the provider, when the purchasing takes the form of a request for proposals (RfP) from the client. A methodology for handling the bidding process is presented, illustrated by a case study from the IT sector. The proposed methodology places risk as a factor for the selection of the best and final offer of the provider in addition to the traditional decision factors: delivery time, product cost and performance. The method is supported by a structured corporate memory and a decision support system based on the analytical hierarchy process.     

Adolescent Online Gambling in Cyprus: Associated School Performance and Psychopathology

This paper presents results from the study of gambling behaviors in a representative sample of Cypriot high-school students. The aim of the study was to ascertain epidemiology of adolescent online gambling in Cyprus and possible correlates. The sample consisted of 2,684 students (48.5 % boys, 51.5 % girls) from the first grades of junior (Gymnasium) and senior (Lyceum) high school. Our results indicate that gamblers presented with lower school achievement and related expectations while scoring consistently higher on measures of Internet addiction, parental bonding and psychopathology. Discriminant analysis revealed two profiles which explained the most variance in gambling behavior; the first profile that corresponded to more explained variance was the student with higher psychopathology, less prosocial behavior, higher Internet addiction score with higher frequencies of online activities and moderate levels of truancy and lower expectation of school achievement. The second profile was that of a student who reported less psychopathology, more prosocial behavior, less involvement with the Internet in general but skipped classes more and his prospects on finishing high school were even slimmer. These results will be utilized in the design of a comprehensive prevention program in an effort to combat online addictive behaviors.     

Effects of Activated and Dispositional Self-Construal on Emotion Decoding Accuracy

The present study examined effects of temporarily salient and chronic self-construal on decoding accuracy for positive and negative facial expressions of emotion. We primed independent and interdependent self-construal in a sample of participants who then rated the emotion expressions of a central character (target) in a cartoon showing a happy, sad, angry, or neutral facial expression in a group setting. Primed interdependence was associated with lower recognition accuracy for negative emotion expressions. Primed and chronic self-construal interacted such that for interdependence primed participants, higher chronic interdependence was associated with lower decoding accuracy for negative emotion expressions. Chronic independent self-construal was associated with higher decoding accuracy for negative emotion. These findings add to an increasing literature that highlights the significance of perceivers’ socio-cultural factors, self-construal in particular, for emotion perception.     

Leaders' and subordinates' attachment orientations,emotion regulation capabilities and affect at work: A multilevel analysis

Two studies examined relationships between leaders' and subordinates' attachment orientations, emotion regulation capabilities, and affective experience and satisfaction at work. As expected, supervisors' and subordinates' insecure attachment orientations (higher anxiety and avoidance) were associated with own positive affect and satisfaction at work. Supervisors' anxious attachment orientation was associated with subordinates' lower positive affect and satisfaction at work. Contrary to hypotheses, supervisors' higher avoidance was associated with subordinates' lower negative affect and higher job satisfaction. Supervisors' emotion regulation capabilities did not mediate relationships between supervisors' insecure attachment orientations and supervisors' own or subordinates' affect and job satisfaction as expected. However, subordinates' emotion regulation capabilities interacted with supervisors' attachment orientations to predict subordinates' emotion experience at work. The results contribute to an understanding of attachment orientations' emotion dynamics in leader–follower interaction, pointing in particular to perceptual and affect-related processes at different levels of analysis.