Correlates of female crime

This article discusses the complexity of developing correlates of female crime in the comparative context of Western and Indian literature. It selectively reviews the findings of American and Indian studies of female crime and concludes with the author’s own findings from a study of 120 women prisoners conducted in a federal women’s prison in India. The author’s main contention is that whereas broad contours of offender profiles can be drawn, it is difficult to draw statistically significant relationships and infer from them predictable variables of criminality.     

Differential Pricing for Information Sharing Under Competition

We consider a two‐echelon supply chain with a manufacturer supplying to multiple downstream retailers engaged in differentiated Cournot competition. Each retailer has private information about uncertain demand. The manufacturer is the Stackelberg leader who sets the contract terms with the retailers, and benefits from retailers sharing their private information. When all retailers are given the same wholesale price, truthful information sharing is not an equilibrium outcome. We propose two variants of differential pricing mechanisms that induce truthful information sharing by all retailers. The first variant rewards a retailer for providing optimistic information and achieves truthful information sharing as a unique equilibrium. The differential pricing mechanism is optimal in the class of linear‐price, incentive‐compatible, direct mechanisms. The second variant, which incorporates provision for a fixed payment in addition to wholesale prices, preserves all the equilibrium properties of the first variant and additionally “nearly coordinates” the supply chain. Our analysis of differential pricing with a fixed payment provides interesting observations regarding the relationship between product substitutability, number of retailers, information precision, and market power. As products become closer substitutes and/or number of retailers increase, the manufacturer's market power increases, enabling her to extract a larger fraction of the supply chain surplus.     

The status of female children and adolescents in development and corrective strategies

This article examines the status of girls globally and demonstrates that acculturation and development processes favor boys and marginalize girls. Even more than women, girls experience the consequences of gender-based discrimination and such discrimination occurs irrespective of societal and personal socioeconomic levels. Recognizing that gender when combined with age provides the more formidable nexus for disability, the article seeks recognition among development’s strategists and scholars that the key to women’s development lies in the extent to which girls are protected, nurtured and empowered. Drawing on cross-cultural and comparative data to establish the greater vulnerability of girls in various development sectors such as health and survival, nutrition, education, employment, and acculturation, the article concludes with specific pointers to development planners, governments and other policy framers to successfully mainstream girls in development strategies as a way of ensuring a more gender-equitablechild andadult world.     

Threshold Incentives and Sales Variance

In this paper, we analyze the impact of two forms of commonly used threshold‐based incentive schemes on the observed sales variability. The first form of the incentive comprises an additional marginal payment on crossing a specified sales threshold and the second form of the incentive scheme comprises a lumpsum bonus payment on crossing the predetermined sales threshold. We model the effect of such incentives under two specific scenarios: an exclusive dealership selling a single product and a non‐exclusive dealer selling two competing products. For an exclusive dealer, we show that a bonus contract not only increases the expected sales, but, more importantly, decreases the sales (order) variance. Consequently, the bonus‐based scheme allows the manufacturer to regulate sales variance better. With a non‐exclusive dealer, the sales variance increases substantially with an additional marginal payment contract. However, our analysis suggests that the bonus contract continues to perform better in this case, too, if the threshold level is set appropriately using the underlying demand distribution.     

Perceptions of Immigrant Criminality: Crime and Social Boundaries

Researchers studying the relationship between immigration and crime frequently note the discrepancy between actual rates and public perceptions of criminal behavior by immigrants. Analyzing staff‐ and reader‐generated texts in a local newspaper, we find that this connection is maintained through a conflation of key terms, assumptions of the legal status of immigrants, and a focus on high‐profile criminal acts. We argue that the discourse of immigrant criminality has been critical in constructing social boundaries used in recent immigration legislation. Our analysis helps explain why current scholarly findings on immigration and crime have had little influence in changing public opinion.     

The changing family and women’s issues in the 1990s

Since the early 1800s when the work place and the home first experienced a clear-cut separation, causing women and men to be perceived as workers and nonworkers, no other period in American history has altered women’s and families’ role so radically as the recent three decades. There is a structural and spiritual difference between the family of the 1950s and that of the 1980s and 1990s. The American family today ranges from the conventional Ozzie and Harriet type to the single parent, working couple, lesbian or gay, blended, unconnected, teen parent or grandparent-led, and homeless family. The attendant challenges for caregivers and providers, particularly women, vary immensely, as was clearly indicated by a group of testifiers at a public forum convened by a women’s body in San Mateo County, California. Drawing from those testimonies, this article examines the various configurations of the American family and assesses the public policy implications of the impact on women of the changing American family. The principal inference is that as the changing family trend gathers further momentum in the 1990s, it will be imperative for policy makers and the American socioeconomy to respond creatively and constructively to the new American family and to women’s changing role in the family and economy.