The "trade-off" approach to benefits cost containment: a strategy to increase employee satisfaction.

Using the author's approach to measure employee receptiveness to benefits "trade-offs", companies can design benefits packages by taking both employee preferences and company costs into account.     

用教育引领新时代--访新时代商学院创史人潘志山

新时代集团作为一家国有企业,在市场竞争中表现出了极强的发展潜力.近日本刊记者专访了新时代商学院创史人潘志山先生.     

A contingent approach to strategy and tactics in formative and summative evaluations

A contingent approach to strategic and tactical choices in formative and summative evaluations is presented. Choices regarding evaluation phases and tactics were found to be dependent on evaluation goals (e.g., whether the evaluation has a formative or summative purpose) and contextual variables. A simulation was designed to pool the judgments of evaluators and users of evaluations to see how they felt evaluation strategy and tactics should change as the situation changes so as to increase the likelihood of evaluation success. Eight panels were constructed to examine eight different situations. The next step in this research is to determine whether following the pooled judgments does lead to greater evaluation success.     

Evaluating a basic-needs strategy and population policies: the BACHUE approach

The BACHUE model, a dynamic simulation technique developed within the International Labour Organization's World Employment Program, has been applied to the Philippines. The model simulates behavior and consequences in a number of key areas: fertility, marriage, migration, savings and expenditure, and labor force participation for households and a macro-model for demand, ouput, employment, and income. The design and development of the model are discussed in detail. The model was run for a series of 13 experiments ranging from nationlization of modern sectors, increasing self-employment, movement toward labor-intensive techniques, changes in growth rates of various sectors, and a reduction in fertility by 2% over 1976-1985, an increase over the 1% assumed in the base run. Runs R-2 to R-11 all showed that a change in basic needs is associated with significant declines in fertility, largely because of increasing education and decreasing mortality. Better economic conditions in rural areas also reduced migration. R-13 which examined the effects of a family planning program of moderate size on ultimate fertility, showed that even by year 2000 the effects were small. The population is reduced 5% over the run which assumes negative income tax and government subsidies to poor families but the gain in income per adult is less than 4%. Any real improvement in income as the result of family planning will take 40-50 years to achieve. Economic incentives, on the other hand, have much faster demographic results. The models also show that rural-urban migration is responsive to policy changes. Planners are cautioned that the model is not a picture of the entire range of human behavior but is an adjunct for use in analyzing interaction between policies.     

Planning and implementation of a participatory evaluation strategy: A viable approach in the evaluation of community-based participatory programs addressing cancer disparities

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) has been posited as a promising methodology to address health concerns at the community level, including cancer disparities. However, the major criticism to this approach is the lack of scientific grounded evaluation methods to assess development and implementation of this type of research. This paper describes the process of development and implementation of a participatory evaluation framework within a CBPR program to reduce breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer disparities between African Americans and whites in Alabama and Mississippi as well as lessons learned. The participatory process involved community partners and academicians in a fluid process to identify common ground activities and outcomes. The logic model, a lay friendly approach, was used as the template and clearly outlined the steps to be taken in the evaluation process without sacrificing the rigorousness of the evaluation process. We have learned three major lessons in this process: (1) the importance of constant and open dialogue among partners; (2) flexibility to make changes in the evaluation plan and implementation; and (3) importance of evaluators playing the role of facilitators between the community and academicians. Despite the challenges, we offer a viable approach to evaluation of CBPR programs focusing on cancer disparities.     

When winning is the only thing: pure strategy Nash equilibria in a three-candidate spatial voting model

It is well known that there are no pure strategy Nash equilibria (PSNE) in the standard three-candidate spatial voting model when candidates maximize their share of the vote. When all that matters to the candidates is winning the election, however, we show that PSNE do exist. We provide a complete characterization of such equilibria and then extend our results to elections with an arbitrary number of candidates.     

Social policy planning in a federal structure: A social learning strategy

Current social welfare policy planning reflects an inadequate sense of the problems to be solved and an incentive structure which discourages responsible decision making. Proceeding from overly simple cause and effect models, social welfare policies are designed with detailed administrative regulations to insure uniformity and regularity of behavior across the states. When problems are not solved, policy makers focus on the failures of personnel to follow all the detailed regulations. This leads to additional efforts to enforce compliance. There is evidence that implementation personnel consistently and purposively do stretch or ignore regulations in order to service clients. An alternative to further detailed regulations then is to use the autonomy of state units in the federal structure by eliminating negative incentives to innovation and creating incentives to experiment with alternative programs. As a social learning strategy this would encourage innovation and make it possible to learn from the experience of personnel who daily confront the realities of welfare problems and the large array of administrative details.     

Food in a row: urban trees offer valuable floral resources to pollinating insects

Urbanization affects the availability and diversity of floral resources (pollen and/or nectar) for wild pollinating insects. For example, urban green areas are characterized by an abundance of ornamental plant species. Increasingly, trees are planted to improve the aesthetics of urban streets and parks. These urban trees might offer important floral resources to pollinating insects. To examine the suitability of urban trees as resources for pollinating insects, we investigated the chemical composition of pollen and nectar as well as the amount of nectar produced by the nine major insect-pollinated tree species planted in cities of Western Europe, namely Acer pseudoplatanus, Aesculus carnea, A. hippocastanum, Robinia pseudoacacia, Tilia cordata, T. x euchlora, T. x europaea, T. platyphyllos and T. tomentosa. The analyses revealed that globally the Tilia trees provide pollen with lower contents of polypeptides, amino acids and phytosterols compared with the other species. Urban tree flowers offer abundant nectar with relatively high sugar contents (0.16–1.28 mg/flower); sucrose was the predominant sugar in all nectars. The investigated tree species could therefore be considered in future city plantings.