Which Fox in What Henhouse and When? Conjectures on Regulatory Capture

This article takes an interdisciplinary lens to the treatment of regulatory capture (RC). RC ensues when government bureaucrats, regulators, and public sector agencies receive adverse publicity for ceasing to serve the wider collective public interest. The work is divided into four sections. The first takes the point of view of each of the participants in the capture situation and provides an overview of the three variations on the RC story. Each subsequent section focuses on a version of the story. RC 1, the libertarian free market version celebrates capture as inevitable and desirable. RC 2, the regulators' communitarian take on capture places it in the context of a cycle story with regulators dutifully doing the public's shifting will. In the RC 3 version, the public finds it difficult to piece together a coherent version of the morally charged narrative. The article concludes with a discussion of the relevance of each of these three versions of RC in order to understand dominant–submissive relationships between business and government.     

Quo vadis ... Orientierungshilfen durch Coaching und Karriereberatung — Eine Einzelfallstudie

Quo vadis — Coaching and career counseling as guidance. A case study The individual case study presents coaching and career counseling as effective and efficient strategies for personnel development, particularly as it regards its ?exclusive“ potential: Contents, methods and counseling process can be adapted to the executive’s concern, person and background, adjustable in time and with precision. Public administrations and private enterprises, both in ?profit“ and ?non-profit“ areas, will therefore increasingly (have to) make use of this professional form of management counseling, since successful personnel management has established itself as a decisive factor for business success a long time ago.     

Reinforcement‐based vs. Belief‐based Learning Models in Experimental Asymmetric‐information Games

This paper examines the abilities of learning models to describe subject behavior in experiments. A new experiment involving multistage asymmetric‐information games is conducted, and the experimental data are compared with the predictions of Nash equilibrium and two types of learning model: a reinforcement‐based model similar to that used by Roth and Erev (1995), and belief‐based models similar to the ‘cautious fictitious play’ of Fudenberg and Levine (1995, 1998) These models make predictions that are qualitatively similar cycling around the Nash equilibrium that is much more apparent than movement toward it. While subject behavior is not adequately described by Nash equilibrium, it is consistent with the qualitative predictions of the learning models. We examine several criteria for quantitatively comparing the predictions of alternative models. According to almost all of these criteria, both types of learning model outperform Nash equilibrium. According to some criteria, the reinforcement‐based model performs better than any version of the belief‐based model; according to others, there exist versions of the belief‐based model that outperform the reinforcement‐based model. The abilities of these models are further tested with respect to the results of other published experiments. The relative performance of the two learning models depends on the experiment, and varies according to which criterion of success is used. Again, both models perform better than equilibrium in most cases.     

Diesseits von Coaching Situative Beratung als Führungsaufgabe

Before coaching: Situational counseling as management function Conflicts, crisis, bullying, weakness or separation: Critical situations for managers are not unusual in day to day business of organizations. Other than an external coach managers in these situations are not acting as professional counselors but as situational counselors. Situational counseling is understood as an organizational role which is activated in normative and critical management situations. There is a characteristic difference to the role of an external professional counselor. Accordingly, the development of competencies for a situational counselor needs its own approach. On the level of organization comprehensive principals for the behavior in critical situations should be developed and agreed by a process of communication. On the level of management development these principals can be transformed into individual strategies and trained.     

Gibt es (noch) etwas spezifisch Ostdeutsches im Beratungsbedarf?

Is there still something specific East German in the need for counseling? There is a specific East German background, considering the adaption of issues, contents and methods of counseling of East German top management, enterprises and institutions. In the last ten years, development in East Germany was above all a make up for the development of West German conditions. Today the trends in West and East Germany are equally faced with the reorganization of processes resulting from global standards. These are confronted with a hardly stabil economical and social basis in East Germany. The general need for counseling is determined by psychological counseling and change management.     

Monopoly Versioning of Information Goods When Consumers Have Group Tastes

Large sunk costs of development, negligible costs of reproduction, and distribution resulting in economies of scale distinguish information goods from physical goods. Versioning is a way firms may take advantage of these properties. However, in a baseline model where consumers differ in their tastes for quality, an information goods monopolist only offers one version, and this differs from what we observe in practice. We explore formulations that add features to the baseline model that result in a monopolist offering multiple versions. We examine versioning where consumers differ in individual tastes for quality, and groups of consumers that share the same group taste are delineated by segments of individual tastes. We find that if groups have mutually exclusive characteristics—a horizontal dimension—that they value relative to the shared characteristics, then versioning is optimal. Consequently, any horizontal differentiation in product line design favors versioning. In addition, when group tastes are hierarchical such that higher taste groups value characteristics that lower taste groups value but not vice versa—a vertical dimension—as long as the valuations of the higher and adjacent lower taste group are sufficiently close, then versioning is also optimal. Our conditions, which also help determine how many versions are optimal, are based on exogenously defined parameters so that it is feasible to check them in practice.     

A Nonidentifiability Aspect of the Two-Stage Model of Carcinogenesis

This paper discusses identifiability of the two-stage birth-death-mutation model of carcinogenesis. It is shown that the homogeneous version of the model is nonidentifiable; the same is all the more evident for its nonhomogeneous versions. This result implies that the model parameters cannot be uniquely estimated from time-to-tumor observations.     

Wirkprozesse kollegialer Beratung

German Kinderg?rten (Kitas) as equivalent to English nursery schools are submitted to a continuously changing social and legal environment. Structural changes in society as well as changes in the legislation on the level of the Federal State and the Bundesl?nder are imposing multifaceted challenges on the daily management of these institutions. This paper examines the contribution of ?peer counseling?? as an intervention-orientated tool in its support of the management of the Kitas. This examination operationalized the added value of ?peer counseling?? in its different field uses. The data from narrative interviews reveal positive procedural relationships between the managements own leadership competence.     

Wissensvermittlung in Beratungsprozessen

In the science of counseling there nearly has been no theoretical reflection on the phenomena of how knowledge effects the orderliness, structure and sequential patterns of interaction in counseling. In the scientific field of educational analysis, increasing attention has been given to the debates of knowledge societies and knowledge management. In the present discussions many concepts of ??knowledge?? are based on a cognitive model using terms like ??content?? and ??data??. In contrast to this theoretical view, a knowledge based framework to research micro-processes of guidance and counseling is developed. The method of qualitative Conversation Analysis, based on ethnomethodological principles, is used to establish an interpretive account of the interactional process in a counseling context. Based on this analysis, a model with four dimensions is developed identifying different action formations which illustrate not only ideal but also problematic aspects of career guidance and counseling.     

Resource constrained scheduling with general truncated job-dependent learning effect

Scheduling with general truncated job-dependent learning effect and resource-dependent processing times is studied on a single machine. It is assumed that the job processing time is a function of the amount of resource allocated to the job, the general job-dependent learning effect and the job-dependent control parameter. For each version of the problem that differs in terms of the objective functions and the processing time functions, the optimal resource allocation is provided. Polynomial time algorithms are also developed to find the optimal schedule of several versions of the problem.     

The Precautionary Principle Is Incoherent

This article argues that no version of the precautionary principle can be reasonably applied to decisions that may lead to fatal outcomes. In support of this strong claim, a number of desiderata are proposed, which reasonable rules for rational decision making ought to satisfy. Thereafter, two impossibility theorems are proved, showing that no version of the precautionary principle can satisfy the proposed desiderata. These theorems are directly applicable to recent discussions of the precautionary principle in medicine, biotechnology, environmental management, and related fields. The impossibility theorems do not imply, however, that the precautionary principle is of no relevance at all in policy discussions. Even if it is not a reasonable rule for rational decision making, it is possible to interpret the precautionary principle in other ways, e.g., as an argumentative tool or as an epistemic principle favoring a reversed burden of proof.     

Optimal Software Free Trial Strategy: Limited Version,Time‐locked,or Hybrid?

Limited version, time‐locked, and hybrid are three software free trial strategies employed by software firms to exploit increased installed base and/or reduction of consumers' uncertainty about software quality. We develop an analytical model to examine these three software free trial strategies. We find that the hybrid strategy weakly dominates the limited and time‐locked versions, and the intensity of the network effects is a key factor determining which strategy is optimal.     

中国管理学学术期刊的发展与未来展望——以《南开管理评论》十年发展为例

本文通过回顾《南开管理评论》十年发展历程,对期刊的定位、特色进行了总结。采用文献计量学的方法,对《南开管理评论》从1998年到2007年十年间刊发文章的被引频次、影响因子、五年影响因子等数据进行分析,重点评价了《南开管理评论》在中国管理学期刊中的学术影响和地位,并且通过分析管理学学术期刊面临的形势,展望了未来的发展方向。文章的主要目的在于提出一些中国管理学学术期刊发展的共性问题,并且希望能辅助探索管理学学科领域的发展规律。     

An appreciation of alternative sales forecasting models: Recent techniques based on historical data

The subject of statistical sales forecasting has recently been brought to prominence as a major area of management decision-making by the growth of a substantive literature and the establishment of several research groups to investigate the building of forecasting models. Whilst a lot of attention has been focused on the relatively newer disciplines of technological forecasting and multiple-equation model building of macro-economic systems, statistical sales forecasting methods have also been subject to considerable development and a number of radically new techniques have emerged. The authors believe that it is timely to review the current ‘state of the art’ of sales forecasting methodology. This study examines a wide range of models in use although it is not intended as a comprehensive guide.     

HEURISTIC ALGORITHMS FOR CAPITAL-BUDGETING DECISIONS IN MULTIDIVISION FIRMS

This paper presents two versions of a heuristic algorithm to solve a model of the capital-budgeting problem in a decentralized multidivision firm involving no more than two exchanges of information between headquarters and divisions. Headquarters makes an allocation of funds to each division based upon its cash demand and its potential growth rate. Each division determines which projects to accept. Then, an additional iteration is performed to define the solution. More than one thousand examples were simulated resulting in an average relative error of less than one percent.     

Trip packing in petrol stations replenishment

This paper considers a generalized version of the trip packing problem that we encountered as a sub-problem of the petrol stations replenishment problem. In this version we have to assign a number of trips to a fleet composed of a limited number of non-identical tank-trucks. Each trip has a specific duration, working time of vehicles is limited and the net revenue of each trip depends on the truck used. The paper provides a mathematical formulation of the problem and proposes some construction, improvement and neighbourhood search solution heuristics. A set of benchmark problem instances is created in a way that reflects real-life situations and used to analyse the performance of the proposed heuristics. A real-life case is also used to further assess the proposed heuristics.     

中国管理实践研究的研究主体与评价主体——基于金蝶的管理研究实践

随着中国管理实践研究的深入发展,其研究主体多元化的格局正逐渐清晰起来。除了高校和研究机构中的管理学者是重要的研究主体之外,诸如管理咨询机构、企业研究院等也日益成为不可忽视的研究力量。研究主体与评价主体之间存在多种不同的对应关系,这其中蕴藏着关于客户的深层次问题。金蝶的管理研究实践,不仅对这一问题予以回应,也引发了对由实践客户驱动的评价路径与策略的探索。管理学者可以寻求社会中的多股力量,来共同推动中国管理实践研究的发展及其评价系统的优化。     

一种基于网状版本模型的复杂产品设计数据管理方法研究

产品设计过程中产生的大量数据是历史设计知识的重要来源.在对象划分、关系定义及数据存储模式设计的基础上,建立了"对象过程版本库+项目版本库"的数据管理架构,提出网状关系模型实现对对象版本和项目版本的综合管理,为不同历史时期的设计知识检索提供支持.并讨论了版本控制的几种关键技术.最后以航空发动机涡轮设计数据管理为例验证了该方法的有效性.实际应用证明,这种包含了设计数据演进过程的网状版本管理方式能解决当前数据管理的难题,为工程设计提供强有力的帮助,提高设计效率和质量.     

道本管理“四主体论”:对管理主体与方式的系统反思——管理从控制到服务的转变

在社会科学领域中,如果理论的基础性假设存在问题,其后续的展开就可能将问题进一步放大。西方传统管理理论隐含着"管理者是管理的唯一主体,被管理者是管理的客体"的前提性假设,表现为管理主体对客体的单向指挥和控制。后来的参与式民主管理对此虽有修补,但本质并没有改变。由于剥夺了被管理者的主体性,导致了现实管理主客体间的恶性互动和双方主体性的扭曲和异化,并制造了管理中的一系列悖论。道本管理在认识和尊重主体性和管理规律的基础上,提出了管理"四主体论",对管理主体及其关系进行了重新认识和定位,破解了错误假设所导致的悖论,并通过机制设计实现了管理各主体之间良性关系的构筑,论证了管理从控制转向服务的必要。     

Psychosocial risk assessment in organizations: Concurrent validity of the brief version of the Management Standards Indicator Tool

The Management Standards Indicator Tool (MSIT) is a 35-item self-report measure of the psychosocial work environment designed to assist organizations with psychosocial risk assessment. It is also used in work environment research. Edwards and Webster presented a 25-item version of the MSIT based on the deletion of items having a factor loading of < .65. Stress theory and research suggest that psychosocial hazard exposures may result in harm to the health of workers. Thus, using data collected from three UK organizations (N = 20,406) we compared the concurrent validity of the brief and full versions of the MSIT by exploring the strength of association between each version of the instrument and a measure of psychological wellbeing (GHQ-12 and Maslach Burnout Inventory). Analyses revealed that the brief instrument offered similar but not always equal validity to that of the full version. The results indicate that use of the brief instrument, which would be less disruptive for employees, would not elevate the risk of false negative or false positive findings in risk assessment.