Tolerance for Failure and Incentives for Collaborative Innovation

Most organizations employ collaborative teams to manage innovation projects. Although the use of collaborative innovation teams is a good starting point, an organization's ability to innovate can be enhanced by managing risk‐taking behavior through monetary incentive schemes and through an organizational culture that tolerates failure. This article reports the results of two controlled experiments aimed at understanding how tolerance for failure and incentives impact the decisions of individuals engaged in a collaborative innovation initiative. A key element of our experiments is the notion of endogenous project risk, which we define as the explicit link between resources allocated to a project and the likelihood of project success. We observe that when penalties are low, the amount of risk an individual assumes is fairly insensitive to the rewards that are offered. In an analogous result, when individuals make decisions alone (rather than collaboratively), higher tolerance for failure does little to increase the amount of risk an individual is willing to take. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of implicit incentives that are created as a result of project and organizational characteristics.     

Statistical Inference for Stochastic Dominance and for the Measurement of Poverty and Inequality

We derive the asymptotic sampling distribution of various estimators frequently used to order distributions in terms of poverty, welfare, and inequality. This includes estimators of most of the poverty indices currently in use, as well as estimators of the curves used to infer stochastic dominance of any order. These curves can be used to determine whether poverty, inequality, or social welfare is greater in one distribution than in another for general classes of indices and for ranges of possible poverty lines. We also derive the sampling distribution of the maximal poverty lines up to which we may confidently assert that poverty is greater in one distribution than in another. The sampling distribution of convenient dual estimators for the measurement of poverty is also established. The statistical results are established for deterministic or stochastic poverty lines as well as for paired or independent samples of incomes. Our results are briefly illustrated using data for four countries drawn from the Luxembourg Income Study data bases.     

Time Out for Childcare: Signalling and Earnings Rebound Effects for Men and Women

ABSTRACT: The wage cost of time out of the labor force for childcare is important in order to understand the functioning of labor markets and for public policy. This paper reviews the literature and identifies several limitations. Using employment records of a large Swedish company over the period 1983-88, we demonstrate an alternative approach for estimating earnings effects and find a year out costs 1.7 percent of earnings for a woman and 5.2 percent for a man. This large effect for men raises questions of signalling costs. For both men and women, earnings‘'rebound'’for time out in the more distant past.     

谋为民之策修执政之德

立党为公、执政为民,是保持共产党员先进性的重要体现,是需要全体党员特别是党员领导干部身体力行的现实任务。立党为公、执政为民,不仅要有愿望和热情,更要有过硬的本领。我们必须把自己担负的职责与执政为民的使命联系起来,以强烈的使命感、责任感,积极进取,求真务实,奋发有为,在具体岗位上切实提高执政为民的能力。一、不断提高科学决策能力,靠正确的决策实现群众愿望决策是领导的基本职责,是实现群众利益的最重要的环节。任何一项决策,都与群众的利益息息相关;决策失误,受害最大的是群众。领导干部要在执政为民上有所作为,就必须把提高…     

Piggybacking for business and nonprofits: a strategy for hard times

This article explains the conceptual foundations for the piggybacking strategy from the general strategic management, adoption of innovation, product life cycle, specialization and diversified portfolio strategy literatures. The strategic piggybacking strategy is compared and contrasted with the diversified portfolio and specialization strategies. Intention, dynamic investment flow, short vs long term, and mission similarities and differences are addressed. A case is made for considering strategic piggybacking as a synthesis of the specialization and diversified portfolio strategies. The conditions appropriate for adoption of a piggybacking strategy are also discussed.     

Mentoring relationships: implications for practitioners and suggestions for future research

This review of the literature is intended to help HRD practitioners facilitate healthy mentoring relationships and better address potentially negative functions or outcomes of the mentoring process within their own organizations. This work provides a review of the social learning processes that play a role in mentoring relationships. In addition, it reviews the functions and outcomes of mentoring for individuals and organizations, as well as the characteristics of good mentors and the influence mentors have upon career choice. Finally, the implications for mentoring relationships among individuals with disabilities, minorities and women are briefly reviewed in order to provide practitioners with a sense of the breadth of individuals who may benefit from well-planned or well-implemented mentoring. This article concludes with critical comments on the current state of mentoring research. Suggestions are made for future research in order to stimulate greater study into certain aspects of mentoring.     

Supplier Strategies and Routines for Capability Development: Implications for Upgrading

This paper examines the strategies and routines adopted by small and medium-sized suppliers to develop capabilities that enable them to engage in upgrading, despite a precarious relational and institutional context. To this end, we investigate the strategic behaviour of two Bangladeshi garment manufacturers. Both started out as small suppliers for multinational enterprises (MNEs) and have eventually grown into micro-multinationals. The firms are involved in ‘tacit promissory contracting’ with their buyers, a specific form of international outsourcing relationship. The study adopts a multiple case study design that involves interviews with managers/owners of the firms. The analysis yields two key findings. Both firms have devised strategies and taken coherent routines involving actions to develop skills and motivation needed to perform appropriate functional activities (i.e. pre-production, production and post-production) as they embarked on different stages of upgrading. Furthermore, firms have designed routines to internalise the challenges originating from their relationships with their buyers and the institutional environment at the time that had the potential to affect their upgrading goals. The paper contributes to IB studies by highlighting how suppliers, even in a precarious context, can control their own strategies and routines, so as to develop capabilities that allow them to gradually redress the power imbalance between themselves and their buyers.     

争不争争什么怎么争

人们在工作、学习和生活中,常常离不开争取,离不开努力。但是,争不争、争什么、怎么争,不是小问题。争取的方法、努力的方向,对人们的理想、信念、行为方式、工作取向和生活情趣都有着很大的影响。对于“争”,态度要科学,取向要正确,境界要高尚。一般来说,人人都有“争”的欲望和潜意识,总希望通过努力争取,保证自己在各方面都能不掉队、不落伍,走在前列。但在现实生活中,在争与不争的问题上,人们的态度是有差别的。有的人总是保持着一股不松懈、不怠慢的劲头,一种欲与天公试比高的精神和不服输、不认低的心志,为真理、为群众,孜孜以求,越争…     

群体性上访事件的成因及化解方式

近年来,随着工业化加快转型、城市化加速推进和各项改革的深入推进,由于生产生活方式和利益格局发生重大调整而引发的群体性事件呈逐年增多态势,已成为困扰各级党委、政府的普遍性问题.结合工作实践.笔者对各地中心城区群体性事件进行了归纳总结.提出一些个人看法.     

New algorithms for k-center and extensions

The problem of interest is covering a given point set with homothetic copies of several convex containers C ₁,…,C _k , while the objective is to minimize the maximum over the dilatation factors. Such k-containment problems arise in various applications, e.g. in facility location, shape fitting, data classification or clustering. So far most attention has been paid to the special case of the Euclidean k-center problem, where all containers C _i are Euclidean unit balls. Recent developments based on so-called core-sets enable not only better theoretical bounds in the running time of approximation algorithms but also improvements in practically solvable input sizes. Here, we present some new geometric inequalities and a Mixed-Integer-Convex-Programming formulation. Both are used in a very effective branch-and-bound routine which not only improves on best known running times in the Euclidean case but also handles general and even different containers among the C _i .     

Preference for Flexibility and Random Choice

We study a two‐stage model where the agent has preferences over menus as in Dekel, Lipman, and Rustichini (2001) in the first period and then makes random choices from menus as in Gul and Pesendorfer (2006) in the second period. Both preference for flexibility in the first period and strictly random choices in the second period can be, respectively, rationalized by subjective state spaces. Our main result characterizes the representation where the two state spaces align, so the agent correctly anticipates her future choices. The joint representation uniquely identifies probabilities over subjective states and magnitudes of utilities across states. We also characterize when the agent completely overlooks some subjective states that realize at the point of choice.