Structure of University Education and Education for Social Work in Italy

The single-case design, with its potential integration of practice and research roles, has roots extending back to the “scientific charity” movement of the late 1800s. While the goals of “scientific charity” were never realized, the new research technology bears promise of achieving them. This background, together with the related experiences of behavioral psychology and of medicine, is briefly highlighted and the prospects, pitfalls, and challenges involved are discussed.     

On the economic foundations of decision theory

Theory and Decision - Economics bases the choice theory on the mental experiment that introduces the choice correspondence, which associates to every set of possible actions the subset of preferred...     

The risk aversion measure without the independence axiom

The risk premium (conveniently normalized) is defined as the measure of risk aversion. This measure does not require any relevant assumption in the theory of choice under uncertainty except the existence of a certainty equivalent. In particular, the independence axiom is not required. The measure of risk aversion of an action is provided not only for the case with one commodity and two consequences but also for the case with many commodities and consequences. The measure of mean risk aversion of all actions with given consequences is introduced and the local measure of risk aversion is obtained by making all these consequences approach the consequence under consideration. This measure is demonstrated to be zero when the von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function exists. In this case a measure of risk aversion of the second order is introduced, which turns out to be equal to the Arrow-Pratt absolute index when there is only one commodity and similar to the generalized measures proposed by several authors when there are many commodities and two consequences.Helpful comments by I. Gilboa and suggestions by the referee are gratefully acknowledged.     

A weighted cramer-von mises statistic derived from a decomposition of the anderson-darling statistic

Two goodness of fit statistics with asymmetric weight function are derived from a decomposition of the Anderson-Darling statistic, For each one, the asymptotic null distribution is found for a simple null hypothesis and some upper percentties are calculated. The asymptotic power of the tests are obtained for some contiguous alternatives around a normal null hypothesis. The tests allow the user to choose to which tail to give more weight and it is intended to be used for that purpose. Therefore it should be not considered as a competitor of the classical goodness of fit tests.     

Probability of Exporting Infected Carcasses from Vaccinated Pigs Following a Foot‐and‐Mouth Disease Epidemic

Emergency vaccination is an effective control strategy for foot‐and‐mouth disease (FMD) epidemics in densely populated livestock areas, but results in a six‐month waiting period before exports can be resumed, incurring severe economic consequences for pig exporting countries. In the European Union, a one‐month waiting period has been discussed based on negative test results in a final screening. The objective of this study was to analyze the risk of exporting FMD‐infected pig carcasses from a vaccinated area: (1) directly after final screening and (2) after a six‐month waiting period. A risk model has been developed to estimate the probability that a processed carcass was derived from an FMD‐infected pig (P_carc). Key variables were herd prevalence (P_H), within‐herd prevalence (P_A), and the probability of detection at slaughter (P_SL). P_H and P_A were estimated using Bayesian inference under the assumption that, despite all negative test results, ≥1 infected pigs were present. Model calculations indicated that P_carc was on average 2.0 × 10^?5 directly after final screening, and 1.7 × 10^?5 after a six‐month waiting period. Therefore, the additional waiting time did not substantially reduce P_carc. The estimated values were worst‐case scenarios because only viraemic pigs pose a risk for disease transmission, while seropositive pigs do not. The risk of exporting FMD via pig carcasses from a vaccinated area can further be reduced by heat treatment of pork and/or by excluding high‐risk pork products from export.     

End‐of‐Life Inventory Decisions for Consumer Electronics Service Parts

We consider a consumer electronics manufacturer's problem of controlling the inventory of spare parts in the final phase of the service life cycle. The final phase starts when the part production is terminated and continues until the last service contract or warranty period expires. Placing final orders for service parts is considered to be a popular tactic to satisfy demand during this period and to mitigate the effect of part obsolescence at the end of the service life cycle. Previous research focuses on repairing defective products by replacing the defective parts with properly functioning spare ones. However, for consumer electronic products there typically is considerable price erosion while repair costs stay steady over time. As a consequence, there might be a point in time at which the unit price of the product drops below the repair costs. If so, it is more cost effective to adopt an alternative policy to meet service demands toward the end of the final phase, such as offering customers a new product of the similar type or a discount on a next generation product. This study examines the cost trade‐offs of implementing alternative policies for the repair policy and develops an exact expression for the expected total cost function. Using this expression, the optimal final order quantity and switching time from repair to an alternative policy can be determined simultaneously. Numerical analysis of a real world case sheds light on the cost benefits of these policies and also yields insights into the quantitative importance of the various cost parameters.     

An Explanation of the Occupational Structure of Sectors of Industry

Abstract. This study has been carried out by the Research Centre for Education and Labour Market (ROA) as part of a long-range research project commissioned by the Ministry of Education and Sciences. The objective of the project is to develop an education/labour-market information system to help secondary and university students choose the right type of school and/or occupation (ROA 1988). The study reported on here sets out to disclose the factors underlying the development of the occupational pattern. The shares of occupational classes in each economic sector are taken as points of departure. The explanatory variables are technological progress and cyclical and structural sectoral developments. For each occupational class, an estimation is made with the help of a linear model, the estimation method being that of Weighted Least Squares. To permit several variables to be included in the equation, the data have been pooled over sectors and time. In two fifths of all cases, a model with explanatory variables has been chosen; in the remaining instances a sector-dummy model was found to suffice.