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Opening approaches and understanding. Reflections about parish counselling and organizational development in the parish communityAny process of changes within a church community or parish needs counselling and organizational development. People working in institutionalized parish guidance are biased by the system, therefore parish guidance is limited in its effects. Counselling by profit organizations often fail their task. Theses organizations provoke resistance by unreflected entering of hermeneutics strange to the cultural understanding. It is necessary to get acceptance and understanding concerning motivation and values of honorary members of the parish board. On this a trusting alliance of work is based on.     

Coaching — Performanceorientierung und Managererwartung

Coaching — orientation on performance and expectations of managersThe author discusses the up to now controversial question what managers are thinking about coaching. The inquiry, developed in the Free University of Amsterdam, asks also for the expectations on coaching. The author finds out, that issues of leading take priority and that not only crises and conflicts are reasons to ask for a coaching, but also desires to improve the personal performance.     

Mothers,fathers and children after divorce: The role of institutions

In recent years the increase in the divorce rate in many advanced countries and the predominance of female-headed families among the poor has generated much interest in the relationship between divorce and the welfare of mothers and children. In this paper I will review a small body of economic literature which has been recently developed in order to analyze the economic consequence of divorce on the welfare of fathers, mothers and children under alternative behavioral assumptions. Important economic and econometric issues arise from an analysis of welfare in non intact households as compared with intact households. In particular the focus is on the role that institutions play in post-divorce arrangements and important implications concerning policies for child support, custody, and visitation.Presidential Address of the Annual Congress of ESPE2000 held on June 15, 2000 in Bonn. I would like to thank Christopher Flinn, Rocio Ribero, Maristella Botticini and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. Responsible editor: Alessandro Cigno.     

Evaluation of a treatment program for abusive and high-risk families in Spain

This article describes a six-year evaluation of a comprehensive treatment program for abusive families in Spain. The evaluation involved practitioners' clinical judgments, standardized measures, and follow-up data about children's living situations. The results were similar to those obtained by similar programs from the United States and other developed countries. The analysis obtained the lowest rates of success for neglectful and abusive-neglectful families. Dropout and nondropout families differed in two paternal characteristics: alcohol problems and childhood experience of out-of-home care. Rehabilitated and nonrehabilitated families differed in several variables, including time elapsed between case detection and referral to the treatment program. Scores on measures showed significant changes during treatment.     

Coalitional strategy-proof and resource-monotonic solutions for multiple assignment problems

We consider the problem of allocating indivisible objects when agents may desire to consume more than one object and monetary transfers are not possible. Each agent receives a set of objects and free disposal is allowed. We are interested in allocation rules that satisfy appealing properties from an economic and social point of view. Our main result shows that sequential dictatorships are the only efficient and coalitional strategy-proof solutions to the multiple assignment problem. Adding resource-monotonicity narrows this class down to serial dictatorships.We thank Francois Maniquet, two anonymous referees, and the participants of the GREBE-FRANCQUI Summer School on Axiomatic Resource Allocation Theory, held in Namur, Belgium, for their comments.     

Recoverability of choice functions and binary relations: some duality results

Banerjee and Pattanaik (1996) proved a theorem that the maximal set with respect to a quasi-ordering can be fully recovered by defining the greatest sets with respect to each and every ordering extension thereof and taking their union. Donaldson and Weymark (1998) proved a theorem that a quasi-ordering can be fully recovered by taking the intersection of all the ordering extensions thereof. These recoverability theorems are obviously related, but their exact relationship has never been clarified in the literature. This paper examines the issue of choice-functional recoverability and relational recoverability in a general framework, and establishes several remarkable duality relationships. Thanks are due to Professors Walter Bossert, Prasanta K. Pattanaik, Clemens Puppe, Amartya K. Sen, and John Weymark, with whom we had several opportunities to discuss this and related issues. The first author also would like to express his gratitude to the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, and the Scientific Research Grant for Policy Areas (B) Number 603 from the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture of Japan for their financial support which made this collaborative research possible. We are also grateful to the referees whose comments have led to several improvements of the paper.     

Implementation of allocation rules under perfect information

We study subgame perfect implementation through perfect information mechanisms in economic environments. We assume that worst bundles exist for each agent and can be assigned to them independently of the bundle assigned to at least one other agent. We restrict our attention to allocation rules that are anonymous, efficient on their own range, single-valued in welfare, and that induce agents' participation. We define a class of mechanisms, which satisfy properties of minimal path length and finiteness of message dimensions. We characterize the class of allocation rules which can be implemented through those mechanisms.I would like to thank Bhaskar Dutta, Louis Gevers, Matthew Jackson, Ozgur Kibris, Hervé Moulin and Arunava Sen for stimulating discussions, seminar participants at Université de Montréal (the Axiomatic Theory of Resource Allocation meeting, May 1996), Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Universitad Carlos III de Madrid and Université de Paris Dauphine for their comments, and Frédéric Gaspart, Tarik Kara, James Schummer, William Thomson and an anonymous referee for extremely useful comments and suggestions on earlier versions.     

On monotonicity in economies with indivisible goods

We consider the problem of fair allocation in economies with indivisible objects that may or may not be desirable (for instance, activities that may or may not be pleasurable but have to be carried out unless there are not enough agents for that). We search for efficient solutions satisfying two additional properties. First, each agent should find his bundle at least as desirable as the bundle that would be assigned to him in the hypothetical economy in which all agents have preferences identical to his, under equal treatment of equals and efficiency. In a preliminary step, we show that there is no logical relation between this requirement and no-envy, and between it and egalitarian-equivalence. We also establish the existence of efficient allocations satisfying it. The second property, object monotonicity, says that the availability of additional objects either has a negative impact on everyone's welfare, or it has a positive impact on everyone's welfare. We show that there is no object-monotonic selection from the correspondence that associates with each economy its set of efficient allocations meeting an even weaker version of the bound.I am grateful to Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Koichi Tadenuma, and a referee for their very helpful comments.     

Wie wird Coaching in einem traditionellen technischen Dienstleistungsunternehmen angenommen?

How coaching is accepted in a traditional technological service-companyFor the present article four leading managers (two women, two men) of a big technological service-company were asked about their experiences with coaching. Their individual accounts are interpreted on the back-ground of the concrete changes in structure and culture of the company. The report gives an impression about the fact, how coaching is accepted in a more traditionally labelled, mainly hierarchically organized and male-dominated structure. There are some points of special interest for the implementation of coaching in that kind of organization structure.