Applying fuzzy logic to personnel assessment: a case study

The main results of a research project spanning over several years are presented in this paper. The aim of the research was the improvement of the effectiveness of personnel assessment within a large Italian corporation operating in the research sector. The first step of the research consisted of the analysis of the raters’ behavior, so as to elicit the judgement categories and prototypes they used in the judgement formulation, based on the rating method adopted in the corporation. The second step consisted of improving the rating method using fuzzy logic. The corporate management tested the new rating method and found it more efficient and reliable than the previous one.     

Costs and benefits for farmers participating in innovative marketing channels for quality food products

The extra benefits and costs for farmers participating in six innovative marketing channels for quality products in Belgium are analysed. A theoretical model serves as an analytical device to structure the qualitative comparisons with the common marketing channel and with direct sale. The analysis is mainly qualitative, because many benefits and costs cannot be quantified exactly. In the analysis, transaction costs are explicitly taken into account because they constitute a real cost when switching from a common to an innovative marketing channel. In all six marketing channels, higher costs are compensated for by higher revenues due to higher prices and a higher turnover and by reduced uncertainty. These factors encourage farmers to enter quality food projects. In addition, we found that co-operation decreases transaction costs and that collective initiatives enable farmers to enter the pathway of quality food production without investing excessive labour or capital.     

LIMITED ASSET MARKET PARTICIPATION,STICKY WAGES,AND MONETARY POLICY

A small amount of nominal wage stickiness makes limited asset market participation (LAMP) irrelevant for the design of monetary policy. Recent research argues that LAMP could invert the slope of the IS curve in otherwise standard New Keynesian models. This, in turn, implies that optimal monetary policy rules should be passive. We show that the so‐called inverted aggregate demand logic (IADL) relies on nominal wage flexibility. Outside of extreme parameterizations, wage stickiness prevents the inversion of the slope of the IS curve. Hence, LAMP does not generally alter the trade‐offs faced by a welfare maximizing Central Bank, and for this reason it does not fundamentally affect the design of optimal simple rules and optimal monetary policy. (JEL E21, E52)     

On the measurement of socioeconomic inequality of health between countries

This paper focuses on the measurement of socioeconomic inequality of health between countries and its evolution over time, by means of population-weighted indicators. We show that rank-dependent indicators of inequality can be highly sensitive to small changes in the socioeconomic variable when estimating inequality in samples consisting of countries with large differences in population weights. Since larger countries count more than smaller countries, changes in the former tend to have bigger effects than changes in the latter. When using rank-dependent indicators, however, the sensitivity to small changes in the variable which is used for ranking can be so extreme, that the indicator may suggest trend reversals in inequality which do not really exist. An empirical study shows that this is not a freak case. The use of rank-dependent indicators may therefore produce misleading results when it comes to the measurement of population-weighted between-country inequality. We propose a simple diagnostic test to check how sensitive rank-dependent indices are to small changes in the variable used for ranking.     

How Do We Assess How Agentic We Are? A Literature Review of Existing Instruments to Evaluate and Measure Individuals' Agency

Social Indicators Research - The importance and centrality of the construct of agency is wellknown amongst social scientists. Yet, there is still little agreement on how this construct should be...     

Do women have longer conversations? Telephone evidence of gendered communication strategies

We investigate whether there are systematic gender differences in communication behavior by telephone. First, we report a study of anonymized billing records of 3103 subscribers to a large mobile operator in Italy and Greece over 2 years from 2006 to 2008. Faced with identical tariffs, women make fewer calls than men, and their calls last 16% longer controlling for other factors. Secondly, we report a study of some 92,000 person-days of calls to call-center employees of a large consumer services company operator at four sites in Germany. Calls randomly allocated to women last 15% longer than those of men controlling for other factors. There is no evidence, however, that this results in the women being any less effective employees than the men; indeed, in operations involving sales where it is possible to measure productivity by this criterion, female employees make slightly more sales per shift than men. It appears instead to reflect systematic gender differences in communication strategies, though it may reflect also an element of preference by both men and women for speaking to women. The findings of both studies are highly statistically significant and are found across all age groups. The magnitude of gender differences is sensitive to the costs of communication. The results have implications for possible explanations of gender clustering in the labor market.     

Soziale Schichtung Und Delinquenz

The frequently posited relationship between social class and criminal behaviour is dubious in theory and lacking empirical evidence. Based upon the economic theory of crime by Gary S. Becker we present an extended model which integrates the effects of the individuals’ class position on their subjective evaluations of costs, utility, and the probability of being caught. Additionally, we take into account selective incentives (social opportunities) and the internalization of social norms concerning conformity (framing of the social situation) depending on social class. We test the model for two offences: shop-lifting and tax-evasion. The source of data is the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) for the years 1990 and 2000. The empirical results support the theoretical model. There is no general relationship between the individuals’ social status and their incentives for criminal behaviour. However, the types of offences committed are affected by the social status. Subjective expected probability of failure or success is more important than fear of punishment or the expected utility. Internalized norms decrease the probability of committing a crime.     

Compatible prior distributions for directed acyclic graph models

Summary.  The application of certain Bayesian techniques, such as the Bayes factor and model averaging, requires the specification of prior distributions on the parameters of alternative models. We propose a new method for constructing compatible priors on the parameters of models nested in a given directed acyclic graph model, using a conditioning approach. We define a class of parameterizations that is consistent with the modular structure of the directed acyclic graph and derive a procedure, that is invariant within this class, which we name reference conditioning.     

The dual network structure of organizational problem solving: A case study on open source software development

We reconstruct the dual network structure generated by the association between 72 contributors and 737 software bugs engaged during a full development cycle of the free/open source software project Epiphany. Estimates of structural parameters of Exponential Random Graph Models for two-mode networks reveal the structural logics shaping activities of collaborative problem solving. After controlling for contributor-specific and software bug-specific characteristics, we find that contributors (“problem solvers”) tend to distribute their activity over multiple software bugs. At the same time, however, we find that software bugs (“problems”) tend not to share multiple contributors. This dual tendency toward de-specialization and exclusivity is sustained by specific local network dependencies revealed by our analysis which also suggests possible organizational mechanisms that may be underlying the puzzling macro-structural regularities frequently observed, but rarely explained, in the production of open source software. By combining these mechanisms with the influence of contributors characterized by different levels of involvement in the project, we provide micro-level evidence of structural interdependence between “core” and “peripheral” members identified exclusively on the basis of their individual level of contribution to the project.