The importance of fairness and equity for the marital satisfaction of older women

In all societies, people are concerned with social justice. "It's just not right" is a fairly common lament. In these two studies, we interviewed 240 older women, who ranged in age from 50 to 82. We found that most older women (85%) considered their marriages to be fair and equitable. Older women were less concerned about existing inequities than their younger peers. Nonetheless, they were somewhat concerned with how rewarding and how fair and equitable their relationships were perceived to be. Those who felt over-benefited, for example, felt more guilty than did their less advantaged peers; those who felt under-benefited felt far more angry than did their privileged peers. Stressful life events--such as the arrival of children, retirement, serious illness, or the awareness impending death--often brought to awareness long simmering resentments over issues of fairness.     

Air canada vs. canadi>n: competition and merger in the framing of airline culture ∗

This paper is concerned with airlines, metaphors and organizational cultures. Specifically the paper seeks to answer the question, ‘why, when so many political and economic commentators are agreed that Canada has only room for one viable airline, has it proven impossible to merge the country's two main commercial airlines?’ To answer the question we draw upon Jenkin's (1994) critical historiographic approach, focusing on the development of the organizational cultures and associated discourses of each airline over time. In the process the paper traces the metaphorical use of the concept of competition in the development of the commercial airline business in Canada. We conclude that the culture of an organization may not, of itself, be enough to explain certain organizational outcomes (e.g., a failure to form a merger or alliance) - particularly organizations that are, in large part, dependent on broad policy concerns, but that broader social discourses (e.g., government policy), mediated by specific organizational cultures, may be the major influence.     

Strategy-proof,efficient, and nonbossy quota allocations

We consider the problem of designing a mechanism to allocate objects to agents when each agent has a quota that must be filled exactly. Agents are assumed to have responsive preferences over items. We show that the only strategy-proof, Pareto optimal, and nonbossy mechanisms are sequential dictatorships. We also show that the only strategy-proof, Pareto optimal, nonbossy, and neutral mechanisms are serial dictatorships. Since these negative results hold for responsive preferences, they hold for more general preferences as well. We are grateful to Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Syed Nageeb Mustafa Ali, Douglas Bernheim, Navin Kartik, Jon Levin, Paul Milgrom, and Azeem Shaikh and two anonymous referees and an editor for helpful discussions. This research has been supported by the Burt and Deedee McMurtry Stanford Graduate Fellowship.