ASSESSMENT OF MULTIATTRIBUTED MEASURABLE VALUE AND UTILITY FUNCTIONS VIA MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING*

A major restriction on the use of decision analysis in practice is the frequent difficulty of determining a decision maker's multiattribute utility function. The assessment process can be complex and tedious and generally involves: (1) identifying relevant independence conditions, (2) assessing conditional utility functions, (3) assessing scaling constants, and (4) checking for consistency. Some of the assessment and modeling complexities encountered include an assessor's inability to respond in a quantitatively meaningful and consistent way to hypothetical gambles and an analyst's problem in selecting an appropriate functional form that accurately characterizes the conditional utility assessments. A simplified procedure that mitigates these difficulties is proposed. This procedure facilitates the determination of scaling constants by obtaining (via mathematical programming) a multiattributed measurable value function which is converted to a multiattributed utility function. The methodology can be developed advantageously to produce an interactive software package for use as an assessment aid.     

A BEHAVIORAL STUDY OF NURSES,SUPERVISORS, AND DIAGNOSTICIANS IN A HOSPITAL SETTING

A hospital is a highly complex organization that is based on the mutual cooperation of a large and heterogeneous mix of interdependent professionals, semiprofessionals, and nonprofessionals. The present study focuses upon role clarity, need for clarity, job satisfaction, and anxiety-stress perceptions among administrators, nurses, and diagnosticians in a large and complex 450-bed teaching-referral hospital.     

The Management of Information and Managers in Subsidiaries of Multinational Corporations

A key challenge facing multinational corporations (MNCs) is how to encourage the development of firm specific advantages throughout the network of subsidiaries while maintaining global coherence. As a result, a critical task for top managers in the MNC is to structure the relationship between headquarters and subsidiaries. Thus, headquarters' control of subsidiary behaviour and performance becomes a central integrating function in the MNC. We examine first the relationship between the nationality of the MNC headquarters and its information management, namely the key performance metrics utilized by the parent to evaluate subsidiary performance. Second, we investigate the relationship between the MNC nationality and its management of managers, specifically, the transfer of parent company nationals and corporate acculturation. These questions are investigated in a study of MNC subsidiaries located in Australia, Ireland and Singapore. Our data provide strong evidence that MNCs of all nationalities place the greatest emphasis on financial metrics compared to other performance metrics. Moreover, there are differences in the degree of emphasis on performance metrics across MNC nationality. We found that Japanese and German MNCs place significantly less emphasis on financial measures than US and UK MNCs. Our hypotheses relating to the management of managers were also supported by the data. In comparison with all other MNC nationalities, Japanese MNCs place greater emphasis on the transfer of Japanese managers to overseas subsidiaries and less emphasis on corporate acculturation. While some researchers have argued that management control has become more isomorphic as a result of globalization, our results show that companies from different nationalities diverge in their practices.     

Bain: a program for Bayesian testing of order constrained hypotheses in structural equation models

This paper presents a new statistical method and accompanying software for the evaluation of order constrained hypotheses in structural equation models (SEM). The method is based on a large sample approximation of the Bayes factor using a prior with a data-based correlational structure. An efficient algorithm is written into an R package to ensure fast computation. The package, referred to as Bain, is easy to use for applied researchers. Two classical examples from the SEM literature are used to illustrate the methodology and software.     

Merkmale und Fragen einer Governance-Reform am Beispiel des österreichischen Schulwesens

Since the 1990s German speaking countries go through an increasing debate on modernising education systems. Based on an analysis of developments in Austria, but as a hypothesis for other German speaking school systems, the paper aims to identify some cornerstones of this discourse. It argues that a central element is the question how further developments of an education system may be productively steered and that the transformations in the idea of system steering may be conceptualized by an analytic concept of ‘governance’.     

Construction union programs to regain jobs: Background and overview

All union initiatives discussed herein are based on union demands for monopoly. Unable to compete with the open-shop contractors on an economic basis, the construction unions seek to offset economic considerations with political initiatives. They have been remarkably successful in so doing; yet their membership continues to lag.⁴⁷ The question for the future is whether politically assisted monopoly will smother economics with the public as the big loser. The author is Professor Emeritus of Management and was formerly, Director, Industrial Research Unit, and Chairman, Labor Relations Council.