AN INTEGRATIVE SUMMARY OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH IN QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Since 1980, practitioner interest in the field of quality management (qm) has grown significantly, resulting in academic researchers embracing QM as a legitimate discipline of study. One approach to evaluating the intellectual health of a discipline is an examination of doctoral dissertation research. This work both complements and extends other published reviews of the quality management discipline by analyzing doctoral dissertation research since 1981, categorizing this research, examining shifts in major research themes, evaluating data collection and analysis methodologies, and discussing general trends in this research area. Our findings suggest that the challenges in QM have become more interdisciplinary and integrated, and reveal an encouraging trend toward more rigorous research methodologies and the increased use of theories from other disciplines, leading to a more mature body of research in this field.     

MONETARY REWARDS AND DECISION COST IN EXPERIMENTAL ECONOMICS

A survey of thirty-one experimental studies which report data on the comparative effects of monetary rewards and opportunity cost shows: (1) several studies in which increased rewards shift the central tendency of the data toward the predictions of rational models; (2) in virtually all cases rewards reduce the variance of the data around the predicted outcome. This is consistent with a model in which rewards are balanced against decision cost in agent behavior and explicates the argument that when rational models fail it can be attributed to low opportunity cost of deviations from the rational prediction.     

Agenda Setting for the Civil Rights Issue

A comparison of front-page New York Times content and nationalpublic opinion from 1954 to 1976 showed strong agenda-settingeffects for the civil rights issue. For this issue, the optimaleffect span was the four- to six-week period immediately priorto field work. These findings contradict previous findings andassertions about a cumulative media effect over a longer periodof time.     

HOUSEHOLDS' GROCERY SHOPPING BEHAVIOR IN THE SHORT-RUN: THEORY AND EVIDENCE

This paper extends the study of nonmarket work activities to explain the impact of household characteristics on grocery shopping behavior. A constrained utility maximization model is developed and the equilibrium conditions of the model are derived. These conditions and the hypotheses implied by them relating to the determinants of time spent in a grocery shopping trip, the size of a purchase, and the number of such trips within a given period of time were tested using data from a sample which identified the household characteristics of grocery shoppers. In these tests, using two-stage least squares, the theoretical implications of our simultaneous equations model are significantly supported.     

TAX EFFECTS, PRICE EXPECTATIONS AND THE NOMINAL RATE OF INTEREST

This paper investigates the relationship between price expectations, income taxes and the nominal rate of interest in Canada. Our primary approach was to utilize the rational expectations hypothesis to create a synthetic price expectations series and to apply this series to four models of the determination of the nominal rate of interest; the Yohe-Karnovsky model, the Carr-Smith model, the Feldstein-Eckstein model and the Jenkins-Lim model. The analysis is inconclusive with respect to the Darby hypothesis that income tax considerations will cause the nominal rate of interest to increase by more than the increase in the expected rate of inflation.