Face,Accounts, and Schemes in the Context of Relationship Breakups

This article investigates account strategies that individuals employ to neutralize identity threats caused by breakups from romantic relationships. I distinguish three narrative frames for such accounts: dumper, dumpee, and consensus narratives. Individuals who employ a consensus narrative frame provide accounts by default: they deny that any harm was done to anyone. Dumpers dismissed the breakup's conflictuality, used externalization strategies, and depicted themselves as empathetic. Dumpees used externalization strategies and denials of injury, emphasized their agency, and pointed out valuable changes of self. I then analyze the results from a phenomenological perspective to identify connections between accounting practices and the structure of the self. I argue that accounting for traumatic breakups is important for the development of schemes that guide perception, action, and the interpretation of biography.     

Entscheidungsverhalten von Kunden in Mass Customization-Systemen

Sequential choice processes are ubiquitous in consumer decision making. In each attribute decision, consumers are often faced with different numbers of options which they must trade off in order to make the best possible choice. Thereby, complicated high variety choices at the beginning of a choice process produce a larger trade-off conflict and, thus, initially a greater mental depletion than more simple low variety choices. We examine the strength of mental depletion in sequential choices on individuals’ perceived attractiveness of the firm’s recommended default option at a target choice. We show that consumers who are confronted with difficult high variety choices early in the decision sequence followed by low variety choices initially deplete more than consumers who encounter exactly the same attribute decisions in reverse. As a result, depleted consumers are more likely to fall prey to the recommended default or some perceptually focal options close to the default anchor at target choice succeeding a sequence of decisions.     

Problem Gambling and Gaming Machine Density: Socio-spatial Analysis of Three Victorian Localities

This paper examines the debate about possible relationships between problem gambling and accessibility to electronic gaming machines (EGMs), in the context of the Victorian Government's policy that imposed a ‘cap’ on EGMs in disadvantaged communities. Using GIS (Geographical Information Systems), the spatial distribution of social disadvantage in three ‘capped’ localities was compared with the spatial distribution of gaming venues and patterns of concentrated EGM expenditure during 2001–2005, including seasonal trends. Research revealed different relationships between spatial and social categories in the study localities, indicating the need for more systematic local area analysis. This research raises questions about the limitations of conventional methodologies and regulatory strategies based on simple measures such as gaming machine density. We propose improvements to the methodology to better measure the changing level of local supply and demand for machine gaming.     

Debt–Growth Nexus: A Spatial Econometrics Approach for Developing Countries

The objective of this paper is to examine the role of external debt in a country’s economic growth. With 31 developing countries divided into four regions, this paper employs the recent technique of spatial econometrics to incorporate the neighbouring effect in the debt–growth model. The empirical results reveal that the East Asia and Pacific, Latin America and Caribbean and the Sub-Saharan Africa regions provide convincing evidence to support a negative relationship between the external debt and economic growth. In addition, there is evidence to support the existence of spillover growth among neighbouring countries. This suggests that the role of spatial correlation is important and should be considered for any analysis of the growth model.     

On the NEH heuristic for minimizing the makespan in permutation flow shops

Over the last 20 years the NEH heuristic of Nawaz, Enscore, and Ham published in this journal has been commonly regarded as the best heuristic for minimizing the makespan in permutation flow shops. In recent years some authors claimed to develop new heuristics that are competitive or outperform NEH. Our study reveals that these claims are not justified. We also address the issue of a fair comparison of the NEH results with those obtained by metaheuristics. Finally we conduct a thorough analysis of NEH leading to its modification which secures the optimality in the two-machine case and improves the general performance.     

Child Survival and Fertility of Refugees in Rwanda

In the 1960s and 1990s, internal strife in Rwanda has caused a mass flow of refugees into neighbouring countries. This article explores the cumulated fertility of Rwandan refugee women and the survival of their children. To this end, we use a national survey conducted between 1999 and 2001 and covering 6,420 former refugee and non-refugee households. The findings support old-age security theories of reproductive behaviour: refugee women had higher fertility but their children had lower survival chances. Newborn girls suffered more than boys, suggesting that the usual sex differential in child survival observed in most populations changes under extreme living conditions.     

Power of the Neyman Smooth Test for Evaluating Multivariate Forecast Densities

We compare and investigate Neyman's smooth test, its components, and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) goodness-of-fit test for testing the uniformity of multivariate forecast densities. Simulations indicate that the KS test lacks power when the forecast distributions are misspecified, especially for correlated sequences of random variables. Neyman's smooth test and its components work well in samples of size typically available, although there sometimes are size distortions. The components provide directed diagnosis regarding the kind of departure from the null. For illustration, the tests are applied to forecast densities obtained from a bivariate threshold model fitted to high-frequency financial data.     

ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND LOCALLY INITIATED ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE NONMETROPOLITAN UNITED STATES

A community embeddedness perspective hypothesizes that nonmetropolitan localities high on entrepreneurial social infrastructure (ESI) are more successful at implementing economic development projects than those lacking ESI. ESI is a format for converting social capital into organizational forms that facilitate collective action. Logistic regression revealed that localities with projects were more likely to have an unbiased newspaper, multiple contributions by financial institutions to community projects, and more external linkages, Project communities place more emphasis on citizen involvement through civic organizations than through local government. Community-based patterns of interactions and organization are associated with successful collective economic development action.     

斯柯达转型之谜

在很长的一段时间里，总部位于捷克的斯柯达都是一家名不见经传的公司，可就在不到15年的时间里，这家公司便实现了转型，从一个行业笑料发展成了一家颇受尊重的汽车巨头。秘诀何在？答案是：质量，知识转移，资本价值，时机把握，上市速度。     

An exploratory study of the relation between concrete and abstract product attributes

It is argued that the abstract product attributes that consumers mention in a research setting should not be interpreted as combinations of the more concrete attributes consumers mention. Results from a laddering study show that a majority of elicited abstract product attributes are unrelated to concrete attributes. Furthermore, these unrelated abstract attributes are about different product aspects than the related abstract attributes. These findings are discussed in the light of the problem of ‘actionability', and of models for new product development.