Crowdfunding through a partial organization lens – The co-dependent organization

Crowdfunding has become a rapidly growing source of alternative financing for a wide range of products and service ideas. The crowdfunding process itself necessitates the successful interaction between a number of actors including the central organizing platform, a number of content providing campaigns, and a large diverse group of funders. By utilizing the literature on complete and partial organizations and rejecting the commonly applied organizational molds to describe the process, this paper proposes that crowdfunding is organized and enabled as a fluid and co-dependent interaction between the various actors. The concept of partial organizations and its emphasis on key organizational decisions reveal that crowdfunding may be conceived of as a “co-dependent organization” in which the relationship of the involved actors is so interdependent that the crowdfunding process can neither be maintained nor implemented without it.     

“Making work pay” in a rationed labor market

This paper empirically analyzes the labor supply effects of two “making work pay” reforms in Germany. We provide evidence in favor of policies that distinguish between low effort and low productivity by targeting individuals with low wages rather than those with low earnings. We discuss our results more generally and with comparisons to the family-based tax credits in force in the US and the UK. For the evaluation of the policies, we apply a static structural labor supply framework and explicitly account for demand-side constraints by using a double-hurdle model.     

Dialogic landscapes: Toward a nuanced understanding of globalization in urban Indonesian signage

This article shows that a perspective rooted in Bakhtin's dialogism between the fixed centripetal and fluid centrifugal forces of language and culture is useful in achieving a nuanced understanding of globalization in general and semiotic landscapes in Indonesia in particular. Drawing on data from Indonesia, this article shows dialogic interconnections between fixed and fluid notions of languages and cultures through a multimodal and indexical analysis of governmental and commercial signage in the urban center of Semarang, the provincial capital of Central Java. The analysis highlights the nuanced localizing and globalizing strategies in signage and how dialogicity helps shape the semiotic landscape.     

Split Return: Transnational Household Strategies in Afghan Repatriation

Split return is a common strategy of repatriation among refugees and migrants. Facing great uncertainty, both economically and security‐wise, households disperse in two or more locations in order to minimize risk. The phenomenon is well‐known in migration studies and in studies of return from the distant diaspora, but is studied less among the overwhelming majority residing in countries neighbouring their own. This article draws on experiences from Afghanistan, comparing split return to similar strategies in migration generally and in refugee situations specifically. It suggests that while splits are conceived as a temporary measure, they often become a lasting form of life. Opportunities for split return are often crucial for the willingness to start repatriation, as well as for the sustainability of the household's economy upon return. The article develops the concept of split return in relation to contextual factors, intensity of networks (at origin and in exile) and household composition.     

Affective and Behavioral Features of Jealousy Protest: Associations with Child Temperament,Maternal Interaction Style,and Attachment

This study explored variation in affective and behavioral components of infants’ jealousy protests during an eliciting condition in which mother and an experimenter directed differential attention exclusively toward a rival. Variation was examined in relation to child temperamental emotionality, maternal interaction style, and attachment security. At 45 weeks, intensity of infants’distress and durations of mother‐ and stranger‐directed behavioral responses, including gaze, touch, and proximity‐seeking, were observed in the eliciting condition. We also assessed infants’positive emotionality (PE) and negative emotionality (NE) and maternal interaction styles of sensitivity and engagement. At 54 weeks, attachment security was measured in the Strange Situation Procedure. Findings revealed that distress differed with temperamental emotionality and maternal interaction style. Specifically, distress was greater in infants with lower PE and having mothers who displayed less sensitivity and engagement. Analyses on behavioral responses toward the experimenter revealed linkages with maternal interaction style. Specifically, experimenter‐directed gaze and touch were greater among infants of mothers who demonstrated less sensitivity and engagement. Behavioral responses toward mother were found associated with quality of attachment. Specifically, mother‐directed proximity and touch were highest among infants later judged insecure resistant and lowest among those later judged insecure/avoidant; with infants later judged secure displaying moderate durations of mother‐directed proximal contact.     

Efficient ways to impute incomplete panel data

We find that existing multiple imputation procedures that are currently implemented in major statistical packages and that are available to the wide majority of data analysts are limited with regard to handling incomplete panel data. We review various missing data methods that we deem useful for the analysis of incomplete panel data and discuss, how some of the shortcomings of existing procedures can be overcome. In a simulation study based on real panel data, we illustrate these procedures’ quality and outline fruitful avenues of future research.     

Tuning tempered transitions

The method of tempered transitions was proposed by Neal (Stat. Comput. 6:353–366, 1996) for tackling the difficulties arising when using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from multimodal distributions. In common with methods such as simulated tempering and Metropolis-coupled MCMC, the key idea is to utilise a series of successively easier to sample distributions to improve movement around the state space. Tempered transitions does this by incorporating moves through these less modal distributions into the MCMC proposals. Unfortunately the improved movement between modes comes at a high computational cost with a low acceptance rate of expensive proposals. We consider how the algorithm may be tuned to increase the acceptance rates for a given number of temperatures. We find that the commonly assumed geometric spacing of temperatures is reasonable in many but not all applications.     

Sprachpolitik und gesellschaftliche Heterogenität in Europa: das Beispiel des mehrsprachigen Raums Luxemburg

The objective of this article is to analyse the interrelation of language, political power and society under conditions of heterogeneity from an interdisciplinary point of view. The analytical focus centres on potentials of societal integration through language policy measures in the European context. The complexity of multilingual situations in Europe is presented and evaluated by the situation of Luxembourg, because of supposed general and structural resemblances of the luxembourgish case to the European level. Central aim of the case study is to develop theses in relation to language and/in society for a European level in a comparative perspective. The article concludes that less institutionalized and static regulations of language policies could serve as a sensible basis for social processes in multilingual societies and suggests that supposedly simple solutions are to be considered in a critical manner.     

What do you say to a lifer?

Right-to-life groups are highly organized, sophisticated, well financed, and have the will to make abortion the sole issue in many future elections. They have an advantage in emotional appeal and numbers of active supporters in the conflict with prochoice groups. Most Americans believe abortion is a private matter between a woman and her doctor, but few base their entire moral code on the belief as the right-to-lifers do. Examples of possible responses to lifer rhetoric are given.     

A Bayesian method for safety signal detection in ongoing blinded randomised controlled trials

Sponsors have a responsibility to minimise risk to participants in clinical studies through safety monitoring. The FDA Final Rule for IND Safety Reporting requires routine aggregate safety evaluation, including in ongoing blinded studies. We are interested in estimating the probability that the true adverse event rate in the experimental arm exceeds that in the control arm. We developed a Bayesian approach that specifies an informative meta-analytic predictive prior on the event probability in the control arm and an uninformative prior on that in the experimental arm. We combined these priors with a mixture likelihood that considers each patient in the ongoing blinded study may belong to the experimental or control arm. This allowed us to estimate the quantity of interest without unblinding. We evaluated our method by simulation, pairing scenarios that differed only in whether a safety signal was present or missing, and quantifying the ability of our model to discriminate using signal detection theory. Our approach shows benefit. It detects safety signals more reliably with greater sample sizes and for common rather than rare events. Performance does not deteriorate markedly when historical studies exhibit heterogeneous hazards or non-constant hazards. Our method will allow us to monitor safety signals in ongoing blinded studies with the goal of earlier identification and risk mitigation. Our method could be adapted to use informative priors on both arms or predictive covariates where pertinent data exist. We stress that ongoing safety monitoring should involve a multi-disciplinary team where statistical methods are paired with medical judgement.