EFFECTS OF OPERATIONAL EMPLOYEE SKILLS ON ADVANCED MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY PERFORMANCE

This study employs structured interviews in a field setting to develop an in‐depth understanding of how a specific human resource decision affected manufacturing performance at 30 plants using advanced manufacturing technologies. Initial results suggested that there is no relationship between the skill level of operational employees and the level of performance of the installations. When a measure of “fit” between environmental characteristics and skills was employed, however, there was a significant relationship between the fit measure and performance.     

An Empirical Investigation of Music and Gambling Behaviour

There has been an increasing amount of research that has examined the structural and situational characteristics of gambling behaviour. However, there is a lack of research examining the role of music and gambling. This study investigated the effects of background music on virtual roulette gaming behaviour under laboratory conditions. There was one independent variable of music with three conditions. The three conditions were (i) no music, (ii) slow tempo music, and (iii) fast music. A total of 60 participants were allocated to one of the three conditions. Ten games of roulette were played with speed of betting, amount spent across high, medium and low-level risk bets and total amount spent recorded. The winner with the most money at the end of the session was rewarded with a non-monetary prize. Results indicated that speed of betting was influenced by musical tempo with faster betting occurring while listening to higher tempo music. There was no relationship between musical tempo and either the size of the bet or the overall amount spent. The results provide valuable insight into how background music can be manipulated to increase betting speed. The implications of these findings for problem gambling management and commercial benefits are discussed.     

Health‐care Nonprofits: Enhancing Governance and Public Trust

Nonprofits are a major part of the U.S. economy and they are not immune from corporate malfeasance controversies. Even Congress has expressed concern about the crisis in nonprofit governance. The nonprofit response to Congress has been a historic initiative recognizing critical challenges to nonprofit governance. In contrast to their for‐profit counterparts, nonprofits are committed to missions serving the public benefit and not to shareholder profits. Accordingly, their missions and financial resources are intrinsic to their very existence, which is built upon the public trust. That trust is rooted in fiduciary responsibility and reflected in best practices. This article traces the history of the nonprofit public trust and fiduciary standards and examines principles of Sarbanes–Oxley and other best practices as they apply to nonprofits. The authors sampled 80 health‐care nonprofit corporation web sites from eight asset classes to determine compliance with Sarbanes–Oxley and identification of fiduciary duty, ethical values, and other best practices. Among the very largest health‐care nonprofits, many comply with Sarbanes–Oxley and identify fiduciary duty, ethical values, and other best practices. However, there are substantial deficiencies in such compliance and identification among all remaining seven asset classes ranging from 99.9 million to less than 100,000. The results appear to corroborate the urgent necessity for reform articulated by the Congress and the nonprofit sector. Nonprofit governance has entered a new era where best practices must be implemented to sustain the public trust.     

Szasz and His Interlocutors: Reconsidering Thomas Szasz's "Myth of Mental Illness" Thesis

It is a matter of some irony that psychiatry's most trenchant critic for over four decades is himself a psychiatrist. I refer to Thomas S. Szasz. Szasz's core thesis may be succinctly rendered: mental illness is a “myth”, a “metaphor” which serves only to obscure the social and ethical “problems in living” we face as human beings. This paper reconsiders the conceptual bases of Szasz's assault on psychiatry and assesses recent counter‐arguments of his critical interlocutors. It presents a defence of the Szaszian conception and emphasises the continuing relevance of his earliest work. Additionally, the paper discusses Szasz's thesis in light of the work of the influential French philosopher of medicine, Georges Canguilhem.     

COMPUTER APPLICATIONS: GRADING SOFTWARE PROGRAMS ACCOMPANYING SELECTED PRINCIPLES TEXTS

An increasing number of non-statistical software packages are being written as supplementary instructional material for economics Principles texts. This paper reviews the software programs currently available as ancillary material to eight major Principles texts. To avoid simply listing what the programs do, a detailed framework for economic software evaluation was created and applied to each program. This evaluation instrument gives the reviewer a total of 31 questions, in jive different categories, to guide the software review. A summary table is presented which allows direct comparison of each package across each of the five evaluation categories.     

THEORY AND EXPERIMENTS ON SPATIAL COMPETITION

We present theoretical and experimental results on spatial competition between two firms. Firms choose locations simultaneously along a line representing a linear market. Identical consumers with non-increasing demand functions are uniformly distributed along this line. We solve for symmetric equilibrium payoffs in an infinitely repeated game for the case of linear demand and an arbitrary discount factor. The set of equilibriums found includes both competitive and collusive payoffs. In laboratory experiments in which the final period was unknown to the players in advance, we observed both competitive and collusive outcomes. Non-binding communication led to collusion.     

EMPIRICAL ADVANCES IN POLITICAL ECONOMY

Editor's Note: I wish to thank Coeditor Mark Zupan, who took responsibility for organizing and implementing both the special symposium on public choice and the processing of papers through the refereeing and editorial process for this special section. On behalf of all the editors, I also would like to express thanks to Carolyn Williams, editorial coordinator, for taking on yet another responsibility in arranging the conference symposium meetings and the management of the files. The symposium on public choice was held at Lake Tahoe during the 1993 WE A meetings. The many efforts of authors, referees, editors and staff have resulted in an exciting complement to this year's Economic Inquiry offerings.     

FURTHER ANALYSIS OF THE THEORY OF ECONOMIC REGULATION: THE CASE OF THE 1969 COAL MINE HEALTH AND SFNETY ACT

How does government regulation influence the structure of industries? In the coal mining industry increased sfnety can be provided with personal protection devices or with engineering controls; but the type of sfnety standard imposed is important because larger producers have a comparative advantage complying with engineering controls. Time series evidence indicates that the 1969 Coal Mine Health and Sfnety Act, by imposing engineering controls, drove out smaller, less sfne mines, thereby shifting production toward larger mines.