Business teaching in the CIS States

The author draws on his experience teaching business concepts to executive students from former centrally-planned economies of the Confederation of Independent States, particularly Tashkent. Several lessons can be learned. Most important is that the students' perceptions of Western business knowledge is very different from those in the West. To bridge these different perceptions, the author suggests starting from a common knowledge base, using only concrete and specific work situations, making tacit knowledge explicit through imagination, analogies and metaphors, and giving priority to the process of introducing new business practices.     

Mechanism Design with Collusion and Correlation

In a public good environment with positively correlated types, we characterize optimal mechanisms when agents have private information and can enter collusive agreements. First, we prove a weak‐collusion‐proof principle according to which there is no restriction for the principal in offering weak‐collusion‐proof mechanisms. Second, with this principle, we characterize the set of allocations that satisfy individual and coalitional incentive constraints. The optimal weakly collusion‐proof mechanism calls for distortions away from first‐best efficiency obtained without collusion. Allowing collusion restores continuity between the correlated and the uncorrelated environments. When the correlation becomes almost perfect, first‐best efficiency is approached. Finally, the optimal collusion‐proof mechanism is strongly ratifiable.     

Automatic Sex-Liking and Sex-Failure Associations in Men With Sexual Dysfunction

Current models of sexual functioning imply an important role for both automatic and controlled appraisals. Accordingly, it can be hypothesized that erectile dysfunction may be due to the automatic activation of negative appraisals at the prospect of sexual intercourse. However, previous research showed that men with sexual dysfunction exhibited relatively strong automatic sex-positive instead of sex-negative associations. This study tested the robustness of this unexpected finding and, additionally, examined the hypothesis that perhaps more specific sex-failure versus sex-success associations are relevant in explaining sexual dysfunction and distress. Male urological patients (N = 70), varying in level of sexual functioning and distress, performed two Single-Target Implicit Association Tests (ST-IATs) to assess automatic associations of visual erotic stimuli with attributes representing affective valence (“liking”; positive versus negative) and sexual success versus sexual failure. Consistent with the earlier findings, the lower the scores on sexual functioning, the stronger the automatic sex-positive associations. This association was independent of explicit associations and most prominent in the younger age group. Automatic sex-positive and sex-failure associations showed independent relationships with sexual distress. The relationship between sexual distress and sex-failure associations is consistent with the view that automatic associations with failure may contribute to sexual distress.     

Efficacy of a Self-Help Treatment for At-Risk and Pathological Gamblers

Available evidence suggests that self-help treatments may reduce problem gambling severity but inconsistencies of results across clinical trials leave the extent of their benefits unclear. Moreover, no self-help treatment has yet been validated within a French Canadian setting. The current study therefore assesses the efficacy of a French language self-help treatment including three motivational telephone interviews spread over an 11-week period and a cognitive-behavioral self-help workbook. At-risk and pathological gamblers were randomly assigned to the treatment group (n = 31) or the waiting list (n = 31). Relative to the waiting list, the treatment group showed a statistically significant reduction in the number of DSM-5 gambling disorder criteria met, gambling habits, and gambling consequences at Week 11. Perceived self-efficacy and life satisfaction also significantly improved after 11 weeks for the treatment group, but not for the waiting list group. At Week 11, 13% of participants had dropped out of the study. All significant changes reported for the treatment group were maintained throughout 1, 6 and 12-month follow-ups. Results support the efficacy of the self-help treatment to reduce problem gambling severity, gambling behaviour and to improve overall functioning among a sample of French Canadian problem gamblers over short, medium and long term. Findings from this study lend support to the appropriateness of self-help treatments for problem gamblers and help clarify inconsistencies found in the literature. The low dropout rate is discussed with respect to the advantages of the self-help format. Clinical and methodological implications of the results are put forth.     

Optimal Cash Tender Offers*

This paper develops a contingent claims analysis, a simple decision model for determining the optimal price in a cash tender offer. The implied behavior of the optimal tender offer premium over the market price of the target common stock is also investigated. Those readers interested in applying the model may obtain an interactive computer program written in FORTRAN and implementable on a personal computer from the authors on request.     

Santé mentale et travail,entre plaisir et souffrance: quand le normal devient pathologique

Mental health in the workplace introduces a basic viewpoint to better understand the actual dynamic relationship between the individual and work in highly productive organisations. It is particularly visible in a hypermodern society, that is, a society where performance and productivity count on the workers’ free involvement and creativity. Concepts of mental health, social norms, normality and pathology, work and organisation are first defined. The main argument is then developed around the different dimensions describing the neoproductivist trend in many societies, in the occidental world but also in many others countries, like Japan, to name one. This neoproductivist ideology, based on neoliberal economy and the neo-Taylorist social approach of work organisation, produces for many workers a syndrome called ‘hyperactivity’ at work. There is a specific combination of great demands on the workers’ performance and involvement in the organisation on one end, and a great appeal to excellence and self-development on the other end. Studies in different organisations, unions, highly-technological enterprises, a television station and universities indicate that this syndrome of hyperactivity comes to be the norm, the reference, for the majority. Performance union leaders, leading scientists, television performers, highly-skilled technicians are some examples of people who become models of working behaviour in the workplace. This new ideology has consequences in all spheres of society and calls for a critical appraisal and research: clinical sociology can be a proper tool to address this challenge.     

Mortality by cause in the USSR in 1970–1987: the reconstruction of time series

This paper is the first step in an exploration of Soviet cause-of-death statistics which became accessible after 1986. Its main aim is the reconstruction of consistent annual series for the period 1970–1987 in spite of changes in cause-of-death classification caused by the 1980 revision of the Soviet nosological system. In a second part, the series thus reconstructed are analysed to describe the main features of the evolution of mortality during these two decades, using first standardized mortality rates for several very important specific causes and, second, using a method of decomposition of life expectancy changes. For the first time, trends in causes of death are thus shown for the crucial period where life expectancy has grown again after two decades of regression.Cet article constitue la première étape d'une exploration des statistiques soviétiques de décès par cause, devenues disponibles à partir de 1986. Il a pour principal objectif la reconstruction de séries annuelles cohérentes pour la période 1970–1987, en traitant les ruptures introduites par la révision de la Classification soviétique de 1980. La méthode utilisée pour ce faire est exposée dans la première partie. Dans une deuxième partie, les résultats ainsi obtenus permettent de décrire les grands traits de l'évolution de la mortalité au cours de ces deux décennies, d'abord sur la base de taux comparatifs de mortalité pour des causes spécifiques, puis grâce à une décomposition des variations de l'espérance de vie. Pour la première fois on peut ainsi suivre l'évolution des causes de décès dans une période déterminante au cours de laquelle, après deux décennies de recul, les progrès de l'espérance de vie ont repris.     

Unmet Needs for Assistance with ADLs and IADLs: A Measure of Healthy Life Expectancy

Measures of healthy life expectancy have beendeveloped over the last thirty years to evaluate thequality of life of an increasing life expectancy.These measures are usually accounting for prevalencerates of either disability or physical dependence inperforming everyday activities. Although they allowfor a better assessment of quality of life, they arenot reflecting the fact that a disabled person mightbe receiving adequate or inadequate assistance forthese activities. In a context of population aging,where our health care system will have to deal moreand more with chronic disease instead of acutedisease, it is imperative to develop a measure thatwill account for the adequacy of the assistanceprovided to the disabled elderly population. Usingdata from the 1986 Health and Activity LimitationSurvey, we are introducing a measure of healthy lifeexpectancy which will fill this gap. We present theconstruction of this measure of population health anddiscuss its usefulness in assessing policies at amacro level.     

Intermarriage and the risk of divorce in the Netherlands: the effects of differences in religion and in nationality, 1974-94

A textbook hypothesis about divorce is that heterogamous marriages are more likely to end in divorce than homogamous marriages. We analyse vital statistics on the population of the Netherlands, which provide a unique and powerful opportunity to test this hypothesis. All marriages formed between 1974 and 1984 (nearly 1 million marriages) are traced in the divorce records and multivariate logistic regression models are used to analyse the effects on divorce of heterogamy in religion and national origin. Our analyses confirm the hypothesis for marriages that cross the Protestant-Catholic or the Jewish-Gentile boundary. Heterogamy effects are weaker for marriages involving Protestants or unaffiliated persons. Marriages between Dutch and other nationalities have a higher risk of divorce, the more so the greater the cultural differences between the two groups. Overall, the evidence supports the view that, in the Netherlands, new group boundaries are more difficult to cross than old group boundaries.