Reconsidering the decision-making approach to management

There appears to be an increasing number of popular articles assailing the quantitative leanings of younger managers, and thus indirectly, our ‘decision-making’ approach to management education. This paper investigates these charges and reexamines some of the conceptual foundations, as well as popular attitudes, of management science. An actual managerial situation, considered to be typical, is used as a vehicle to explore these foundations and attitudes and some possible redirections of the field are then suggested.     

On the accuracy of approximate studentization

With a parametric model, a measure of departure for an interest parameter is often easily constructed but frequently depends in distribution on nuisance parameters; the elimination of such nuisance parameter effects is a central problem of statistical inference. Fraser & Wong (1993) proposed a nuisance-averaging or approximate Studentization method for eliminating the nuisance parameter effects. They showed that, for many standard problems where an exact answer is available, the averaging method reproduces the exact answer. Also they showed that, if the exact answer is unavailable, as say in the gamma-mean problem, the averaging method provides a simple approximation which is very close to that obtained from third order asymptotic theory. The general asymptotic accuracy, however, of the method has not been examined. In this paper, we show in a general asymptotic context that the averaging method is asymptotically a second order procedure for eliminating the effects of nuisance parameters.     

Guest Editors' Introduction

This discourse analysis explores traditional and feminist articulations of rape in online mediated discourse regarding the sexual attack on CBS journalist Lara Logan in Egypt in February 2011. Examination of 175 stories and links in the top ten news blogs in the United States showed that the blogosphere contested traditional rape narratives that blamed Logan for the attack and conceptualized rape through a more varied means. In doing so, bloggers engaged in a struggle for meaning, and mainstreamed feminist understandings of sexual violence within the online public space.     

Simple and accurate inference for the mean of the gamma model

The two-parameter gamma model is widely used in reliability, environmental, medical and other areas of statistics. It has a two-dimensional sufficient statistic, and a two-dimensional parameter which can be taken to describe shape and mean. This makes it closely comparable to the normal model, but it differs substantially in that the exact distribution for the minimal sufficient statistic is not available. Some recently developed asymptotic theory is used to derive an approximation for observed levels of significance and confidence intervals for the mean parameter of the model. The approximation is as easy to apply as first-order methods, and substantially more accurate.     

ON THE BEHRENS–FISHER PROBLEM1

In this article the Behrens-Fisher problem is reformulated in terms of a structural model of inference. For this version of the problem a solution is obtained which is valid for arbitrary absolutely continuous error distributions. These results are further discussed for the standard normal distribution and for some other special cases with not normally distributed populations.     

Trends and Compositional Changes in Fertility: California Circa 1970–1990

Since 1970 California has been the prime destination of the high numbers of both legal and illegal U.S. entrants. Fertility consequences have been dramatic. Births to U.S.-born women, after the decline in the 1970s and mild rebound in the 1980s, neared the 1970 level of 325,000. Yet total births rose from 360,000 to 600,000 in 1992. White non-Hispanic women bore nearly 70% of births in 1970 but 38% in 1992; Hispanic women, 20% in 1970 and 44% in 1992; others (primarily Asian ancestry), 3% and 10% respectively; and blacks, 9% and 7.5%. In the same period the proportion of births to U.S. natives fell from 89% to 56%; that to Mexican nationals rose from 7% to 27% (a six-fold increase absolutely); and that to women of all other birthplaces rose from 3% to 18%. Filipino women (the second largest category of foreign-born women) have borne 2% of all births since 1980. The increase in Mexican-born mothers was especially sharp after 1985, while the estimated Hispanic TFR rose 30% to 3.5 children per woman. In 1992 California's TFR was 2.42—18% above the U.S. average. In 1970 nearly 95% of teen mothers were U.S.-born, and 20% were Hispanic. In 1992, 61% of teen mothers were U.S. nationals; 60% were Hispanic, over half of them Mexican-born. The large increase in births in the 1980s, especially those to cultures supporting early childbearing, presages a sharp increase in births beginning in 2000. Meanwhile, the 5 years' median schooling of Mexican migrants has resulted in a parallel decline in parental education. Given the positive correlation of parental education and school achievement and attainment, California can expect a decline in the latter and hence lower labor productivity, incomes, and tax revenues by the young adults of the twenty-first century.