STAFFING SERVICE ACTIVITIES WITH WAITING LINE MODELS

The problem of scheduling service activities and variable tasks has traditionally been solved subjectively. The lack of objective approaches has been due to the absence of formal standards and delay costs and by the high cost of examination and measurement. Some recent developments in work measurement concepts may permit the development of more objective standards, which when used in conjunction with scientific methodology such as waiting line theory, make possible objective scheduling of the variable service type activity. The work of a salesperson in a retail store provides an example of both the variable service type activity and the waiting line problem. The manager attempts to balance the cost of service facilities (sales personnel) against the cost of a waiting line (customer ill will). The necessary data inputs for the waiting line model were obtained from field studies by means of work sampling. Computer simulation was then utilized to study various sized sales forces in an attempt to determine the most economical staff allocation.     

The Probation Officer as Social Worker

Summary In this article the author argues for a detachment of the probationservice from the function of carrying out court orders to superviseoffenders. He suggests that changes in social work traininghave not been matched by any fundamental changes in the probationservice's relationship with the court or by any fundamentalchanges in the probation service's own organization or philosophy.The consequence is that probation officers spend a disproportionateamount of time doing tasks for which their training has notequipped them. He postulates a new relationship between theprobation service and the courts which gives the former greaterautonomy in social work decision making, and gives the lattergreater scope to administer punishments within the community.The need to move away from the utilitarian justification forwork with offenders that it reduces crime is also urged, andit is suggested that there is a need to establish, as a value,the importance of social work provisions and counselling foroffenders as a deprived group in society, irrespective of theeffect of these measures on the crime rate.     

Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling

Abstract. The Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling algorithm is aimed at an optimal recycling of past simulations in an iterated importance sampling (IS) scheme. The difference with earlier adaptive IS implementations like Population Monte Carlo is that the importance weights of all simulated values, past as well as present, are recomputed at each iteration, following the technique of the deterministic multiple mixture estimator of Owen & Zhou (J. Amer. Statist. Assoc., 95, 2000, 135). Although the convergence properties of the algorithm cannot be investigated, we demonstrate through a challenging banana shape target distribution and a population genetics example that the improvement brought by this technique is substantial.     

International Business,Human Rights,and Moral Complicity: A Call for a Declaration on the Universal Rights and Duties of Business

The purpose of this article is to call for the formulation and adoption of a declaration on the universal rights and duties of business. We do not attempt to define the specific contents of such a declaration, but rather attempt to explain why such a declaration is needed and what would be some of its general characteristics. The catalyst for this call was the recognition that even under optimal conditions, good companies sometimes are susceptible to moral lapses, and when companies undertake ventures in authoritarian countries with poor human rights records, even those with the best intentions may find themselves drawn into complicity in human rights abuses. There, market exigencies may persuade them to leave their codes of ethics and commitments to human rights at home. Pragmatism, it would seem, requires thatthey accept the ethical inconsistencies that follow from a “When in Rome, do as they Romans do” outlook. When facing the moral dilemma about whether or not to invest in human rights abusing countries, companies are offered two alternatives: they can operate in those countries and accept potential complicity or they can stay away. We suggest, however, that a preferable option is to address the underlying problem, and to this end we advocate the promulgation of a declaration for business that is comparable to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Our proposed name for this is the “Declaration on the Universal Rights and Duties of Business.” To be effective, such a declaration would require enforcement mechanisms. To illustrate this issue, we focus on China, not because China is unique in its human rights abuses, but because China occupies such a central place in the globalization efforts of the major companies from around the world. A robust international declaration is needed to provide a common framework for the practice of consistent and fair business competition everywhere.     

AMBIGUOUS SOLICITATION: AMBIGUOUS PRESCRIPTION

We conduct a two‐phase laboratory experiment, separated by several weeks. In the first phase, we conduct urn games intended to measure ambiguity aversion on a representative population of undergraduate students. In the second phase, we invite the students back with four different solicitation treatments, varying in the ambiguity of information regarding the task and the payout of the laboratory experiment. We find that those who return do not differ from the overall pool with respect to their ambiguity aversion. However, no solicitation treatment generates a representative sample. The ambiguous task treatment drives away the ambiguity averse disproportionally and the detailed task treatment draws in the ambiguity averse disproportionally. Finally, the standard laboratory recruitment e‐mail disproportionately draws in those who are not ambiguity averse. (JEL A12, C81, C90)     

Pseudo-Opinions on Public Affairs

This article reports on the often suspected but rarely researchedtendency of survey respondents to give opinions on topics towhich they have given little or no thought. The findings, basedon a question about a fictitious public affairs issue, do showthat the magnitude of the problem is substantial. But the dataalso demonstrate that this phenomenon does not represent simplerandom error, reflecting instead basic social-psychologicaldispositions which can be elicited, unwittingly, in the contextof the interview.     

Dual citizenship or dual identity? Does ‘transnationalism’ supplant ‘nationalism’ among returning Trinidadians?

In this article we focus on the dual identities of relatively young Trinidadians who have decided to return to the island of their birth, or of their parents, while still in their thirties and forties. Highly‐educated professional transnational migrants mostly make up our sample of 36; 26 possess dual citizenship. We focus on our informants’ narratives about their transnational experiences, self‐appraisals of their dual identities and how they value dual citizenship. More generally, we ask, does transnationalism supplant nationalism among our returning informants? Unsurprisingly, the diverse responses we document do not support the commonly held explanatory relationship between return adaptations, ‘national belonging’ and the expected dominance of ‘transnational belonging’. Family relations intervene significantly, both to encourage transnationalism and to strengthen nationalism. Feelings of national belonging often accompany transnationalism. Notably, we view dual citizenship strategically and pragmatically as advantageous to the continuation of transnational practices.