The Dynamism of Organizational Practices: The Role of Employment Blueprints

This paper explores how founders’ blueprints affect the dynamism of organizational practices, and in particular the capability to sustain as well as change practices. First, a theoretical argument is developed on the critical role of founders’ blueprints of the employment model, which are difficult to alter and mark firms’ future paths by affecting the dynamism of organizational practices over an extended period of time. Subsequently, case studies of several organizational practices in three management consulting firms in the USA, the Netherlands and the UK illustrate how founders’ conceptions of the employment relationship (i.e. their employment model) affect the way in which competing demands of continuity and renewal are addressed. Moreover, engineering‐ or commitment‐oriented blueprints appear to facilitate the capability to adapt, while autocratic blueprints do not.     

Tests for the mean of a multivariate normal population

We study the problem of testing: H₀ : μ ∈ P against H₁ : μ ? P, based on a random sample of N observations from a p-dimensional normal distribution N_p(μ, Σ) with Σ > 0 and P a closed convex positively homogeneous set. We develop the likelihood-ratio test (LRT) for this problem. We show that the union-intersection principle leads to a test equivalent to the LRT. It also gives a large class of tests which are shown to be admissible by Stein's theorem (1956). Finally, we give the α-level cutoff points for the LRT.     

On utility functions

The von Neumann-Morgenstern (vNM) expected utility criterion is a particular case of a more general utility space structure. The general utility function can take care of the intrinsic utility or disutility of risk.An approximation to this general utility function is the proposed Constant Elasticities of Value and Risk (CEVR) function, which is easily applied in specific cases, for instance in psychometric studies of behaviors in the presence of certain or uncertain gains or losses.     

Independence of irrelevant alternatives in the theory of voting

In social choice theory there has been, and for some authors there still is, a confusion between Arrow'sIndependence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) and somechoice consistency conditions. In this paper we analyze this confusion. It is often thought that Arrow himself was confused, but we show that this is not so. What happened was that Arrow had in mind a condition we callregularity, which implies IIA, but which he could not state formally in his model because his model was not rich enough to permit certain distinctions that would have been necessary. It is the combination of regularity and IIA that he discusses, and the origin of the confusion lies in the fact that if one uses a model that does not permit a distinction between regularity and IIA, regularity looks like a consistency condition, which it is not. We also show that the famous example that proves that Arrow was confused does not prove this at all if it is correctly interpreted.     

SEPARATING MORAL HAZARD FROM ADVERSE SELECTION AND LEARNING IN AUTOMOBILE INSURANCE: LONGITUDINAL EVIDENCE FROM FRANCE

The identification of information problems in different markets is a challenging issue in the economic literature. In this paper, we study the identification of moral hazard from adverse selection and learning about risk within the context of a multi‐period dynamic model. We extend the model of Abbring, Chiappori, and Pinquet (2003, Journal of the European Economic Association, 1, 767–820) to include learning about risk and insurance coverage choice over time. We derive testable empirical implications for panel data. We then perform tests using longitudinal data from France during the period 1995–1997. We find evidence of moral hazard among a sub‐group of policyholders with less driving experience (less than 15 years). Policyholders with fewer than five years of experience have a combination of learning about risk and moral hazard, whereas no residual information problem is found for policyholders with more than 15 years of experience.     

Act outlines ways to protect health care workers and the public in an emergency

In case of emergency, state public health officials need to be ready and authorized to act. Here's an overview of the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act and the powers it provides.