Perceived Risk, Trust, and Democracy

Risk management has become increasingly politicized and contentious. Polarized views, controversy, and overt conflict have become pervasive. Risk-perception research has recently begun to provide a new perspective on this problem. Distrust in risk analysis and risk management plays a central role in this perspective. According to this view, the conflicts and controversies surrounding risk management are not due to public ignorance or irrationality but, instead, are seen as a side effect of our remarkable form of participatory democracy, amplified by powerful technological and social changes that systematically destroy trust. Recognizing the importance of trust and understanding the "dynamics of the system" that destroys trust has vast implications for how we approach risk management in the future.     

Calculating the cost of capital

One of the most important recent advances in corporate finance is the use of risk measures in setting discount rates or required rates of return for capital projects. An understanding of this area is of crucial importance to senior managers and corporate planners. This article explains how to calculate required rates of return using the modern approach to the cost of capital.     

Reliability Estimation Based on System Data with an Unknown Load Share Rule

We consider a multicomponent load-sharing system in which the failure rate of a given component depends on the set of working components at any given time. Such systems can arise in software reliability models and in multivariate failure-time models in biostatistics, for example. A load-share rule dictates how stress or load is redistributed to the surviving components after a component fails within the system. In this paper, we assume the load share rule is unknown and derive methods for statistical inference on load-share parameters based on maximum likelihood. Components with (individual) constant failure rates are observed in two environments: (1) the system load is distributed evenly among the working components, and (2) we assume only the load for each working component increases when other components in the system fail. Tests for these special load-share models are investigated.     

Cultural Differences in International Negotiating

In this age of the global economy, negotiating across cultures is an inevitable part of doing business for firms desiring to compete internationally. What problems could cultural differences cause? Can firms from some countries or cultures do better than firms from other countries or cultures? To study this possibility, cross-cultural negotiating behavior was examined using Hofstede's criteria, to see if some firms may have a cultural competitive advantage. Assumptions were proposed and tested, and additional research is suggested.     

Publicizing our product: Sociologists, the press and defining the discipline at the local level

While sociologists at the national level are often called upon to present opinions about social issues, the crucial work of clarifying the image of the discipline is probably best done in local settings. The difficulty, however, is that practicing sociologists at the state and local levels are often unsure about how to deal with the press and as a consequence are reluctant to present themselves to the local media arena. Several state associations are aware of this problem and have incorporated media training into their annual programs (notably, Georgia and North Carolina). This paper suggests some strategies for talking with the local media, based on personal experience of the author both as a sociologist and as a member of a state legislature. Paul Luebke, has also served since 1991 as a Democrat from Durham county in the North Carolina House of Representatives. His revised study of political change in North Carolina, Tar Heel Politics 2000, was recently published by UNC Press.     

Finding the majority-rule equilibrium under lexicographic comparison of candidates

This paper considers the well studied problem of the existence of an undominated point, under the assumption of lexicographic preferences of voters, as espoused by Taylor in [24]. We extend Taylor's model to situations were we allow for (i) voters to have different ranings of the issues in n-dimensional issue space and (ii) a candidate to be disregarded by a voter if his stand on any one or more of the issues involved in the election is perceived to be too extreme by the voter and (iii) combinations of (i) and (ii). We extend the results of Taylor by demonstrating the non-existence of an equilibrium point in these models in general and then showing that under special circumstances, specialized variants of the “median” point(s) represent equilibrium or undominated points in these models too. Thus a model of voting behavior results that is closer approximation of reality in that historically incumbents tend to win. The primary conclusion of the paper is to suggest that incumbents tend to have an advantage when the election process is characterized by a large presence of special interests or as information becomes more expensive to acquire. Received: 13 February 1996 / Accepted: 27 March 1997     

Book Review: Robert H. Bremner,Giving, Charity and Philanthropy in History,Transaction Publishers,New Brunswick and London, 1996, xiii + 241 pp.

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -