Motivation and Commissioning: Perceived and Expressed Motivations of Care Home Providers

Commissioning of social care for older people has seen major changes since the early 1990s. Considerable responsibility now rests with local authority staff, whose views of care home providers’ motivations, their perceived strengths and weaknesses as service providers, will have a bearing on commissioning decisions. We examine commissioners’ views of provider motivations in eight English local authorities and compare their perceived motivations with providers’ expressed motives. Data were collected through semi‐structured face‐to‐face interviews with commissioners and care home providers. Providers are generally perceived by commissioners as highly altruistic, but also relatively financially motivated individuals. Further analysis revealed significantly different views towards profit‐maximizing, which commissioners perceive as very important, while providers consider it to be of little motivational value. Private sector providers are described by commissioners as significantly more motivated by personal income. Associations are found between commissioners’ perceptions of motivations and the nature of their relationships with providers. Perceptions of providers’ motivations appear important within the commissioning framework.     

Characterizations of the β- and the Degree Network Power Measure

A symmetric network consists of a set of positions and a set of bilateral links between these positions. For every symmetric network we define a cooperative transferable utility game that measures the “power” of each coalition of positions in the network. Applying the Shapley value to this game yields a network power measure, the β-measure, which reflects the power of the individual positions in the network. Applying this power distribution method iteratively yields a limit distribution, which turns out to be proportional to the well-known degree measure. We compare the β-measure and degree measure by providing characterizations, which differ only in the normalization that is used.      

Dancing with the Devil: Partnering with Industry but Publishing in Academia*

We believe that partnering with industry can lead to research that is relevant, rigorous, and refreshing. Our experiences show that the potential benefits of partnering with industry are enormous, but that this is not an easy route for academics interested in operations research modeling or empirical methods. The need for grounded business research is greater now than ever, and, while academics have made great progress, there are still numerous opportunities to demonstrate the relevance of our research. We discuss how to establish industry contacts, identify fruitful academic—industry projects, and publish the resulting research.     

Robust Resource Allocation Decisions in Resource‐Constrained Projects*

The well‐known deterministic resource‐constrained project scheduling problem involves the determination of a predictive schedule (baseline schedule or pre‐schedule) of the project activities that satisfies the finish–start precedence relations and the renewable resource constraints under the objective of minimizing the project duration. This baseline schedule serves as a baseline for the execution of the project. During execution, however, the project can be subject to several types of disruptions that may disturb the baseline schedule. Management must then rely on a reactive scheduling procedure for revising or reoptimizing the baseline schedule. The objective of our research is to develop procedures for allocating resources to the activities of a given baseline schedule in order to maximize its stability in the presence of activity duration variability. We propose three integer programming–based heuristics and one constructive procedure for resource allocation. We derive lower bounds for schedule stability and report on computational results obtained on a set of benchmark problems.     

Building cultural intelligence through supervisor support: Social exchange and subjective career success as mediators and organisational support as a moderator

This study offers a new perspective on how organisational factors influence migrant workers' cultural intelligence (CQ) by examining a moderated mediation model of the mechanism underlying the relationship between perceived supervisor support and CQ. We tested our model using a survey on a sample of 462 migrants. We found that employees' social exchange and subjective career success mediated the relationship between their perceptions of supervisor support and CQ. Furthermore, perceived organisational support moderated the social exchange–CQ relationship, and this relationship was stronger among workers with perceived high organisational support than for those with perceptions of low support. We also found that the indirect effect of employees' perceived supervisor support on CQ via social exchange was stronger for those with perceived high organisational support than for those with perceptions of low support. This study contributes to a better understanding of factors that foster migrant workers' abilities to navigate diverse workplaces.     

Family Well-Being During the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Risks of Financial Insecurity and Coping

During the COVID-19 pandemic, families have experienced unprecedented financial and social disruptions. We studied the impact of preexisting psychosocial factors and pandemic-related financial and social disruptions in relation to family well-being among N = 4091 adolescents and parents during early summer 2020, participating in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development^SM Study. Poorer family well-being was linked to prepandemic psychosocial and financial adversity and was associated with pandemic-related material hardship and social disruptions to routines. Parental alcohol use increased risk for worsening of family relationships, while a greater endorsement of coping strategies was mainly associated with overall better family well-being. Financial and mental health support may be critical for family well-being during and after a widespread crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.     

The Unemployed Individual's Marginal Willingness to Pay for the Remaining Entitlement Period

Abstract. This paper introduces a method of estimating the unemployed individual's marginal willingness to pay for the remaining entitlement period by application of search theory. It is demonstrated that search theory implies that the unemployed individual's marginal willingness to pay for the remaining entitlement period must be less than the value of the unemployment benefit. When benefits expire, though, the willingness to pay for an additional period must be equal to the benefit received during that period. The empirical relevance of this method is shown by re‐interpreting the studies of Meyer (Econometrica 58: 757–782, 1990) and Katz and Meyer (Journal of Public Economics 41: 45–72, 1990).     

Maternal neural reactivity during pregnancy predicts infant temperament

Maternal biological systems impact infant temperament as early as the prenatal period, though the mechanisms of this association are unknown. Using a prospective, longitudinal design, we found that maternal (N = 89) amplitudes of the late positive potential (LPP) in response to negative stimuli during the second, but not the third, trimester of pregnancy predicted observed and physiological indices of temperamental reactivity in infants at age 4 months. Maternal LPP was positively associated with observed infant fear and negatively associated with frontal EEG asymmetry and cortisol reactivity in infants at age 4 months. Results identify a putative mechanism, early in pregnancy, for the intergenerational transmission of emotional reactivity from mother to infant.