Participatory shaping of community futures in e‐waste processing hubs: Complexity,conflict and stewarded convergence in a Palestinian context

This article describes an unconventional participatory development approach carried out in an informal e‐waste hub in South‐West Hebron, an area that has collected and processed the bulk of Israeli e‐waste for over a decade. Our approach contributes to the critique and recovery of community representation in participatory development and the search for ways to facilitate representative community engagement. Specifically, we describe our use of a novel Delphi‐like method that allowed us to facilitate a broadly endorsed development trajectory within a heterogeneous and conflicted community. We show how the results yielded by this approach diverged from those that were likely to emerge from more facile forms of participation in ways that are important for other similar e‐waste hubs internationally, which face a destructive status quo on the one hand, or the economically ruinous international policies that ban e‐waste trade from “developed” to “developing” countries on the other. Despite real tensions and cleavages within the affected communities, the process described facilitated a shift from deadlocked environmental versus livelihood positions towards building capacity and regulating existing informal e‐waste trades to preserve livelihoods dependent on these.     

Revisiting Nested Group Testing Procedures: New Results,Comparisons, and Robustness

Group testing has its origin in the identification of syphilis in the U.S. army during World War II. Much of the theoretical framework of group testing was developed starting in the late 1950s, with continued work into the 1990s. Recently, with the advent of new laboratory and genetic technologies, there has been an increasing interest in group testing designs for cost saving purposes. In this article, we compare different nested designs, including Dorfman, Sterrett and an optimal nested procedure obtained through dynamic programming. To elucidate these comparisons, we develop closed-form expressions for the optimal Sterrett procedure and provide a concise review of the prior literature for other commonly used procedures. We consider designs where the prevalence of disease is known as well as investigate the robustness of these procedures, when it is incorrectly assumed. This article provides a technical presentation that will be of interest to researchers as well as from a pedagogical perspective. Supplementary material for this article is available online.     

Communal values and economic success: A comparison of israeli collective settlements

The association between economic success and adherence to communal values in Israeli kibbutz communes is analyzed over a thirty year period. Adherence to four communal objectives, as independent variables, is considered: Settling the land and absorbing settlers, farming as a way of life, refraining from financial speculation and minimizing consumption. Economic performance was used as the criterion variable. The findings show that the federation of religious kibbutzim (plural of kibbutz) adhered most closely to the social objectives and achieved better economic/financial performance than other kubbutz federations. The economic success of the religious kibbutzim is attributed to a religious rational ethic that was developed during their formative years and maintained consistently over time.     

Games of Competition in a Stochastic Environment

The paper presents a set of games of competition between two or three players in which reward is jointly determined by a stochastic biased mechanism and players’ choices. More specifically, a resource can be found with unequal probabilities in one of two locations. The first agent is rewarded only if it finds the resource and avoids being found by the next agent in line; the latter is rewarded only if it finds the former. Five benchmarks, based on different psychological and game-theoretic assumptions are derived and their predictions compared to actual behavior of 120, 40, and 48 participants playing repeatedly. Of the five benchmarks—the unique (Nash) equilibrium, reinforcement learning, trust-based efficiency, maximum unpredictability, and regret-based (Impulse Balance) equilibrium—regret for missed opportunities best accounts for the qualitative aspect of participants’ behavior and regret attenuated by randomization best accounts for the quantitative aspect of behavior.     

The Role of Strategic Agility in Acquisitions

The aim of the present study is to examine the role of strategic agility as a component of the acquisition process by investigating its constituent elements and effects on knowledge transfer in the context of acquisitions. The study also elaborates on the relationship between knowledge transfer and performance in acquisitions. We test our theoretical model on a quantitative data set of acquisitions conducted by Finnish companies.     

A Note on the Minimax Solution for the Two-Stage Group Testing Problem

Group testing is an active area of current research and has important applications in medicine, biotechnology, genetics, and product testing. There have been recent advances in design and estimation, but the simple Dorfman procedure introduced by R. Dorfman in 1943 Dorfman, R. (1943), The Detection of Defective Members of Large Populations, The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 14, 436–440.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar] is widely used in practice. In many practical situations, the exact value of the probability p of being affected is unknown. We present both minimax and Bayesian solutions for the group size problem when p is unknown. For unbounded p, we show that the minimax solution for group size is 8, while using a Bayesian strategy with Jeffreys’ prior results in a group size of 13. We also present solutions when p is bounded from above. For the practitioner, we propose strong justification for using a group size of between 8 and 13 when a constraint on p is not incorporated and provide useable code for computing the minimax group size under a constrained p.     

Gay, Orthodox, and trembling: the rise of Jewish Orthodox gay consciousness, 1970s-2000s

In 2001, the documentary movie, Trembling Before God, was played in Jewish and gay film festivals around the world, provoking strong emotional reactions. Trembling Before God comprises interviews with Orthodox Jewish gay and lesbian persons who vividly and movingly describe their struggles to live their lives as observant Jewish people, being faithful at the same time to their sexual desires and their religious tradition. Almost all the people interviewed in the movie expressed mixed emotions: love towards their tradition and attachment to their community of faith, coupled with resentment against a community, which in their eyes failed to respond with understanding to their emotional needs, thus adding to their pain. This article aims to modify the picture portrayed in the movie. The dilemmas and struggles of gays and lesbians who live their lives in Orthodox Jewish communities are indeed real. Orthodox gays and lesbians experience a greater dissonance between their sexuality and the values of their community and therefore face more anxieties and inner turmoils than gays and lesbians who live in more permissive environments. The struggles of gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews, however, are not necessarily greater than those of gays and lesbians who live their lives in other conservative communities. In fact, while it is almost impossible to be a sexually active gay or lesbian and a practicing Southern Baptist, Seventh-Day Adventist, Jehovah's Witness, or Mormon, it is not impossible for gays and lesbians to live their lives in an Orthodox Jewish environment. Amazingly, since the 1970s, thousands of gays and lesbians have given up on liberal environments and joined the ranks of traditionalist Jewish congregations.     

Best Invariant and Minimax Estimation of Quantiles in Finite Populations

The theoretical literature on quantile and distribution function estimation in infinite populations is very rich, and invariance plays an important role in these studies. This is not the case for the commonly occurring problem of estimation of quantiles in finite populations. The latter is more complicated and interesting because an optimal strategy consists not only of an estimator, but also of a sampling design, and the estimator may depend on the design and on the labels of sampled individuals, whereas in iid sampling, design issues and labels do not exist.We study the estimation of finite population quantiles, with emphasis on estimators that are invariant under the group of monotone transformations of the data, and suitable invariant loss functions. Invariance under the finite group of permutation of the sample is also considered. We discuss nonrandomized and randomized estimators, best invariant and minimax estimators, and sampling strategies relative to different classes. Invariant loss functions and estimators in finite population sampling have a nonparametric flavor, and various natural combinatorial questions and tools arise as a result.     

ACADEMIC ADMISSIONS STANDARDS: IMPLICATIONS FOR OUTPUT,DISTRIBUTION, AND MOBILITY

We examine the trade‐offs implicit in academic admissions standards when students are charged cost‐based tuition and offered loans that remove liquidity constraints. Lowering entry requirements while holding graduation requirements fixed increases aggregate output and promotes a more equal distribution of wages, but reduces relative income mobility and diminishes the scope for affirmative action. Lowering admissions standards while raising graduation requirements, so that the number of graduates remains constant, has little direct effect on output, distribution, or mobility, but again reduces the scope for affirmative action. Income‐based affirmative action offers a better trade‐off between output and relative mobility than income‐neutral admissions. (JEL: D31, H42, I23, I28, J24)