A “brer rabbit” case for reverse mandated benefits

Reverse mandated benefits is a government-mandated policy that requires employees to provide their employers with benefits that workers would not provide otherwise. Of course, only those benefits would be mandated that are worth more to employers than they cost, as determined by political authorities. My case for such a policy argues that it is at least as sensible as policies mandating that employers provide benefits to their employees that would not be provided otherwise.     

Intertemporal choice under timing risk: An experimental approach

This paper investigates how individuals evaluate delayed outcomes with risky realization times. Under the discounted expected utility (DEU) model, such evaluations depend only on intertemporal preferences. We obtain several testable hypotheses using the DEU model as a benchmark and test these hypotheses in three experiments. In general, our results show that the DEU model is a poor predictor of intertemporal choice behavior under timing risk. We found that individuals are averse to timing risk and that they evaluate timing lotteries in a rank-dependent fashion. The main driver of timing risk aversion is nothing but probabilistic risk aversion that stems from the nonlinear treatment of probabilities.     

Empirical Bayes estimation in finite population sampling under functional measurement error models

The paper considers simultaneous estimation of finite population means for several strata. A model-based approach is taken, where the covariates in the super-population model are subject to measurement errors. Empirical Bayes (EB) estimators of the strata means are developed and an asymptotic expression for the MSE of the EB estimators is provided. It is shown that the proposed EB estimators are “first order optimal” in the sense of Robbins [1956. An empirical Bayes approach to statistics. In: Proceedings of the Third Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability, vol. 1, University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 157–164], while the regular EB estimators which ignore the measurement error are not.     

The IPO phenomenon in the 1990s

Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) were the most prevalent form of securities issued to raise capital by firms wanting to go public during the last decade (1990–2000) in the United States. The IPO phenomenon got a tremendous boost during the late 1990s by the popularity of the Internet stocks. In the so-called ‘bubble period’ of 1998–1999, hardly a week went by when one or two IPOs, particularly of the Internet variety, did not appear in the capital market. In this paper we have analyzed the IPO phenomenon during 1990–1995 and during 1996–1999. We have also focused on Internet bubble during 1998–1999, and the IPO meltdown after March 2002. We have found that not all IPOs performed well in 1999, the majority of the 25 IPOs that had the highest first-day gains over 200% in 1999 had also a poor performance record during 2001–2002. As the IPOs issued now are few in number, we may not see the kind of ‘irrational exuberance’ as we witnessed in the late 1990s, for the foreseeable future in the United States.     

Beheimatungsprozesse begleiten — ein Werkstattbericht

Supporting processes of belonging in supervision and coachingThe contemporary employee has to cope with frequent changes. Not only does he lose his familiar environment, he also has to find ways to familiarize himself with new places and to develop a fresh sense of belonging. This process can be understood and facilitated by interpreting the German concept of “Heimat“ as something we have to create ourselves. First experiences demonstrate the usefulness of this approach in coaching processes.     

Expected sample moments of concomitants of selected order statistics

In this paper, the task of determining expected values of sample moments, where the sample members have been selected based on noisy information, is considered. This task is a recurring problem in the theory of evolution strategies. Exact expressions for expected values of sums of products of concomitants of selected order statistics are derived. Then, using Edgeworth and Cornish-Fisher approximations, explicit results that depend on coefficients that can be determined numerically are obtained. While the results are exact only for normal populations, it is shown experimentally that including skewness and kurtosis in the calculations can yield greatly improved results for other distributions.     

Going to Pieces: Paul Monette and the Fragments of the Tribe

Author of the highly acclaimed Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988) and winner of the 1992 National Book Award for his autobiography Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, Paul Monette died of complications from AIDS in Los Angeles on February 12, 1995. His most recent work, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise (1994), is his third volume in a trilogy of autobiographical writing on growing up gay, coming-out, and living with AIDS. A graduate of Phillips Academy and Yale University, Monette received a number of awards for his writing and his work as an outspoken voice in the battle against AIDS, including the National Book Award, three Lambda Literary awards, the PEN Center West Freedom to Write Award, and three honorary doctorate degrees, from Wesleyan University, the City University of New York, and the State University of New York at Oswego. A memorial service was held for Monette on Sunday, February 19, 1995, at the Directors Guild of America on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Paul Monette was 49.     

Sensitivity of the Optimum to Perturbations of the Profit or Weight of an Item in the Binary Knapsack Problem

In the binary single constraint Knapsack Problem, denoted KP, we are given a knapsack of fixed capacity c and a set of n items. Each item j, j = 1,...,n, has an associated size or weight w_j and a profit p_j. The goal is to determine whether or not item j, j = 1,...,n, should be included in the knapsack. The objective is to maximize the total profit without exceeding the capacity c of the knapsack. In this paper, we study the sensitivity of the optimum of the KP to perturbations of either the profit or the weight of an item. We give approximate and exact interval limits for both cases (profit and weight) and propose several polynomial time algorithms able to reach these interval limits. The performance of the proposed algorithms are evaluated on a large number of problem instances.     

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