Motivating Mormons

Despite numerous studies on motivation for generosity, much remains unknown. Given that the lion's share of giving and volunteering is directed toward religious institutions, we aimed to test the motivation for the generosity of Mormons. Previous research has indicated that Mormons (Latter‐day Saints) volunteer and donate at much higher levels than other groups. This study examined how self‐reported motivations to volunteer explain the annual number of hours volunteered and the likelihood of donating toward various causes. We used thirty qualitative interviews with Latter‐day Saints to create a comprehensive questionnaire measuring the time spent engaged in various volunteer activities and whether or not the respondents donated to various causes. The questionnaire also asked respondents to rank how important twenty‐five different motivations were to their service or volunteering. We used factor analysis of the results on the twenty‐five motivation items to identify underlying variables behind volunteer motivations, and we used the scores on the five resulting factors in multiple regression analyses to predict volunteer hours and logistic regression analyses to predict the likelihood of making donations. Different types of motivations predicted different types of volunteering and charitable giving. Theological motivations had the broadest impact and predicted religious volunteering, social volunteering to benefit church members, social volunteering through the church to benefit the community, religious donations, and donations toward social causes made through the church. After inserting control variables into our models, we found that none of the five types of motivations predicted secular volunteering or secular charitable giving. We conclude with managerial and conceptual implications of these and other results.     

Temporal effects on biodiversity and composition of arthropod communities along an urban–rural gradient

Global urbanization is rapidly increasing, yet the prevalence of single order and time point studies likely miss important temporal effects of urbanization on entire communities. We studied three sites along a rural–urban gradient in the Seattle metropolitan area with three sampling periods from 2009–2011 to examine how arthropod communities respond to increasing levels of urbanization in a similar habitat type through time. Consistent with previous studies, urban areas contained altered environmental conditions relevant for litter arthropods, and arthropod biodiversity decreased with urbanization. However, urban arthropod biodiversity was not influenced by environmental measures, supporting the idea of an “urban-filter”. Urbanization was not a factor influencing how communities responded to the effect of time, suggesting that other factors (e.g. disturbance) may ultimately be more important for determining patterns of biodiversity through time in urban areas. Finally, our study illustrates urbanization forces can structuring entire arthropod communities similarly through time, having important consequences for our understanding of urbanization’s temporal effects and indirect influence on community interactions and ecosystem processes. As the effects of urbanization will inevitably vary through time, we suggest that multiple time point studies are required to increase our ability to accurately describe arthropod community responses to increasing urbanization.     

Ethical Violations: What Can and Does Go Wrong in Child Custody Evaluations?

Child custody evaluations can have a significant impact on the adjustment and well-being of children and family members. Custody evaluators must be qualified and held to the highest professional standards. The authors of this article review custody evaluations and often witness inadequate and unprofessional evaluations. In this article, ethical mistakes seen regularly are highlighted. Many mistakes occur when cases are complex and include allegations of child maltreatment or intimate partner violence. Therefore, it is important that custody evaluators be trained in family and child psychology, attachment dynamics, psychological assessment, child abuse, and intimate partner violence. Child custody work needs to be monitored closely to ensure that mistakes can be eliminated in order to avoid unnecessary harm to children and families.     

Ethical Actions: A Comparison of Individual and Group Recommendations

In order to examine the way ethical decisions are made, we asked ethicists, regulatory officials, and experienced researchers to review a set of scenarios that depict important ethical tensions in research. The method employed was “protocol analysis,” a talk-aloud technique pioneered by cognitive scientists. Each individual was asked to make recommendations for courses of action. Later, we held a focus group of university faculty and staff with either institutional review board experience or research ethics training. They too were asked to recommend actions. The results show there are areas where the two data collection approaches agree, as well as areas of considerable difference. Implications for training in the responsible conduct of research are discussed.     

A Clarke tax tâtonnement that converges to the Lindahl allocation

This paper uses the Clarke mechanism to construct an incentive compatible t âtonnement process which converges to the Lindahl allocation of a stylized public good economy when consumers have quadratic preferences. We show truth-telling to be an ex-post perfect equilibrium in the infinite horizon game induced by the tâtonnement.     

Optimal Order Quantities with Remanufacturing Across New Product Generations

We address the problem of determining the optimal retailer order quantities from a manufacturer who makes new products in conjunction with ordering remanufactured products from a remanufacturer using used and unsold products from the previous product generation. Specifically, we determine the optimal order quantity by the retailer for four systems of decision‐making: (a) the three firms make their decisions in a coordinated fashion, (b) the retailer acts independently while the manufacturer and remanufacturer coordinate their decisions, (c) the remanufacturer acts independently while the retailer and manufacturer coordinate their decisions, and (d) all three firms act independently. We model the four options described above as centralized or decentralized decision‐making systems with the manufacturer being the Stackelberg leader and provide insights into the optimal order quantities. Coordination mechanisms are then provided which enable the different players to achieve jointly the equivalent profits in a coordinated channel.     

The NPMLE for Doubly Censored Current Status Data

In biostatistical applications interest often focuses on the estimation of the distribution of time T between two consecutive events. If the initial event time is observed and the subsequent event time is only known to be larger or smaller than an observed point in time, then the data is described by the well understood singly censored current status model, also known as interval censored data, case I. Jewell et al. (1994) extended this current status model by allowing the initial time to be unobserved, but with its distribution over an observed interval ' A, B ' known to be uniformly distributed; the data is referred to as doubly censored current status data. These authors used this model to handle application in AIDS partner studies focusing on the NPMLE of the distribution G of T . The model is a submodel of the current status model, but the distribution G is essentially the derivative of the distribution of interest F in the current status model. In this paper we establish that the NPMLE of G is uniformly consistent and that the resulting estimators for the n ^1/2-estimable parameters are efficient. We propose an iterative weighted pool-adjacent-violator-algorithm to compute the estimator. It is also shown that, without smoothness assumptions, the NPMLE of F converges at rate n ^−2/5 in L ²-norm while the NPMLE of F in the non-parametric current status data model converges at rate n ^−1/3 in L ²-norm, which shows that there is a substantial gain in using the submodel information.     

Making Southern universities web-enabled: From leapfrogging to antelope jumping

Information and communication technology (ICT) has become a very important factor for national economic growth in Southern (or developing) nations, where a societal history in technology and industrial innovation is missing. Online learning implies a redefinition of traditional education, it connects teachers and students in a less formal way, and it affects the structure as well as the culture of education. In this article we highlight the specific requirements and possible solutions needed to make Southern universities web-enabled. We look at the transinstitutional context, portability of content, the threat of global monoculturalism, and teacher training.     

Limits to Concurrency*

In the global race to bring new products to market, many firms have adopted concurrent engineering as a technique to shrink development lead time. Due to the many concurrent engineering success stories in the business and engineering literature, a common misconception has grown that more concurrency is always better. The major contribution of this paper is a rigorous demonstration that limits to concurrency exist even in the simplified situation in which concurrency is modeled as the number of design modules to be executed in parallel. As complexities such as communication linkages between modules are layered onto our basic model, we show that the expected project completion time is minimized at a finite number of modules, a number that decreases with increasing problem complexity. In general, the more complex the project, the stricter the limits to concurrency. This strongly suggests that project managers should be cognizant of the potentially adverse effects of pushing concurrency too far.