Willingness to Pay, Compensating Variation, and the Cost of Commitment

Hicksian welfare theory is static in nature, but many decisions are made in a dynamic environment. We present a dynamic model of an agent's decision to purchase or sell a good under the realistic conditions of uncertainty, irreversibility, and learning over time. Her willingness to pay (WTP) contains both the intrinsic value of the good as in Hicksian theory plus a commitment cost associated with delaying to obtain more information. The Hicksian equivalence between WTP/Willingness to accept (WTA) and compensating and equivalent variations no longer holds. The WTP and WTA divergence may arise and observed WTP values are not always appropriate for welfare analysis.     

Decision Making,Risk and Gender: Are Managers Different?

This paper explores differences in the nature of decisions taken by males and females. Women are playing an increasingly important role in business management and managers are ultimately tested and evaluated in terms of their success in making decisions. Consequently any difference in the character and quality of decisions taken by male and female managers will have important implications for organizations. This paper reviews the literature, and reports two pieces of empirical work which investigate the connections between gender and decision making. The decision-making characteristics of males and females in a ‘non-managerial’ population in which the majority of individuals have not undergone formal management education are contrasted with a ‘managerial’ population of potential and actual managers who have undertaken such education. It is argued that women are often excluded from managerial positions of authority and leadership due to stereotypes, which have been constructed by observing ‘non-managerial’ populations at large. The paper concludes, however, that these stereotypes may not apply to managers as in the ‘managerial’ sub-population males and females display similar risk propensity and make decisions of equal quality.     

Rates of missing responses in personal digital assistant (PDA) versus paper assessments

This article describes rates of missing item responses in personal digital assistant (PDA) assessments as compared to paper assessments. Data come from the evaluation of a classroom-based leisure, life skills, and sexuality education program delivered to high school students in Cape Town, South Africa. Analyses show that the paper assessments had much higher rates of missing-ness than PDA assessments. This association is moderated by item order. Certain analyses also suggest that paper assessments have higher rates of missingness for items pertaining to participants' sexual behavior. Implications of these results for evaluation research will be discussed.     

Contextualizing Cultural Orientation and Organizational Citizenship Behavior

This research attempts a more contextualized approach to examining organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Borrowing from theory in international and cross cultural management as well as organizational behavior, context is conceptualized as multi-level and as a shaper of meaning and variability in employee citizenship behaviors. By centralizing the unique socio-cultural, political and historical national context (i.e., omnibus context) of Lebanon at the core of our theorizing, we hypothesize, contrary to previous research, a positive relationship between idiocentrism and employee engagement in organizational citizenship behaviors. Furthermore, we explore the influence that unit level OCB (i.e., discrete context) has on the idiocentrism–OCB relationship. Our analysis confirms the positive relationship between idiocentrism and OCB in this unique context. In addition, our cross-level analysis suggests that in workgroups with higher levels of unit level OCB, idiocentrism is more strongly related to employee engagement in OCB. The findings highlight the value added in contextualizing research on OCB and employee behavior in general.     

How Public Are We? Coverage of Sociology by the Associated Press

The recent and prolific attention to public sociology has involved a great deal of theoretical debate about its merits, flaws, and potential future within the discipline. Despite the loud call for becoming more public, existing research on the discipline lacks both an empirical understanding of where we are as well as a methodological rubric to guide future inquiry. This project explores one outlet for public sociology—the press—as a starting point for this line of research. Through an investigation of Associated Press stories featuring sociology and sociologists, we seek to provide a baseline for consideration of public sociology efforts by describing the current state of how our discipline and its members are portrayed in the press. Further, based on our findings we provide some insights for future research.     

Developmental Trends in Self-regulation among Low-income Toddlers

The attainment of self‐regulatory skills during the toddler years is an understudied issue, especially among low‐income children. The present study used growth modeling to examine the change over time and the final status in children's abilities to self‐regulate, in a sample of 2,441 low‐income children aged 14 to 36 months. Positive growth in their self‐regulation occurred between 14 and 36 months, but individual variation was observed in both the growth rates and final status. Children who showed high degrees of negativity at 14, 24 and 36 months grew at slower rates than other children. Boys and children high in negativity had lower scores in self‐regulation at 36 months than girls and children with low negativity, whereas higher quality mother–child interactions at 14 and 24 months were associated with better self‐regulation at 36 months. The results suggest that some children may be at risk for developing problems in regulation because of mother–child interaction patterns and child characteristics such as high negativity.