The Risk Perception Paradox—Implications for Governance and Communication of Natural Hazards

This article reviews the main insights from selected literature on risk perception, particularly in connection with natural hazards. It includes numerous case studies on perception and social behavior dealing with floods, droughts, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, wild fires, and landslides. The review reveals that personal experience of a natural hazard and trust—or lack of trust—in authorities and experts have the most substantial impact on risk perception. Cultural and individual factors such as media coverage, age, gender, education, income, social status, and others do not play such an important role but act as mediators or amplifiers of the main causal connections between experience, trust, perception, and preparedness to take protective actions. When analyzing the factors of experience and trust on risk perception and on the likeliness of individuals to take preparedness action, the review found that a risk perception paradox exists in that it is assumed that high risk perception will lead to personal preparedness and, in the next step, to risk mitigation behavior. However, this is not necessarily true. In fact, the opposite can occur if individuals with high risk perception still choose not to personally prepare themselves in the face of a natural hazard. Therefore, based on the results of the review, this article offers three explanations suggesting why this paradox might occur. These findings have implications for future risk governance and communication as well as for the willingness of individuals to invest in risk preparedness or risk mitigation actions.     

An in-depth case study on the role of industrial design in a business-to-business company

In this paper, we investigate how managers perceive the roles of industrial design, based on their experiences with designers in two product development projects in a business-to-business environment. The study demonstrates that designers can make contributions that surpass the design of physical products, and that influence the effective implementation of product development processes. Our findings extend the limited literature on the role of industrial design in industrial markets, and are of value for managers looking to strengthen their product development processes.     

The value of rescheduling functionality within standard MRP packages

One of the basic functions of an MRP system is to issue rescheduling messages that urge the planner tospeed up or slow down open orders. It seems in practice that these messages are not used at all by planners. This is mostly due to the inaccuracy of MRP, that more or less ignores safety time, safety stocks and lotsize flexibility in the calculation of reschedule-in messages. Reschedule-out messages are usually ignored because planners do not see the value of the message. Other reasons for not adhering to rescheduling messages are a lack of maintenance of MRP parameters or simply the wrong use of the MRP function. In the future, MRP rescheduling functionality will be used even less than today, due to the changing role of MRP within the planning framework. With the uprise of finite capacity scheduling packages, MRP is being pushed one level upward in the planning hierarchy. This means that rescheduling functionalities for the short term will become completely obsolete in MRP systems.     

The impact of acquisitions on firm performance: A review of the evidence

This paper presents a review of empirical research on the impact of acquisitions on firm performance. The evidence suggests that, in the short run, acquisitions have at best an insignificant impact on shareholder wealth. Long‐run performance analysis reveals overwhelmingly negative returns, while the evidence using accounting performance measures is mixed. The review also examines the impact of bid characteristics on performance. The acquisition of hostile targets, transactions that are paid for with cash and acquisitions of larger targets are associated with superior (or at least less negative) performance, while there is mixed evidence on the benefits of related acquisitions. A number of recent studies find that acquirers with superior pre‐bid performance tend to experience significant underperformance in the post‐bid period.     

Ability, individual development and optimal selection decisions

The paper analyzes different selection policies in education and business. We show that incorrect self-perceptions combined with imperfect performance measurement may cause significant welfare losses in selective educational systems, in particular if selection starts too early. Of course, these welfare losses can be mitigated by an investment in better ability assessment. However, an affirmative action policy could serve the same purpose as such an investment. We apply our analysis also to diversity management in firms. Based on positive discrimination we establish an efficiency argument for diversity management.     

Judgment aggregation without full rationality

Several recent results on the aggregation of judgments over logically connected propositions show that, under certain conditions, dictatorships are the only propositionwise aggregation functions generating fully rational (i.e., complete and consistent) collective judgments. A frequently mentioned route to avoid dictatorships is to allow incomplete collective judgments. We show that this route does not lead very far: we obtain oligarchies rather than dictatorships if instead of full rationality we merely require that collective judgments be deductively closed, arguably a minimal condition of rationality, compatible even with empty judgment sets. We derive several characterizations of oligarchies and provide illustrative applications to Arrowian preference aggregation and Kasher and Rubinstein’s group identification problem. This paper was circulated in August 2006 and presented at the Yale workshop on Aggregation of Opinions, September 2006, at the Centre interuniversitaire de rechere en économie quantitative, Montreal, October 2006, and at the 1st International Workshop on Computational Social Choice, Amsterdam, December 2006. We are grateful to the participants at these occasions and the anonymous referees for comments. We also thank Ton Storcken for discussion. Elad Dokow and Ron Holzman have independently proved closely related results, which were also presented at the Yale workshop in September 2006, and circulated in the December 2006 paper (Dokow and Holzman 2006).     

The Inherent Politics of Managing the Quality of Urban Green Spaces

Although the term ‘quality’ has a universal positive connotation and typically is framed by a focus on improvements, its application includes as well as excludes the access, values and world views of particular actors and interests. In this article, we highlight the relevance and implications of such ‘inherent politics’ through a case study of a widespread approach to operationalizing quality in urban green space management. We conclude that adoption of any quality model has both limiting and enabling implications for public participation and decision-making and that a critical stance is needed within both research and practice for the development of quality models that connect to values of broader societal relevance.