Wie gehen wissensintensive Dienstleister mit eigenen Wissenslücken um?

With the conducted Delphi study diverse alternatives could be identified which have been used by Consultants in dealing with their own unawareness. Superior strategies, which controlled the adoption of individual steps and oriented the activities in dealing with unawareness, as well as organisational regulations for dealing with unawareness, were noticeable, which could be adopted depending on the subjective perception and assessment of the present unawareness and its relevance and impacts. The detected strategies ranged from the maintenance and use of unawareness to open communication and elimination of unawareness to total ignorance and the hiding of unawareness. Concerning organisational regulations, on the one hand formal regulations and on the other hand informal regulations could be found.     

Conflicting evidence and decisions by agency professionals: an experimental test in the context of merger regulation

Many important regulatory decisions are taken by professionals employing limited and conflicting evidence. We conduct an experiment in a merger regulation setting, identifying the role of different standards of proof, volumes of evidence, cost of error and professional or lay decision making. The experiment was conducted on current practitioners from 11 different jurisdictions, in addition to student subjects. Legal standards of proof significantly affect decisions. There are specific differences because of professional judgment, including in how error costs and volume of evidence are taken into account. We narrow the range of explanations for why professional decision making matters.     

Robust Methods of Building Regression Models—An Application to thè Housing Sector

This article studies robustification strategies for the linear model in the presence of outliers. The advantages of an internal analysis of the robustness of least squares for a given sample are pointed out. The application of this methodology is illustrated by building an explicit model of the determinants of rental housing values in the Madrid Metropolitan Area.     

Accountability and the Camera Perspective Bias in Videotaped Confessions

Prior research indicates that altering the perspective from which a videotaped confession is recorded influences assessments of the confession's voluntariness. The present study examined whether increasing decision makers' sense of accountability attenuates this biasing effect of camera perspective. Participants in a high-accountability (but not a low-accountability) condition were told that they would have to justify their judgments concerning the voluntary status of a video-taped confession to a trial judge. Although supplementary measures indicated that high-accountability participants processed information contained in the video-taped confession more carefully and thoroughly, the camera perspective bias persisted. This result adds to a growing body of work indicating that the criminal justice system needs to be seriously concerned with how it acquires and utilizes videotaped confession evidence.     

Using Related Samples in Assessing Conformance to Safety Goals: A Nuclear Reactor Safety Application

Quantifying safety goals is a key to the regulation of activities which are beneficial on the whole but entail some risks in being performed. Determining compliance with safety goals involves dealing with uncertainties. A recent article by Bier^(I) describes some of the difficulties encountered using measures with uncertainty to determine compliance with safety goals for nuclear reactors. This paper uses a hierarchical Bayes approach to address two practical modeling problems in determining safety goal compliance under uncertainty: (1) allowing some modeling assumptions to be relaxed, and (2) allowing data from previous related samples to be included in the analysis. The two issues effect each other to the extent that relaxing some assumptions allows the use of a broader range of data. The usefulness of these changes and their impact on assessing safety compliance for nuclear reactors is shown.     

NONPROFIT INCORPORATION AMONG MOVEMENTS OF THE POOR:

Social movement scholars have begun to note the widespread use of nonprofit incorporation by social movement organizations (SMOs) in the United States. They argue that nonprofit incorporation is a voluntary act that ultimately leads to moderation in goals and tactics. I examine this argument with ethnographic data on fifteen homeless SMOs that operated in eight U.S. cities. I identify six pathways to adoption or nonadoption of nonprofit form and find that moderation, when it occurs, is not a function of nonprofit incorporation per se but of the particular pathway by which an SMO came to adopt nonprofit form. I discuss the implications of these findings for SMOs in general and for understanding the broader debates about organizational autonomy and external control of SMOs.     

MODERN MAGIC

The suggestion that students at present day universities participate in magic at exam time may seem unusual. This study views "magic" as behavior directed toward achieving an outcome, involving many everyday and commonplace acts, but seeming to rely for success on some mystical element. Hundreds of personal accounts from students describing their exam-related behaviors provide the basis for a classification system of their "magical practices." The classification yields findings regarding the use of magic for luck and the avoidance of bad luck. Student magic is found to be idiosyncratic, inconsistent, and never malevolent as it often is in preliterate societies. Such differences between preliterate magic, other modern forms, and student magic are related to the complexity and heterogeneity of the larger society, the cultural norms, and the degree of collective action involved.     

Estimation of the number of studies with positive trends when studies with negative trends are present

A two-point estimator is proposed for the proportion of studies with positive trends among a collection of studies, some of which may demonstrate negative trends. The proposed estimator is the y-intercept of the secant line joining the points (a, F?(a)) and (b, F?(b)), where F?(p) is the empirical distribution function of p-values from one-tailed tests for positive trend derived from the individual studies. Although this estimator is negatively biased for any choice of the points 0 ≤ a < b ≤ 1, the bias is less than that of the previously proposed one-point estimator defined by setting b = 1. The bias of the two-point estimator is smallest when a and b approach the inflection point of the true distribution function, E [F?(p)]. The utility of the two-point estimator is demonstrated by using it to estimate the number of male-mouse liver carcinogens among carcinogenicity studies conducted by the National Toxicology Program.