Acting Surprised: Comparing Perceptions of Different Dynamic Deliberate Expressions

Journal of Nonverbal Behavior - People are accurate at classifying emotions from facial expressions but much poorer at determining if such expressions are spontaneously felt or deliberately posed....     

On the functional form of temporal discounting: An optimized adaptive test

The tendency to discount the value of future rewards has become one of the best-studied constructs in the behavioral sciences. Although hyperbolic discounting remains the dominant quantitative characterization of this phenomenon, a variety of models have been proposed and consensus around the one that most accurately describes behavior has been elusive. To help bring some clarity to this issue, we propose an Adaptive Design Optimization (ADO) method for fitting and comparing models of temporal discounting. We then conduct an ADO experiment aimed at discriminating among six popular models of temporal discounting. Rather than supporting a single underlying model, our results show that each model is inadequate in some way to describe the full range of behavior exhibited across subjects. The precision of results provided by ADO further identify specific properties of models, such as accommodating both increasing and decreasing impatience, that are mandatory to describe temporal discounting broadly.     

What drives unconventional political participation? A two level study

There is little evidence on the factors that drive peaceful unconventional political participation. This study evaluates the impact of seven individual level constituents – age, income, education, gender, satisfaction with the government, engagement in civil society organizations and voting – as well as five macro-level factors – economic development, democratic experience, income inequalities, a country's regime type and federalism – on citizens’ participation in boycotts, demonstrations and petition signing activities. Participation in all three protest activities hinges on education, voting, participation in civil society organizations, and lack of satisfaction with the government. Moreover, the influence of some macro-factors, such as democratic experience and economic development, and micro-level factors, such as gender differs between the three forms of political engagement.     

Nonformal education for improving educational outcomes for street children and street youth in developing countries: A systematic review

Tens of millions of children and youth (up to 24 years of age) live and work on the streets of developing countries. Most of them are forced to leave formal education. As a potential solution, nonformal education (NFE) interventions have spread worldwide. However, no previous attempt has been made to address the state of evidence regarding effectiveness studies of NFE for street children and youth. This review addresses this gap by conducting the first systematic review concerning the effectiveness of NFE for improving educational outcomes for street children and street youth. The search was conducted in 35 structured electronic databases and numerous organizations and experts were also contacted. The screening of 9,271 titles resulted in the identification of zero prospective effectiveness studies with a counterfactual. Lessons are drawn from the highest quality excluded studies to inform future evaluations that seek to address this knowledge gap. Key Practitioner Message: ● Practitioners should implement comparable intake and monitoring assessments to track changes consistently over time; ● Programs informed by critical pedagogy and empowerment‐based approaches may improve behavioral outcomes; ● Programs that work with street children and street youth should clarify how they identify their target population.     

Corporate governance and board accounts: exploring a neglected interface between boards of directors and management

There is an absence of research about what information boards of directors have access to and how they use that information. The purpose of this paper is to explore and theorize about the content and use of information to boards of directors. The paper introduces and elaborates on the concept of ‘board accounts’, which is defined as the information supplied to boards of directors by top-management. The paper locates the board accounts in the Swedish institutional setting and demonstrates how the concept can be operationalized in an empirical setting. On the basis of a unique material of archived board records in a Swedish company, the paper explores the board accounts over a period of 10 years (1989–1998). It is found that while use of the board accounts in the case study company changes considerably over time, the content of the board accounts remains largely unchanged. This raises questions about where and when directors receive information, the reliability of the information in the board accounts, and recent attempts to integrate corporate governance and management accounting (CIMA, Performance reporting to boards: a guide to good practice, 2003; CIMA strategic scorecard: boards engaging in strategy, 2005; Seal, Management Accounting Research 17(4):389–408, 2006). Finally, the paper discusses the merits of historical archive-based approaches in this field and possibilities for future research.

Subjektivierung Distinktion Narzissmus

The work on subjectification tends to put actors in a victimized position and to restrain itself on organizational discourse and cultural analyses. The article proposes a sociostructural and -psychological enhancement of perspective. The concepts of distinction and symbolic violence will give a more accurate picture of class specific conditions, meanings and effects of subjectification in flexible capitalism. Concepts of narcissism theory improve our understanding of subjectification??s attraction through its relation to the antagonistic psychodynamic of impotence, omnipotence and fear. Not at last, this enhancement of perspective will allow for a better reflection on subjectification??s entanglement with power and dominance in the interest of its emancipatory potentials.     

Weighted logistic regression and robust analysis of diverse toxicology data

Simpson, Carroll, Zhou and Guth (1996) developed an ordinal response regression approach to meta-analysis of data from diverse toxicology studies, applying the methodology to a database of acute inhalation studies of tetra-chloroethylene. We present an alternative analysis of the same data, with two major differences: (1) interval censored scores are assigned worst-case values, e.g., a score known to be in the interval [0,1] is set equal to 1; and (2) the response is reduced to a binary response (adverse, nonadverse). We explore the stability of the analysis by varying a robustness parameter and graphing the curves traced out by the estimates and confidence intervals.     

The Bias in Price Elasticity Estimates Under Homothetic Separability: Implications for Analysis of Peak-Load Electricity Pricing

This article demonstrates that the assumption of a homothetically separable utility function places a priori restrictions on the parameters of the demand system. If these restrictions are unwarranted, an open question if they are not explicitly tested, they will lead to biased price elasticity estimates. In particular, we show that the uncompensated own-price elasticities must be smaller than the negative of the expenditure shares; that is, the price elasticity of peak electricity demand must be less than the negative of the share of expenditure devoted to peak electricity. This finding is probably not new to economists familiar with consumer demand analysis. Nevertheless, many recent studies of consumer demand for electricity under time-of-day rates explicitly impose this restriction. The resulting price elasticity estimates are usually quite large in absolute value (.5 to .8); but they are the product of restrictive a priori assumptions as well as information embodied in the sample data. The results of two analyses of time-of-day experiments, where the researchers imposed the untested assumption of homothetic separability, are examined more closely. We find that the reported price elasticities are strongly influenced by that a priori assumption. A Monte Carlo experiment demonstrates that using this model will lead to the reported price elasticities even if the consumption data are perfectly random with respect to price.     

The Estimation of Food Expenditures From Household Budget Data in the Presence of Bulk Purchases

The aim of this article is the estimation of annual food expenditures with limited information about bulk purchases with data from a Spanish household-budget survey for 1990—1991. Three alternatives are compared. The first, currently used for official purposes, does not use all the information. The second uses all the available information in a rough way. The third assumes a formal model for the unknown frequency of purchases. The three alternatives are compared by a regression model that should be homogeneous with respect to the dummy variables that represent the partial information of the groups and should show a distinct pattern of outliers under each alternative. Finally, we study the effect of the official and the best alternative on food inflation and inequality measures. We find that they lead to similar inflation rates but to different inequality estimates.     

Determining the Number of Primitive Shocks in Factor Models

Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) in the National Income and Product Accounts are often used to investigate whether the time series properties of consumption are consistent with the permanent-income/life-cycle hypotheses. In this article, I address the issue of the general quality of the PCE data and its definitional consistency with the typical model of the intertemporal allocation of consumption. I find that, in terms of the population coverage and the consumption concept, the raw PCE data are unsuitable for the analysis of the permanent-income/life-cycle hypotheses. More fundamentally, adjustments to the data to provide greater consistency with the theory alter critical conclusions concerning the time series properties of consumption.