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.     

A Guaranteed Minimum Income Scheme for Australia? Some Problems1

The integration of the income taxation and social security systems is implicit in a guaranteed minimum income scheme. Some of the issues involved in this integration are highlighted. The two systems have developed independently in Australia, mainly because of the fundamentally different roles that the two serve. It is argued that although the two systems should work in harmony, their complete integration will present many great conceptual and practical difficulties which would reduce the effectiveness of both. Thus the poverty problem can be more fruitfully attacked by reform within the existing social security system in Australia than by the introduction of an integrated system.     

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.     

Teaching Manual Signs to Adults With Mental Retardation Using Matching-to-Sample Procedures and Stimulus Equivalence

The objective of this study was to teach manual signs through an automated matching-to-sample procedure and to test for the emergence of new conditional relations and imitative behaviors. Seven adults with mild to severe mental retardation participated. Four were also hearing impaired. Relations between manual signs (set A) and pictures (set B) were initially taught, followed by the training of corresponding printed words (set C) and pictures (set B). Further presentations of conditional discriminations tested for the emergence of AC, followed by tests for the emergence of imitative signing behavior (D) in the presence of either pictures (B) or printed words (C). Each stimulus set was comprised of 9 elements. The stimuli were still pictures, printed words, and dynamic presentations of manual signs. A pretest was conducted to determine which signs the participants could make pre-experimentally. Teaching was arranged in a multiple baseline design across 3 groups of 3 words each. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether participants would emit manual signs in expressive signs tests as a result of observation (video modeling) during match-to-sample training in the absence of explicit training. Five of the 7 subjects passed tests of emergence and emitted at least 50% of the signs. Two were hearing impaired with signing experience, and 3 were not hearing impaired and had no signing experience. Thus, observation of video recorded manual signs in a matching-to-sample training procedure was effective at establishing some signs by adults with mental retardation.     

Household migration and the labor market position of married women

The present paper conceptualizes labor force participation among U.S. wives as both a determinant and consequence of household migration. A theoretical justification is provided for decomposing these relationships by occupational position of the wife. Applying log-linear models to data from the 1970 One-in-a-Thousand Public Use Sample, we corroborate previous research in that, on the average, the likelihood of interstate migration between 1965 and 1970 was greatest among families in which the wife was not employed prior to the move. However, among employed wives, those classified as professionals or managers were also found to accentuate the probability of household migration, particularly if the husband was not employed in 1965. The implication is that all types of employment by the wife need not limit family mobility as previous studies have suggested. Although migration was found to have a disrupting effect on the continuity of employment among most wives, this effect was most in evidence among wives employed in blue collar occupations. The data suggest the need for a careful reappraisal of traditional economic notions of migration, particularly as they apply to married women.