Effectiveness of Interactive Computer-Based Instruction: A Review of Studies Published Between 1995 and 2007

Computer-based instruction (CBI) has been growing rapidly as a training tool in organizational settings, but close attention to behavioral factors has often been neglected. CBI represents a promising instructional advancement over current training methods. This review article summarizes 12 years of comparative research in interactive computer-based instruction relevant to employee training techniques. The results demonstrate that CBI is an effective and viable training technique, and several areas in need of further examination are detailed.     

Further specification of the leader political skill–leadership effectiveness relationships: Transformational and transactional leader behavior as mediators

The present investigation was a three-source test of the intermediate linkages in the leader political skill–leader effectiveness and follower satisfaction relationships, which examined transformational and transactional (i.e., contingent reward behavior) leader behavior as mediators. Data from 408 leaders (headmasters) and 1429 followers (teachers) of state schools in the western part of Germany participated in this research. The results of mediation analyses, based on bias-corrected bootstrapping confidence intervals, provided support for the hypotheses that political skill predicts both transformational and transactional leader behavior, beyond other established predictors, and that transformational and transactional leader behavior mediate the relationships between leader political skill and leadership effectiveness. The contributions to theory and research, strengths and limitations, directions for future research, and practical implications are discussed.     

Poverty and Self‐Control

We argue that poverty can perpetuate itself by undermining the capacity for self‐control. In line with a distinguished psychological literature, we consider modes of self‐control that involve the self‐imposed use of contingent punishments and rewards. We study settings in which consumers with quasi‐hyperbolic preferences confront an otherwise standard intertemporal allocation problem with credit constraints. Our main result demonstrates that low initial assets can limit self‐control, trapping people in poverty, while individuals with high initial assets can accumulate indefinitely. Thus, even temporary policies that initiate accumulation among the poor may be effective. We examine implications concerning the effect of access to credit on saving, the demand for commitment devices, the design of financial accounts to promote accumulation, and the variation of the marginal propensity to consume across income from different sources. We also explore the nature of optimal self‐control, demonstrating that it has a simple and behaviorally plausible structure that is immune to self‐renegotiation.     

Advisers and the Fiduciary Duty Debate

This work concerns itself with the debate taking place in the United States about the duty of care financial advisers owe investors. On one side it is argued that advisers need only concern themselves with recommendations which meet certain suitability standards. On the other side, there are those who argue the suitability standard is not strong enough to adequately protect investor interests. Instead of ensuring investment recommendations are merely suitable, financial advisers owe their investors a fiduciary duty to “act in the best interest of the customer without regard to the financial or other interests … of the investment adviser providing the advice.” (SEC, 2011). In applying a properly understood conception of what fiduciary means I argue that regulations should not be harmonized but that fiduciary duty should apply to all who provide personalized investment advice to retail customers. I will further argue that even if the regulations are harmonized as proposed, because of exemptions for broker‐dealers as envisioned in the proposal, and which currently apply to Registered Investment Advisers, the efficacy of fiduciary duty is diluted to the point of rendering its current application, much less its potential uniform imposition, irrelevant.     

The Economic Partnership Agreements: Rationale,Misperceptions and Non‐trade Aspects

The European Union and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries entered a new era in 2008. The Cotonou trade regime and the WTO waiver legitimising it have expired, and the long anticipated, and much debated, move to Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) has begun. This article explains the background and analyses the ‘alternatives’ to EPAs, in order to tackle common misperceptions. Moving on from what has been the focus of debates, namely, the reciprocal liberalisation required under WTO rules, it sheds some light on the non‐goods trade aspects of EPAs which, while integral to economic policy, are inherently hard to quantify and often skimmed over in existing studies or addressed in ideological terms.     

Politics,Plurality and Problemsheds: A Strategic Approach for Reform of Agricultural Water Resources Management

Starting from the assessment that past efforts at reform in agricultural water management in developing countries have achieved very little, this article argues that a fundamental change is required in the approach to policy and institutional transformation if the present deadlock in the internalisation of ecological sustainability, human development/poverty alleviation and democratic governance into the ‘core business’ of water bureaucracies is to be overcome. ‘Social engineering’ approaches need to be replaced by ‘strategic action’ approaches that acknowledge the inherently political character and the plurality of actors, institutions and objectives of water management — a perspective operationalised here around the notions of ‘problemshed’ and ‘issue network’.     

Gamesmanship for internal evaluators: Knowing when to “hold 'em” and when to “fold 'em”

This article discusses the ethical conflicts between an internal evaluator's altruistic social reform motivation and an organization's practical survival motivation. The internal evaluator might encounter (a) pressure to downplay negative and emphasize positive findings; (b) reinforcement for nonthreatening, routine evaluation activities; (c) greater interest in making the evaluation unit visible than in using evaluation results; or (d) reduced access to privileged information.     

Minimax-variance L- and R-estimators of location

We consider the problem of minimax-variance, robust estimation of a location parameter, through the use of L- and R-estimators. We derive an easily checked necessary condition for L-estimation to be minimax, and a related sufficient condition for R-estimation to be minimax. Those cases in the literature in which L-estimation is known not to be minimax, and those in which R-estimation is minimax, are derived as consequences of these conditions. New classes of examples are given in each case. As well, we answer a question of Scholz (1974), who showed essentially that the asymptotic variance of an R-estimator never exceeds that of an L-estimator, if both are efficient at the same strongly unimodal distribution. Scholz raised the question of whether or not the assumption of strong unimodality could be dropped. We answer this question in the negative, theoretically and by examples. In the examples, the minimax property fails both for L-estimation and for R-estimation, but the variance of the L-estimator, as the distribution of the observation varies over the given neighbourhood, remains unbounded. That of the R-estimator is unbounded.