Index of Authors Volume 59, 2002

Authors Index

Index of Authors Volume 59, 2002     

Putting the Logos to Work: A Reply to Meyer

Abstract

Journalist Janet Malcolm recently published several articles and a book in which she accused her own profession of manipulation and deceit in its listening and interviewing practices. Specifically, she focused on the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case, on which Joe McGinniss' book, Fatal Vision, was based. McGinniss, she claimed, fostered a close and seemingly empathic relationship with the accused in order to betray him later—and in this event Malcolm saw the prototypical journalist-interviewee relationship. Her accusations about the role of journalism raised intense professional scrutiny. This essay examines the case from the standpoint of journalistic listening. Are the temptations for deceptive or “slanted” empathy inherent in the journalistic interview? Does the journalist have a responsibility not only to listen to the person being interviewed, but to “listen” equally well to the demands of a developing story—as if it, too, were a living entity? Do ethical standards within journalism demand that an interviewer's listening style, especially as it is seen in empathic behavior, be congruent with his or her unexpressed conclusions?     

Reconsidering the impact of behavior prediction questions on illegal drug use: The importance of using proper analytic methods

Social scientists often habitually employ ANOVA methods when analyzing data from experiments when other analytic approaches are required instead. This paper illustrates how traditional analytic approaches can lead to incorrect research conclusions by reanalyzing data from a recent study by Williams, Block, and Fitzsimons (2006a Williams, P., Block, L. G. and Fitzsimons, G. J. 2006a. Simply asking questions about health behaviors increases both healthy and unhealthy behaviors.. Social Influence, 1(2): 117–127. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). Because the non‐negative dependent variable (illegal drug use) was super skewed and had a large majority of zero values, the use of improper statistical tests and the presence of just a few extreme, outlying observations produced the illusion that asking people to predict their likelihood of drug use increased that behavior significantly, when in fact it did not. The effect of behavior prediction questions on frequency of exercise also turns out to be non‐significant when analyzed properly. As this example illustrates, experimental researchers should choose and implement appropriate analytic approaches carefully.     

The irreversibility effect and agency conflicts

This paper studies the influence of agency conflicts on the irreversibility effect. Using a dynamic variant of the static Baron and Myerson (Econometrica 50(4):911–930, 1982) adverse selection model, we characterize under which circumstances the irreversibility effect arises in the presence and absence of an agency conflict. In particular, we find that in the presence of an agency conflict the irreversibility effect arises in more circumstances than in the standard first-best analysis that abstracts from agency problems.     

Cost-plus pricing when joint costs are present

Companies using cost-plus pricing often produce products that entail joint cost allocation. A problem they have encountered is that, while product prices are a function of the full cost, joint cost allocation methods using net realizable values depend on the product prices. This paper shows that when all costs and production quantities are known (or can be budgeted), it is possible to simultaneously determine unique product prices and cost allocations using the net realizable value method.     

Using Implied Probabilities to Improve the Estimation of Unconditional Moment Restrictions for Weakly Dependent Data

In this article, we investigate the use of implied probabilities (Back and Brown, 1993) to improve estimation in unconditional moment conditions models. Using the seminal contributions of Bonnal and Renault (2001 Bonnal, H., Renault, E. (2001). Minimal Chi-Square Estimation with Conditional Moment Restrictions, Document de Travail, CESG, September 2001. [Google Scholar]) and Antoine et al. (2007 Antoine, B., Bonnal, H., Renault, E. (2007). On the efficient use of the informational content of estimating equations: Implied probabilities and euclidean empirical likelihood. Journal of Econometrics 138(2):461–487.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), we propose two three-step Euclidian empirical likelihood (3S-EEL) estimators for weakly dependent data. Both estimators make use of a control variates principle that can be interpreted in terms of implied probabilities in order to achieve higher-order improvements relative to the traditional two-step GMM estimator. A Monte Carlo study reveals that the finite and large sample properties of the three-step estimators compare favorably to the existing approaches: the two-step GMM and the continuous updating estimator.