Handle with care! How majority cues can reduce the negative effects of warnings of foreseeable product failures

Review of Managerial Science - To ensure full effectiveness of several goods, suppliers have to instruct consumers to handle these products in a careful way. In other words, they have to warn of...     

Uniform trade rules for uncleared markets

We analyze markets in which the price of a traded commodity is such that the supply and the demand are unequal. Under standard assumptions, the agents then have single peaked preferences on their consumption or production choices. For such markets, we propose a class of Uniform trade rules each of which determines the volume of trade as the median of total demand, total supply, and an exogenous constant. Then these rules allocate this volume “uniformly” on either side of the market. We evaluate these “trade rules” on the basis of some standard axioms in the literature. We show that they uniquely satisfy Pareto optimality, strategy proofness, no-envy, and an informational simplicity axiom that we introduce. We also analyze the implications of anonymity, renegotiation proofness, and voluntary trade on this domain.     

Acculturation Identity and Higher Education: Is There a Trade‐off Between Ethnic Identity and Education?1

This paper examines the role of identification to home and host cultures on the pursuit of higher educations for individuals with immigrant backgrounds. Identity is defined according to a two‐dimensional acculturation framework based on strength of identification to both ethnic background cultures and the majority culture. Results indicate that integrated men that identify with both the majority and the background culture are associated with higher probabilities of completed tertiary educations than men that identify only with the majority culture as well as men with weak affiliations to both background and majority cultures. These results hold despite controls for early education outcomes and socioeconomic status. No systematic differences in higher educational attainment by identity are found for women once differences in early education are accounted for. These results put into question the premise of oppositional identities, i.e., a trade‐off between ethnic identity and higher educational achievement.     

The problem of being a paradigm: the emergence of neural stem cells as example for “Kuhnian” revolution in biology or misconception of the scientific community?

In a thought experiment we want to test how the emergence of adult neural stem cells could constitute an example for a scientific revolution in the sense of Thomas Kuhn. In his major work, “The structure of scientific revolutions, 3rd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago” (Kuhn 1996), the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, states that scientific progress is not a cumulative process, but new theories appear by a rather revolutionary sequence of events. Kuhn built his theory on landmark events taken from chemistry and physics, lacking examples from biology. Beginning with Ramon y Cajal’s famous quote, “no new neurons after birth”, from the early years of the twentieth century, and Reynolds and Weiss’s conflicting finding in 1992 of adult neural stem cells giving rise to new neurons, we will test how the finding of neural stem cells in the adult brain matches with Kuhn’s theory. The pivotal problem of defining a paradigm will be our main focus, since the emergence of adult neural stem cells has been acclaimed by the scientific community as the rebuttal of Ramon y Cajal’s paradigm.     

试论沈从文与威廉·福克纳小说中的文化特质及价值评判

中国作家沈从文与美国作家威廉·福克纳的创作分别立足于“湘西世界”和“约克纳帕塌法天地”,两位作家一生都在致力于挖掘、揭示这两个文学世界所蕴含的本土文化特质,以期对现代社会精神价值的构建提供一种参考,同时对其负面价值意义也进行了不同程度的反思和批判。尽管存在着种种差异性,两位作家都表达了对人性自由的张扬,对摧残、压抑人的情感欲望等异化力量批判的共同价值取向。     

Wissenschaftliche Alltagsbewegungen. Die mobile Formation ethnografischer Arbeitsplätze

Mobility studies have stressed that ethnographic research fields are often multi-sited and mobile, and have therefore encouraged more flexible strategies. This paper, however, focuses on the practice of ethnographic work, constituting an in itself ethnographic workplace study. It shows that not only the field but also scientific ‘desk work’ is characterized by diverse movements. Yet, these can only be unraveled if multiple material participants (and not only persons) and their mobilities are scrutinized. The article argues that in a skillfully balanced interplay of mobilities and immobilities, ephemeral data is stabilized as scientific studies and researchers turned into academic actors. At the same time, ethnographic mobility is highly influenced by bigger social mobility regimes.     

A Cox-type regression model with change-points in the covariates

We consider a Cox-type regression model with change-points in the covariates. A change-point specifies the unknown threshold at which the influence of a covariate shifts smoothly, i.e., the regression parameter may change over the range of a covariate and the underlying regression function is continuous but not differentiable. The model can be used to describe change-points in different covariates but also to model more than one change-point in a single covariate. Estimates of the change-points and of the regression parameters are derived and their properties are investigated. It is shown that not only the estimates of the regression parameters are [Formula: see text] -consistent but also the estimates of the change-points in contrast to the conjecture of other authors. Asymptotic normality is shown by using results developed for M-estimators. At the end of this paper we apply our model to an actuarial dataset, the PBC dataset of Fleming and Harrington (Counting processes and survival analysis, 1991) and to a dataset of electric motors.     

GENERALIZED INTEGER-VALUED AUTOREGRESSION

The integer-valued AR1 model is generalized to encompass some of the more likely features of economic time series of count data. The generalizations come at the price of loosing exact distributional properties. For most specifications the first and second order both conditional and unconditional moments can be obtained. Hence estimation, testing and forecasting are feasible and can be based on least squares or GMM techniques. An illustration based on the number of plants within an industrial sector is considered.     

Mobilität oder Immobilität?

An ongoing controversy in transformation research concerns the relative importance of firm-internal versus occupational segmentation in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) employment system compared to the West German system. In a first step, institutions of vocational education and of the employment system focusing on their impact on labor market segmentation are analyzed. Then, the occupational careers of different birth cohorts of East and West Germans are examined. Empirical results show that the importance of internal mobility increased over time in the GDR. But this change cannot primarily be attributed to personnel policies of firms. It was mainly due to social policies, i.e. the introduction of compulsory army service and of maternity leave, since companies were obliged to take the army recruits and mothers back afterwards. Obviously, the way social policies were institutionalized affected the levels of labor market mobility in both countries more than changes of employment strategies.