Fertility differences between the family of orientation and the family or procreation in Barbados

Data from an island-wide probability sample of 4119 Barbadian females aged 16-50 were used to study whether there has been an intergenerational fertility decline between the respondents and their mothers. The fertility of the respondents, all from the low or lower middle class, was significantly lower than that of their mothers. However, the size of the family of procreation was seen to be positively related to the size of the family of orientation; i.e., those from large families tended to have large families and vice versa. There was, however, a regression to the mean. There were no differences between women from small and large families as to fertility norms, age at 1st use of contraceptives, or actual practice of contraception. Women from small families did tend to enter sexual relationships and get pregnant at a later age. The women from small families were better educated, earned higher incomes, and had higher status occupations, all factors which might have influenced their fertility. Women from larger families cited higher numbers for both small and large families than did the women from small families. This indicates a perceptual difference which was, in turn, related to fertility differences.     

The Determinants of Trust and Credibility in Environmental Risk Communication: An Empirical Study

This study examines a key component of environmental risk communication; trust and credibility. The study was conducted in two parts. In the first part, six hypotheses regarding the perceptions and determinants of trust and credibility were tested against survey data. The hypotheses were supported by the data. The most important hypothesis was that perceptions of trust and credibility are dependent on three factors: perceptions of knowledge and expertise; perceptions of openness and honesty; and perceptions of concern and care. In the second part, models were constructed with perceptions of trust and credibility as the dependent variable. The goal was to examine the data for findings with direct policy implications. One such finding was that defying a negative stereotype is key to improving perceptions of trust and credibility.     

Culture, Cosmopolitanism, and Risk Management

Most cultural approaches to risk management deal with the connections between the forms of social relations within groups and the risk concerns of those groups. According to these theories, a certain limited set of different relational forms (usually three, four, or five) lead to specific, different and conflicting, risk concerns. In contrast to these theories, cosmopolitanism is an approach to culture that focuses, not on forms of sociality, but on changes among forms—expansions and contractions in the inclusivity of forms and movement by persons from one form of sociality to another. Relative to other cultural theories, cosmopolitanism thus is much more concerned with the solution of risk management problems than with their origins. Cosmopolitanism can be thought of as a cultural continuum, with cosmopolitanism at one end and pluralism at the other. Cosmopolitan persons are more open to cultural change—and thus the solution of risk management problems. In this article, we outline our new theory of cosmopolitanism, describe a method for measuring it and present an experimental study that tests some implications of the theory. Results from the study support the theory by showing that, compared to pluralistic respondents, cosmopolitan respondents are more inclusive in their risk management judgments—that is, they express equal concern for a local and a national issue, whereas the pluralistic respondents express greater concern in the local case. We discuss the risk management implications of a cosmopolitan approach to culture.     

Estimation from Zero-Failure Data

When performing quantitative (or probabilistic) risk assessments, it is often the case that data for many of the potential events in question are sparse or nonexistent. Some of these events may be well-represented by the binomial probability distribution. In this paper, a model for predicting the binomial failure probability, P , from data that include no failures is examined. A review of the literature indicates that the use of this model is currently limited to risk analysis of energetic initiation in the explosives testing field. The basis for the model is discussed, and the behavior of the model relative to other models developed for the same purpose is investigated. It is found that the qualitative behavior of the model is very similar to that of the other models, and for larger values of n (the number of trials), the predicted P values varied by a factor of about eight among the five models examined. Analysis revealed that the estimator is nearly identical to the median of a Bayesian posterior distribution, derived using a uniform prior. An explanation of the application of the estimator in explosives testing is provided, and comments are offered regarding the use of the estimator versus other possible techniques.     

The impact of supply chain management practices on competitive advantage and organizational performance

Effective supply chain management (SCM) has become a potentially valuable way of securing competitive advantage and improving organizational performance since competition is no longer between organizations, but among supply chains. This research conceptualizes and develops five dimensions of SCM practice (strategic supplier partnership, customer relationship, level of information sharing, quality of information sharing, and postponement) and tests the relationships between SCM practices, competitive advantage, and organizational performance. Data for the study were collected from 196 organizations and the relationships proposed in the framework were tested using structural equation modeling. The results indicate that higher levels of SCM practice can lead to enhanced competitive advantage and improved organizational performance. Also, competitive advantage can have a direct, positive impact on organizational performance.     

GM Foods and the Misperception of Risk Perception

Public opposition to genetically modified (GM) food and crops is widely interpreted as the result of the public's misperception of the risks. With scientific assessment pointing to no unique risks from GM crops and foods, a strategy of accurate risk communication from trusted sources has been advocated. This is based on the assumption that the benefits of GM crops and foods are self-evident. Informed by the interpretation of some qualitative interviews with lay people, we use data from the Eurobarometer survey on biotechnology to explore the hypothesis that it is not so much the perception of risks as the absence of benefits that is the basis of the widespread rejection of GM foods and crops by the European public. Some respondents perceive both risks and benefits, and may be trading off these attributes along the lines of a rational choice model. However, for others, one attribute-benefit-appears to dominate their judgments: the lexicographic heuristic. For these respondents, their perception of risk is of limited importance in the formation of attitudes toward GM food and crops. The implication is that the absence of perceived benefits from GM foods and crops calls into question the relevance of risk communication strategies for bringing about change in public opinion.     

COST-VOLUME-PROFIT ANALYSIS IN STOCHASTIC PROGRAMMING MODELS

This paper applies mathematical programming to cost-volume-profit (CVP) analysis under contribution margin uncertainty. Three CVP probabilistic chance-constraint models based on various safety-first criteria for decisions under uncertainty are presented and compared. It is shown that a break-even segment of the mean-standard deviation frontier is a set of optimal solutions for the proposed models. An operational parametric quadratic programming (QP) model is constructed, and the efficiency frontier is generated. The procedures for locating an optimal solution on the efficiency frontier are then presented. The recommended QP procedure offers both technical relief from the computational difficulties posed by the probabilistic constraints and a desired flexibility in generating and presenting the relevant information for decisions under uncertainty.