ON THE EXTERNAL VALIDITY OF LABORATORY TAX COMPLIANCE EXPERIMENTS

An essential issue for laboratory experiments to inform policy debates is the “external validity” of the experimental results; that is, does behavior in the laboratory apply to behavior that occurs in the naturally occurring world? We examine this issue of external validity in the specific context of laboratory experiments on tax compliance, using two different types of evidence. We find that the behavioral patterns of subjects in the laboratory conform to those of individuals making a similar decision in naturally occurring settings. We also find that the behavioral responses of students are largely the same as those of nonstudents in identical experiments (JEL C9, H0, H3)     

The Challenges in Developing an Online Applied Statistics Program: Lessons Learned at Penn State University

Numerous professional fields have an increasing need for individuals trained in statistics and other quantitative analysis techniques. Today there exists great potential to fulfill this need by providing opportunities through online learning. However, to provide a high-quality education for returning adult professionals seeking advanced degrees in applied statistics online, many challenges need to be overcome. Based on our experience developing Penn State University’s online program in applied statistics, we discuss the evolution of the program’s curriculum, recruitment and development of online faculty, and meeting the requirements of students as important areas that require consideration in the development of an online program. We also highlight program evaluation strategies employed to ensure innovation and improvement in online education as cornerstones to a program’s success.     

ENDOGENOUS PRESIDENTIALISM

We develop a model to understand the incidence of presidential and parliamentary institutions. Our analysis is predicated on two ideas: first, that minorities are relatively powerful in a parliamentary system compared to a presidential system, and second, that presidents have more power with respect to their own coalition than prime ministers do. These assumptions imply that while presidentialism has separation of powers, it does not necessarily have more checks and balances than parliamentarism. We show that political leaders who prefer presidentialism may be supported by their own coalition if they fear losing agenda‐setting power to another group. We argue that the model is consistent with a great deal of qualitative information about presidentialism in Africa and Latin America. (JEL: D72, P5, O1)     

Value of Sharing Production Yield Information in a Serial Supply Chain

New developments in corporate information technology such as enterprise resource planning systems have significantly increased the flow of information among members of supply chains. However, the benefits of sharing information can vary depending on the supply chain structure and its operational characteristics. Most of the existing research has studied the impact of sharing downstream information (e.g., a manufacturer sharing information with its suppliers). We evaluate the benefits of sharing upstream yield information (e.g., a supplier sharing information with the manufacturer) in a two‐stage serial supply chain in which the supplier has multiple internal processes and is faced with uncertain output due to yield losses. We are interested in determining when the sharing of the supplier's information is most beneficial to the manufacturer. After proposing an order‐up‐to type heuristic policy, we perform a detailed computational study and observe that this information is most beneficial when the supplier's yield variance is high and when end‐customer demand variance is low. We also find that the manufacturer's backorder‐to‐holding cost ratio has little, if any, impact on the usefulness of information.     

New Directions in Revenue Management Research

Research in revenue management is rapidly changing as the environment in which firms operate changes. The Internet, the adoption of new information technologies, and other market forces are driving a new wave of research in revenue management. At the same time, more and more industries are adapting the tools of revenue management to their needs. Promising research directions are more sophisticated models of consumer behavior, more general models and understanding of rivalry, and more general pricing mechanisms. These are important issues for today's revenue managers and promising areas for both theoretical and empirical research.     

Crisis Communication Post Katrina: What are we Learning?

Hurricane Katrina and post-Katrina audits are an on-going project for public affairs scholarship. Much has been written but critical frameworks of analysis are minimal. Crisis communication taxonomies are rich and fruitful in understanding the framing of calamitous events. In revisiting a previous mapping of crisis communication vulnerability points in the Katrina tragedy, the authors provide a further “vulnerability audit” of crisis-communication capabilities within a changing political/administrative ontology—one pointing to the privatization of crises/disasters within the Neo-liberal state. Lessons about crisis communication according to the earlier four conceptual lenses (Garnett and Kouzmin 2007) are supported by more recent developments and scholarship.     

Dinner with Bayes: On the revision of risk beliefs

Journal of Risk and Uncertainty - We study how people form and revise health risk beliefs based on food safety information. In an online experiment, subjects stated their perceived risk of...     

Willingness to accept equals willingness to pay for labor market estimates of the value of a statistical life

Our research clarifies the conceptual linkages among willingness to pay for additional safety, willingness to accept less safety, and the value of a statistical life (VSL). We present econometric estimates using panel data to analyze the VSL levels associated with job changes that may affect the worker’s exposure to fatal injury risks. Our baseline VSL estimates are $7.7 million and $8.3 million (Y$2001). There is no statistically significant divergence between willingness-to-accept VSL estimates associated with wage increases for greater risks and willingness-to-pay VSL estimates as reflected in wage changes for decreases in risk. Our focal result contrasts with the literature documenting a considerable asymmetry in tradeoff rates for increases and decreases in risk. An important implication for policy is that it is reasonable to use labor market estimates of VSL as a measure of the willingness to pay for additional safety.     

A Tree-Structured Markovian Model of the Shipment Consolidation Process

This article studies the dispatch of consolidated shipments. Orders, following a batch Markovian arrival process, are received in discrete quantities by a depot at discrete time epochs. Instead of immediate dispatch, all outstanding orders are consolidated and shipped together at a later time. The decision of when to send out the consolidated shipment is made based on a “dispatch policy,” which is a function of the system state and/or the costs associated with that state. First, a tree structured Markov chain is constructed to record specific information about the consolidation process; the effectiveness of any dispatch policy can then be assessed by a set of long-run performance measures. Next, the effect on shipment consolidation of varying the order-arrival process is demonstrated through numerical examples and proved mathematically under some conditions. Finally, a heuristic algorithm is developed to determine a favorable parameter of a special set of dispatch policies, and the algorithm is proved to yield the overall optimal policy under certain conditions.