TRUST,SOCIAL CAPITAL,AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Many argue that elements of a society's norms, culture, or social capital are central to understanding its development. However, these notions have been difficult to capture in economic models. Here we explore a possible role for “trustworthiness” as corresponding to social capital. Individuals are trustworthy when they perform in accordance with promises, even if this does not maximise their payoffs. The usual focus on incentive structures in motivating behaviour plays no role here. Instead, we emphasise more deep‐seated modes of behaviour and consider trustworthy agents being socialised to act as they do. To model this socialisation, we borrow from a process of preference evolution pioneered by Bisin and Verdier (2001). The model developed endogenously accounts for social capital and explores its role in the process of economic development. It captures in a simple, formal way the interaction between social capital and the economy's productive processes. The results obtained caution against rapid reform and provide an explanation for why late‐developing countries may not easily be able to transplant the modes of production that have proved useful in the West. (JEL: O1, O3, O4, Z1)     

Clickstream Data and Inventory Management: Model and Empirical Analysis

We consider firms that feature their products on the Internet but take orders offline. Click and order data are disjoint on such non‐transactional websites, and their matching is error‐prone. Yet, their time separation may allow the firm to react and improve its tactical planning. We introduce a dynamic decision support model that augments the classic inventory planning model with additional clickstream state variables. Using a novel data set of matched online clickstream and offline purchasing data, we identify statistically significant clickstream variables and empirically investigate the value of clickstream tracking on non‐transactional websites to improve inventory management. We show that the noisy clickstream data is statistically significant to predict the propensity, amount, and timing of offline orders. A counterfactual analysis shows that using the demand information extracted from the clickstream data can reduce the inventory holding and backordering cost by 3% to 5% in our data set.     

TEACHING SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT THROUGH GLOBAL PROJECTS WITH GLOBAL PROJECT TEAMS

In this article, we describe the Global Project Coordination Course, a course in which project teams composed of three students from each of two overseas universities execute company‐sponsored projects dealing with global supply chain management issues. The $75,000 to $100,00 contributed in total by the three to four sponsoring companies funds all course expenses. We assess the benefits and challenges of the use of cross‐cultural project teams with diverse educational backgrounds. We conclude that the course provides a unique and effective vehicle for furthering students' knowledge of Supply Chain Management and Information Systems, improving understanding of “soft” issues, and training students to work in diverse, global, cross‐cultural project teams.     

Entscheidungsverhalten von Kunden in Mass Customization-Systemen

Sequential choice processes are ubiquitous in consumer decision making. In each attribute decision, consumers are often faced with different numbers of options which they must trade off in order to make the best possible choice. Thereby, complicated high variety choices at the beginning of a choice process produce a larger trade-off conflict and, thus, initially a greater mental depletion than more simple low variety choices. We examine the strength of mental depletion in sequential choices on individuals’ perceived attractiveness of the firm’s recommended default option at a target choice. We show that consumers who are confronted with difficult high variety choices early in the decision sequence followed by low variety choices initially deplete more than consumers who encounter exactly the same attribute decisions in reverse. As a result, depleted consumers are more likely to fall prey to the recommended default or some perceptually focal options close to the default anchor at target choice succeeding a sequence of decisions.     

A game theoretical analysis of an extended manager-auditor-conflict

Horst Albach has dealt in his research very often with problems of the quality of balance auditing (Albach 1992, 2003). Sometimes his considerations show close relations to the current crisis of the financial market and its consequences. Some of his contributions were already made in times, when it was not yet expected that the dependency of auditors from clients could once become a serious deficit of auditing. Those aspects also become relevant now in connection with the crisis of the financial market.The misgivings that arise continuously in this context with regard to the correctness of submitted balance sheets have sparked off intense discussions in two directions in the Federal Republic of Germany. Whereas the USA has already realised a prohibition of this nature to a great extent through statutory provisions, a broad spectrum of additional consultancy services is still permissible in the Federal Republic of Germany in spite of similar initiatives on the part of legislators.The present paper analyses methodically in the framework of an extended manager–auditor game how the Nash equilibrium is altered in a non-cooperative two-person game through the behaviour of the players, if the supervisory board, as an exogenous party, detects with a specific probability the incorrect certification of a substantively incorrectly prepared balance sheet. At the same time, payoffs from consultancy services for both players are included in the analysis here. However, with a greater probability of detection of an incorrectly certified incorrect balance sheet, and through the reductions of consultancy payoffs, the supervisory board can work towards the product of audit and publication quality being increased.     

Multivariate non-linear time series modelling of exposure and risk in road safety research

Summary.  A multivariate non-linear time series model for road safety data is presented. The model is applied in a case-study into the development of a yearly time series of numbers of fatal accidents (inside and outside urban areas) and numbers of kilometres driven by motor vehicles in the Netherlands between 1961 and 2000. The model accounts for missing entries in the disaggregated numbers of kilometres driven although the aggregated numbers are observed throughout. We consider a multivariate non-linear time series model for the analysis of these data. The model consists of dynamic unobserved factors for exposure and risk that are related in a non-linear way to the number of fatal accidents. The multivariate dimension of the model is due to its inclusion of multiple time series for inside and outside urban areas. Approximate maximum likelihood methods based on the extended Kalman filter are utilized for the estimation of unknown parameters. The latent factors are estimated by extended smoothing methods. It is concluded that the salient features of the observed time series are captured by the model in a satisfactory way.     

关于防范"法轮功"加强社区管理的思考

“法轮功”邪教组织给我国社会造成的危害 ,促使人们对社会稳定工作的思考。本文从分析“法轮功”传播的特点、迅速蔓延的原因入手 ,着重论证了如何搞好社区防范的问题。     

A Comparative Study of Segregation Patterns in Belgium,Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden: Neighbourhood Concentration and Representation of Non-European Migrants

In this paper, we use geo-coded, individual-level register data on four European countries to compute comparative measures of segregation that are independent of existing geographical sub-divisions. The focus is on non-European migrants, for whom aggregates of egocentric neighbourhoods (with different population counts) are used to assess small-scale, medium-scale, and large-scale segregation patterns. At the smallest scale level, corresponding to neighbourhoods with 200 persons, patterns of over- and under-representation are strikingly similar. At larger-scale levels, Belgium stands out as having relatively strong over- and under-representation. More than 55% of the Belgian population lives in large-scale neighbourhoods with moderate under- or over-representation of non-European migrants. In the other countries, the corresponding figures are between 30 and 40%. Possible explanations for the variation across countries are differences in housing policies and refugee placement policies. Sweden has the largest and Denmark the smallest non-European migrant population, in relative terms. Thus, in both migrant-dense and native-born-dense areas, Swedish neighbourhoods have a higher concentration and Denmark a lower concentration of non-European migrants than the other countries. For large-scale, migrant-dense neighbourhoods, however, levels of concentration are similar in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Thus, to the extent that such concentrations contribute to spatial inequalities, these countries are facing similar policy challenges.     

Covariate Order Tests for Covariate Effect

A new approach for constructing tests for association between a random right censored life time variable and a covariate is proposed. The basic idea is to first arrange the observations in increasing order of the covariate and then base the test on a certain point process defined by the observation times. Tests constructed by this approach are robust against outliers in the covariate values or misspecification of the covariate scale since they only use the ordering of the covariate. Of particular interest is a test based on the Anderson-Darling statistic. This test has good power properties both against monotonic and nonmonotonic dependencies between the covariate and the life time variable.