Limited Rationality and Strategic Interaction: The Impact of the Strategic Environment on Nominal Inertia

Much evidence suggests that people are heterogeneous with regard to their abilities to make rational, forward‐looking decisions. This raises the question as to when the rational types are decisive for aggregate outcomes and when the boundedly rational types shape aggregate results. We examine this question in the context of a long‐standing and important economic problem: the adjustment of nominal prices after an anticipated monetary shock. Our experiments suggest that two types of bounded rationality—money illusion and anchoring—are important behavioral forces behind nominal inertia. However, depending on the strategic environment, bounded rationality has vastly different effects on aggregate price adjustment. If agents' actions are strategic substitutes, adjustment to the new equilibrium is extremely quick, whereas under strategic complementarity, adjustment is both very slow and associated with relatively large real effects. This adjustment difference is driven by price expectations, which are very flexible and forward‐looking under substitutability but adaptive and sticky under complementarity. Moreover, subjects' expectations are also considerably more rational under substitutability.     

Optimizing the Staffing and Routing of Small‐Size Hierarchical Call Centers

Multiple‐skill call centers propagate rapidly with the development of telecommunications. An abundance of literature has already been published on call centers. Here, we want to focus on centers that would typically occur in business‐to‐business environments; these are call centers that handle many types of calls but where the arrival rate for each type is low. To find an optimal configuration, the integrality of the decision variables is a much more important issue than for larger call centers. The present paper proposes an approach that uses elements of combinatorial optimization to find optimal configurations. We develop an approximation method for the evaluation of the service performance. Next, we search for the minimum‐cost configuration subject to service‐level constraints using a branch‐and‐bound algorithm. What is at stake is to find the right balance between gains resulting from the economies of scale of pooling and the higher cost or cross‐trained agents. The article shows that in most cases this method significantly decreases the staffing cost compared with configurations with only cross‐trained or dedicated operators.     

Organizational Form as a Mechanism to Involve Staff,Public and Users in Public Services: A Study of the Governance of NHS Foundation Trusts

In addition to introducing markets and market‐like structures into public services, New Labour wished to promote the involvement of users and the public in decision‐making in other ways than as individual consumers. One way was to involve the public in the governance of organizations. This could be done by removing public services from state control, and transferring them to mutual ownership; or by increasing public involvement in the governance of public bodies. NHS foundation trusts (FTs) were presented as mutuals. Our study shows FTs are not mutuals, as they continue to be owned by the state. Moreover, staff of FTs were generally not engaging with the new governance structures. In general, there was mixed experience of the new structures enabling governors to increase accountability of the hospitals to the public. On the other hand, having a membership did enhance the legitimacy of FTs, as opposed to other NHS organizations. The findings of the study are of current interest as the coalition government is continuing with the policy of FTs, and also encouraging mutuals and other forms of public involvement.     

Adverse selection,moral hazard and propitious selection

We propose a simple model with preference-based adverse selection and moral hazard that formalizes the cherry picking/propitious selection argument. This argument assumes that individuals differ in risk aversion, potentially resulting in more risk averse agents buying more insurance while being less risky. The propitious selection argument is summarized by two properties: regularity (more risk averse agents exert more caution) and single-crossing (more risk averse agents have a higher willingness to pay for insurance). We show that these assumptions are incompatible with a pooling equilibrium, and that they do not imply a negative correlation between risk and insurance coverage at equilibrium.

Seeing double,thinking twice: the Toronto drag kings and (re-) articulations of masculinity

Through a close reading of the performances of masculinity by the Toronto drag kings, this chapter argues that drag king shows parody the hyper-masculine star at his most contradictory and dialogic. Given that drag king performances parody both the contradictions of masculinity on stage, and the productive technologies of the star, king performances are essentially both meta-theatrical (performances about performing where lights, music, body language, dance all make the man) and meta-performative (performances which are at once conditioned by the performative reiterations which enable a fiction of identity in the first place). Finally, I explore the rather abstracted question of what cultural work the category of "drag king" does. I argue that it is a term which articulates a series of productive but necessary slippages in and through the contradictory and dialogic practices of identification. The bottom line is this: drag kings are situated in and play with the ironic no man's land between "lesbian," "butch," "transman" and "bio-boy" where the sell evident is neither.     

Parents of adults with developmental disabilities: Age and reasons for reluctance to use another caregiver

Parents of individuals with developmental disabilities differ in their expressed reluctance to use another caregiver depending on their age. Older parents, more than younger parents, reported a reluctance to use another caregiver because of financial reasons and the unavailability of qualified caregivers. The results suggest that elderly parents may be willing to leave their developmentally disabled child with someone else but they require financial assistance and education regarding program quality and availability.Jean L. Engelhardt is a Research Associate of the Family and Child Studies Center, Department of Home Economics and Consumer Sciences, at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her current research is in the area of older parents of developmentally disabled children. Dr. Engelhardt received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Notre Dame.Dr. Lutzer is Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology and an Associate of the Family and Child Studies Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She is currently involved in research on the older parents of developmentally disabled children.Timothy H. Brubaker is Professor and Director of the Family and Child Studies Center, Department of Home Economics and Consumer Sciences, at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Dr. Brubaker holds a Ph.D. from Iowa State University and is currently conducting research on the older parents of developmentally disabled children.We express our gratitude to the Family Resource Services Program of the Butler County (Ohio) Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities for their help, and to the Jacob G. Schmidlapp Trust of Cincinnati for financial support during the writing of this article.     

Adolescent emancipation from foster care

This demonstration project tested the degree to which a short-term, competence-oriented service delivery model prepared 31 older adolescents to move into responsible independent living upon termination of foster home placement. The adolescents achieved significant growth as measured by independent living, employment, and social network skills but not in level of psychosocial functioning.