Tolerance for Failure and Incentives for Collaborative Innovation

Most organizations employ collaborative teams to manage innovation projects. Although the use of collaborative innovation teams is a good starting point, an organization's ability to innovate can be enhanced by managing risk‐taking behavior through monetary incentive schemes and through an organizational culture that tolerates failure. This article reports the results of two controlled experiments aimed at understanding how tolerance for failure and incentives impact the decisions of individuals engaged in a collaborative innovation initiative. A key element of our experiments is the notion of endogenous project risk, which we define as the explicit link between resources allocated to a project and the likelihood of project success. We observe that when penalties are low, the amount of risk an individual assumes is fairly insensitive to the rewards that are offered. In an analogous result, when individuals make decisions alone (rather than collaboratively), higher tolerance for failure does little to increase the amount of risk an individual is willing to take. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of implicit incentives that are created as a result of project and organizational characteristics.     

Isolation and Insecurity: Resettlement Issues Among Muslim Refugee Women in Perth,Western Australia

Refugee Muslim women face a number of formidable obstacles in the resettlement process within Australia. As Muslims, they are a religious minority that has come under considerable racial attack in recent years in the wake of international terrorism. As refugees, they are struggling to put past traumas behind them and find ‘security’ in a strange land with different customs. As women, they are trying to find a voice for themselves amidst ethnic traditions that limit their range of expression and an Australian society that aspires to, but has not yet achieved, equality for women. Our qualitative study, upon which this paper is based, explored resettlement issues of Muslim refugee women during their first five years of arrival in Perth, Australia. It is based on focus groups and semi‐structured interviews with 80 Muslim refugee women: 35 Iraqi, 34 Sudanese and 11 Afghan. Our study re‐affirms that well‐documented issues of resettlement continue to be poor English language competency, securing employment and accommodation and gender‐specific problems. In addition, however, our study highlights a new and emerging issue, which is that of personal, psychological and cultural insecurity, heightened by the current political climate and exacerbated by their religious background. This leads to problematic ‘intersections’ with an Australian society that is far more complex and more difficult to cope with than is portrayed in popular discourse and political rhetoric of the easy‐going ‘lucky country’.     

Cumulative Structural Disadvantage and Racial Health Disparities: The Pathways of Childhood Socioeconomic Influence

Cumulative structural disadvantage theory posits two major sources of endogenous selection in shaping racial health disparities: a race-based version of the theory anticipates a racially distinct selection process, whereas a social class-based version anticipates a racially similar process. To operationalize cumulative structural disadvantage, this study uses data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in a Latent Class Analysis that demographically profiles health impairment trajectories. This analysis is used to examine the nature of selection as it relates to racial differences in the development of health impairments that are significant enough to hinder one’s ability to work. The results provide no direct support for the race-based version of cumulative structural disadvantage theory. Instead, two key findings support the social class–based version of cumulative disadvantage theory. First, the functional form of the different health trajectories are invariant for whites and blacks, suggesting more racial similarly in the developmental process than anticipated by the race-based version of the theory. The extent of the racial disparity in the prevalences across the health impairment trajectories is, however, significant and noteworthy: nearly one-third of blacks (28 %) in the United States experience some form of impairment during their prime working years compared with 18.8 % of whites. Second, racial differences in childhood background mediate this racial health disparity through the indirect pathway of occupational attainment and through the direct pathway of early-life exposure to health-adverse environments. Thus, the selection of individuals into different health trajectories, based largely on childhood socioeconomic background, helps explain racial disparities in the development of health impairments.     

Integrating service delivery in a regional homelessness service system

All tiers of government in Australia are focused on service integration as a key response to homelessness. However, service integration strategies need to consider particular service system characteristics and location‐specific conditions. This paper reports on an investigation of service integration strategies suitable for a regional context undertaken in 2010 and 2011. A three‐phase participatory action research (PAR) framework was utilised to collect data about the homelessness service system in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, and about the existing and potential service integration strategies in the region. The findings suggest that strategies for better integration should take into account specific local conditions and be developed and implemented at a local level with support from government. The paper concludes by presenting an argument that the development and implementation of strategies should be based on a place‐based assessment of demand and suitability.     

Moving Average-Based Estimators of Integrated Variance

We examine moving average (MA) filters for estimating the integrated variance (IV) of a financial asset price in a framework where high-frequency price data are contaminated with market microstructure noise. We show that the sum of squared MA residuals must be scaled to enable a suitable estimator of IV. The scaled estimator is shown to be consistent, first-order efficient, and asymptotically Gaussian distributed about the integrated variance under restrictive assumptions. Under more plausible assumptions, such as time-varying volatility, the MA model is misspecified. This motivates an extensive simulation study of the merits of the MA-based estimator under misspecification. Specifically, we consider nonconstant volatility combined with rounding errors and various forms of dependence between the noise and efficient returns. We benchmark the scaled MA-based estimator to subsample and realized kernel estimators and find that the MA-based estimator performs well despite the misspecification.     

Employee Volunteering and Social Capital: Contributions to Corporate Social Responsibility

As employee volunteering (EV) is increasingly regarded as a means of improving companies' community and employee relations, we investigate the contribution of EV to corporate social responsibility, specifically whether and how it contributes to social capital. We investigate the dynamics of EV in three UK companies. We explore the social relations and resources which underpin social capital creation; the roles of opportunity, motivation and ability in bringing the actors together and enhancing their capacity for cooperation; and the ways in which alternative EV modes inform the different dimensions of social capital – networks, trust and norms of cooperation. Our paper contributes to our understanding of EV and the factors that enable it to create social capital. Finally we assess the contribution of EV to the overall corporate social responsibility agenda of companies.     

Environmental Inequity: An Analysis of Large‐Scale Hog Operations in 17 States, 1982–1997*

Abstract This study extends ideas of environmental equity to large‐scale hog operations. We investigate counties in 17 hog producing states to determine whether large‐scale hog operations are more likely to be sited and expanded in areas that have a disproportionate number of Black, Hispanic, and/or economically disadvantaged residents. The data for this work come from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Bureau of Census. We discover evidence of racial inequity, but only in those states where large‐scale operations are being rapidly sited and expanded (i.e., Iowa, North Carolina, and Minnesota). There is no evidence of ethnic or economic inequality. We conclude that reductions in community quality of life attributable to large‐scale hog operations are more likely to be found in counties that are disproportionately Black than White if located in states that are expanding the number of large‐scale hog operations.     

Seven tenths incorrect: heterogeneity and change in the waist-to-hip ratios of Playboy centerfold models and Miss America pageant winners

Drawing on an article by Singh (1993), many discussions of the evolutionary psychology of heterosexual male preferences have reported a remarkable consistency in the waist-to-hip ratios of Playboy centerfold models and Miss America pageant winners over time. We reexamine the measurement data on these American beauty icons and show that these reports are false in several ways. First, the variation in waist-to-hip ratios among these women is greater than reported. Second, the center of the distribution of waist-to-hip ratios is not 0.70, but less than this. Third, the average waist-to-hip ratio within both samples has changed over time in a manner that is statistically significant and can be regarded as mutually consistent. Taken together, the findings undermine some of the evidence given for the repeated suggestion that there is something special--evolutionarily hard-wired or otherwise--about a specific female waist-to-hip ratio of 0.70 as a preference of American heterosexual males.