Psychological taxing in Flemish municipalities

We analyse whether the psychological pricing in the private sector has a public sector counterpart in tax policy. Analysing the main theoretical arguments for the existence of price points, and applying them to the public sector, suggests that psychological taxing reveals itself by the use of non-0 ending tax rates. The tax rate endings of the local income taxes, which are set by 308 Flemish municipalities in the fiscal year 1998, suggests the presence of psychological taxing. Non-0 endings occur more frequently in municipalities where demand for public policy is more elastic (and where, therefore, the benefits to the politicians from setting a tax just below a tax point is higher). The pre-tax income inequality and the level of the tax rate positively affect psychological taxing. The latter effect is reinforced in those municipalities where the existing tax rate is above the average tax rate in neighbouring municipalities and below their neighbours’ minimum, although this effect has a limited effect and is offset the further below the minimum the tax is set.     

The State of Care Management in Learning Disability and Mental Health Services 12 Years into Community Care

This paper reports on the organization of care management froma longitudinal study of community care for people resettledfrom long-stay learning disability and psychiatric hospitals.The findings from a 12-year follow-up of care management arrangementsin 12 learning disability and eight mental health study siteservices are described. The diversity of care management arrangementsfound at earlier points in the evaluation remained evident.Also, many of the former ‘care in the community’service users were excluded from mainstream care managementarrangements in their localities. The difficulty of developingperson-centred arrangements in learning disability and the lackof integration of the Care Programme Approach and care managementwere evident. The findings and observations are placed in thewider policy and practice context, with suggestions for takingcare management forward nationally and locally.     

Goal Ambiguity and Organizational Performance in U.S. Federal Agencies

In spite of numerous observations that government organizationshave high levels of organizational goal ambiguity that exertmajor influences on their other characteristics, few researchershave measured goal ambiguity and tested these frequent assertions.In previous research, we developed measures of four dimensionsof goal ambiguity: mission comprehension ambiguity, directivegoal ambiguity, evaluative goal ambiguity, and priority goalambiguity. Confirming hypotheses developed from the literatureon public organizations, the latter three variables showed relationsto such organizational characteristics as organizational age,financial publicness (proportion of funding from governmentallocations), and regulatory status. This article reports asecond analytical step of examining the relations between thegoal ambiguity dimensions and indicators of organizational performancebased on responses to the 2000 National Partnership for ReinventingGovernment Survey of federal employees. The performance variablesincluded managerial effectiveness, customer service orientation,productivity, and work quality. Regression analyses with numerouscontrol variables found that directive, evaluative, and prioritygoal ambiguity related negatively to managerial effectiveness.All four performance indicators showed significant negativerelationships with evaluative goal ambiguity and directive goalambiguity. The results provide further evidence of the viabilityof the new measures of goal ambiguity, support theory-basedbut previously untested hypotheses, and further indicate thefeasibility and value of analyzing goal ambiguity of governmentorganizations.     

Comparing Networks Across Space and Time, Size and Species

We describe and illustrate methodology for comparing networks from diverse settings. Our empirical base consists of 42 networks from four kinds of species (humans, nonhuman primates, nonprimate mammals, and birds) and covering distinct types of relations such as influence, grooming, and agonistic encounters. The general problem is to determine whether networks are similarly structured despite their surface differences. The methodology we propose is generally applicable to the characterization and comparison of network–level social structures across multiple settings, such as different organizations, communities, or social groups, and to the examination of sources of variability in network structure. We first fit a p^* model (Wasserman and Pattison 1996) to each network to obtain estimates for effects of six structural properties on the probability of the graph. We then calculate predicted tie probabilities for each network, using both its own parameter estimates and the estimates from every other network in the collection. Comparison is based on the similarity between sets of predicted tie probabilities. We then use correspondence analysis to represent the similarities among all 42 networks and interpret the resulting configuration using information about the species and relations involved. Results show that similarities among the networks are due more to the kind of relation than to the kind of animal.     

Social choice with analytic preferences

Arrow's axioms for social welfare functions are shown to be inconsistent when the set of alternatives is the nonnegative orthant in a multidimensional Euclidean space and preferences are assumed to be either the set of analytic classical economic preferences or the set of Euclidean spatial preferences. When either of these preference domains is combined with an agenda domain consisting of compact sets with nonempty interiors, strengthened versions of the Arrovian social choice correspondence axioms are shown to be consistent. To help establish the economic possibility theorem, an ordinal version of the Analytic Continuation Principle is developed. Received: 4 July 2000/Accepted: 2 April 2001     

Relationship Dissolution as a Life Stage Transition: Effects on Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors

In this paper, with the use of linear regressions to investigate how relationship dissolution affects sexual attitudes and behaviors, the authors address the stereotype that newly single people seek multiple sexual partners. Although the newly single people surveyed did obtain new sexual partners, the rate at which they acquired new partners did not support the stereotype. Specifically, men with custody of their children seemed oriented toward finding a steady partner. Additionally, men and women with low incomes reported relatively high rates of partner acquisition after relationship dissolution. The high rates reported by disadvantaged groups may be more directly related to familial instability accompanying poverty than to cultural characteristics associated with income or race. We argue that a life stage model with categorical stages in a rigid, anachronistic progression provides insufficient means to gain an understanding of newly single people.