The Risk of an Unwanted Birth: The Changing Context of Contraceptive Sterilization in the U.S.

Life-table estimates indicate that one-quarter of U.S. women intend no more births by age 25, one-half by age 27, and three-quarters by age 30. The resulting long period at risk of unwanted fertility is argued to be an important underlying dimension of the revolution in attitudes to and practice of sterilization. Life-table estimates are then considered of the timing of sterilization after the last wanted birth. Almost one-quarter of all couples select sterilization within the first year after they have had the number of children they desire. Recent experience would imply that four-fifths of all couples will eventually use contraceptive sterilization. In order to examine the determinants of men's and women's sterilization, logistic regression is used with a polytomous dependent variable: sterilization of the woman, sterilization of the man, or no sterilization within four years of the last wanted birth. Covariates considered are age and parity at last wanted birth, year and duration of marriage at last wanted birth, wife's and husband's education, wife's and husband's religion, whether residence is in a central city, region, pill-use history and timing-failure histories before the last wanted birth, and unwanted birth. Large and significant effects are found for most of these variables, and these effects change in interpretable ways between early innovative behaviour and sterilization during the most recent period when it was widely accepted.     

The Meaning and Measurement of Productive Engagement in Later Life

This study draws from the work engagement literature to define engagement as an indicator of role quality and to develop a measure—The Productive Engagement Portfolio (PEP)—that can be used to assess engagement in work, volunteering, caregiving, and informal helping among older adults. A Rasch measurement approach was used to develop both Likert-based and semantic-differential-based measures of engagement across 4 roles. Items for both scales were developed through an iterative process that included focus groups, 4 pilot tests, and one full-scale administration. Results suggest that the psychological state of engagement can be conceptualized and measured on a meaningful continuum defining a unidimensional and hierarchical construct ranging from lower to higher levels of engagement. The technical characteristics of the items were found to be invariant across each productive role type for both measurement approaches and the meaning of person scores within a role were found to be independent of the response format for both approaches. Using score conversion charts designed to translate the scale scores into a form that is readily transparent and usable for practitioners, our scales can easily and meaningfully chart a person’s level of engagement pre- and post-intervention. The PEP instrument can also be used in survey research or by practitioners in community or medical settings to assess the extent to which older adults are involved in roles that enhance their overall quality of life.     

An Evaluation of the Effects of Very Difficult Goals

In 1968 the first cohesive theory on goal setting proposed that difficult goals produce higher levels of performance than easy goals and that specific goals produce a higher level of performance than “do your best” goals. While over 40 years of research supports this theory, there has been some discrepancy regarding the use of very difficult goals. This study was designed to examine the effects on performance of different levels of performance improvement goals and two different types of feedback, as feedback is often used in conjunction with goal setting. A group design was used with participants receiving one of two goal levels, and two different types of feedback. While no significant effects were found between the two types of feedback, goal level produced significant results in terms of performance and accuracy.     

Efficiency with Endogenous Population Growth

In this paper, we generalize the notion of Pareto efficiency to make it applicable to environments with endogenous populations. Two efficiency concepts are proposed: ℘‐efficiency and 𝒜‐efficiency. The two concepts differ in how they treat potential agents that are not born. We show that these concepts are closely related to the notion of Pareto efficiency when fertility is exogenous. We prove a version of the first welfare theorem for Barro–Becker type fertility choice models and discuss how this result can be generalized. Finally, we study examples of equilibrium settings in which fertility decisions are not efficient, and we classify them into settings where inefficiencies arise inside the family and settings where they arise across families.     

AN ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIOR AND PERFORMANCE IN THE FOOD RETAILING INDUSTRY USING EXPERIMENTAL BUSINESS GAMING

This research tested hypotheses concerning the effects of organizational affiliation, differences among managers nested within organizational affiliation, degree of price competition and selected demographic and psychological traits of managers on economic behavior and performance. Experimental gaming in a behavioral science laboratory was used with a group of 60 subjects who were managers of Indiana supermarkets. The results support the influence of economic factors on the behavior and performance of managers. Degree of price competition imposed by the researchers significantly affected pricing decisions. At the same time, factors not usually considered in the static theory of the firm, such as organizational affiliation, had a significant influence on behavior and performance. While psychological and demographic traits generally did a poor job of explaining manager behavior, their effect may have been masked by the main treatments to which subjects were exposed. Realism in the experiment was not as high as expected, but the approach used was judged to be superior to alternative approaches.     

Investment and Competitive Matching

We study markets in which agents first make investments and are then matched into potentially productive partnerships. Equilibrium investments and the equilibrium matching will be efficient if agents can simultaneously negotiate investments and matches, but we focus on markets in which agents must first sink their investments before matching. Additional equilibria may arise in this sunk‐investment setting, even though our matching market is competitive. These equilibria exhibit inefficiencies that we can interpret as coordination failures. All allocations satisfying a constrained efficiency property are equilibria, and the converse holds if preferences satisfy a separability condition. We identify sufficient conditions (most notably, quasiconcave utilities) for the investments of matched agents to satisfy an exchange efficiency property as well as sufficient conditions (most notably, a single crossing property) for agents to be matched positive assortatively, with these conditions then forming the core of sufficient conditions for the efficiency of equilibrium allocations.     

Production System Development for Expert Systems Using a Recursive Partitioning Induction Approach: An Application to Mortgage,Commercial, and Consumer Lending

The concepts of expert systems and decision support systems have received considerable attention recently. While systems have been proposed for various problem areas in business, difficulties still exist in the knowledge acquisition phase of development. This paper presents a recursive partitioning analysis (RPA) approach to knowledge acquisition. The RPA production system approach was applied to data sets representing the mortgage, commercial, and consumer lending problems. Comparison of the classification rates across these problems to the results of a generalized inductive inference production system (Quinlan's ID3 algorithm) and across the mortgage and commercial lending problems to traditional statistical modeling approaches indicated that the RPA approach provided superior results while using fewer variables.