Sampling from a Discrete Distribution While Preserving Monotonicity

This article describes a cutpoint sampling method for efficiently sampling from an n-point discrete distribution that preserves the monotone relationship between a uniform deviate and the random variate it generates. This property is useful for developing a sampling plan to reduce variance in a Monte Carlo or simulation study. The expected number of comparisons with this method is derived and shown to be bounded above by (m + n ?1)/n, where m denotes the number of cut-points. The alias sampling method, which is regarded as the most efficient table sampling technique, generally lacks the monotone property and requires 2n storage locations, whereas the proposed cutpoint sampling method requires m + n storage locations. The article describes two modifications for cases in which n is large and possibly infinite. It is shown that circumstances arise in which the cutpoint method requires fewer comparisons on average than the alias method does for exactly the same space requirement. The article also describes an algorithm to implement the proposed method.     

Father Involvement and Childhood Injuries

Unintentional injury is the leading cause of death for children in the United States. Parental supervision is a key factor in preventing injuries, but little is known about the role of fathers. Today, one quarter of children live with a single mother, and another third live with a mother and her new partner, resulting in tremendous diversity in the amount and type of paternal involvement in children's lives. The authors examined the effects of involvement by resident biological, nonresident biological, and resident social fathers on the risk of injury among children from birth to age 5 using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 4,352). They found that living with a social father and social fathers' more frequent engagement with children increase risk of injury, but only for the youngest children. Higher levels of fathers' cooperative parenting reduce children's risk of injury regardless of fathers' biological or residential status.     

MONITORING IN TEAMS: USING LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS TO STUDY A THEORY OF THE FIRM

Alchian and Demsetz’s influential explanation of the classical business firm (The American Economic Review, 1972, 62, 777–795) argues that there is need for a concentrated residual claim in the hands of a central agent, to motivate the monitoring of workers. We model monitoring as a way to transform team production from a collective action dilemma with strong free riding incentives to a productivity‐enhancing opportunity with strong private marginal incentives to contribute effort. In an experiment, we have subjects experience team production without monitoring, team production with a central monitor, and team production with peer monitoring. Then subjects vote on whether to employ the central monitor, who gets to keep a fixed share of the team output, or to rely on peer monitoring, which entails a coordination or free riding problem. Our subjects usually prefer peer monitoring but they switch to the specialist when unable to successfully self‐monitor. We provide evidence for situations in which team members resist the appointing of a central monitor and succeed in overcoming coordination and free riding problems as well as for a situation in which an Alchian–Demsetz‐like firm grows in the laboratory.     

The Cultural Dimension of Metagovernance: Why Governance Doctrines May Fail

National cultures often reflect a preference for one of the ideal-types hierarchical, network or market governance. A comparison of four similar policy cases in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and the European Commission reveals that successful public managers under certain conditions are able to construct and design productive mixtures of the three styles. They applied metagovernance, a process of designing and managing situationally optimal combinations of the three competing, and to an extent mutually undermining, governance styles. Their national cultures and politico-administrative traditions co-determined the governance mixture which would work in a given situation. The research reinforces the case already made by others, that governance doctrines cannot be transferred as ‘best practices’ from one nation to another without adaptation. The article suggests that the future does not lie in inventing new management and governance doctrines, but in investing in post-dogmatic public management.     

National policy making in a global economy: The case for U.S. economic planning

In 1980 the Joint Economic Committee completed the Special Study on Economic Change. This 20 volume, 3-year project, was premised on the fact that: ‘fundamental economic, social, political, international and technical conditions have changed, and are still changing markedly’. This suggests that conventional wisdom and established economic tools may not be equal to meeting the challenge of making sound policies in the economic sphere. The so-called laws of economics have not been repealed, but all guiding principles presuppose a certain environment of conditions, customs and practices—and when these change, the implementation of new policies and the modes of adjustment have to change also. This paper examines the problem of devising policy instruments for economic management, identifying the facts of the changing economic environment and the main difficulties facing world economic development.     

On the definition and varieties of attitude and wellbeing

In a paper published in Social Indicators Research in 1975, Levy and Guttman proved the proposition that wellbeing is a special case of attitude. They exploited this result for establishing a certain lawfulness for wellbeing behavior, and built on this for revealing more specialized features of the lawfulness. Five years later in this same journal, Andrews and McKennell published two papers on exactly the same proposition, but without proving it, without building on known relevant lawfulness of attitudinal behavior, and without mentioning (neither positively nor negatively) the Levy-Guttman work. The Andrews-McKennell papers are shown to be a retrogression rather than a scientific advance, being conceptually confused, using inappropriate data analysis, and dealing with arbitrary assumptions which are either untested, untestable or false.