Estimating the Nonresponse BiasDue to Refusals in Telephone Surveys

This paper attempts to aid the process of accumulating the necessaryinformation for making more informed judgments about the effectsof nonresponse under different conditions. Two measures, whichpermit quantifiable nonsubjective assessment of the effectsof nonresponse on sample estimates, are introduced and are usedto examine the effects of respondent refusals in a random-digit-dialedgeneral population telephone survey of over 1,200 householdsas the response rate isincreased from 74.5 percent to 86.8 percent.By applying these measures under a wide range of conditions,the adequacy of various response rates may be assessed and morerational decisions made about the costs and benefits of devotingextraordinary resources to minimizing nonresponse.     

Public Hearings and Public Preferences: The Case of the White House Conference on Families

To provide input into Arizona's participation in the White HouseConference on Families, the Arizona Governor's Council on Children,Youth, and Families commissioned a random statewide survey toassess the relative priority given to 41 selected family-relatedneeds and preferences for institutional responses to those needs.A similar survey was administered to participants at each ofsix regional public hearings held throughout the state priorto the 1980 White House Conference on Families. A comparisonof the two surveys provides an opportunity to test the representativenessof public hearings participants with respect to the populationfrom which they were drawn. Fundamental differences in the prioritiesof these two samples cast considerable doubt on the assumptionthat public hearings are an effective means of gauging publicsentiment.     

COLLUSION, EFFICIENCY AND PRICING BEHAVIOR: EVIDENCE FROM THE BANKING INDUSTRY

This paper examines the validity of competing hypotheses used to explain the observed positive relationship between concentration and profits. Using price proxies from the banking industry, we find that leading (secondary) firms in a market act as price-setters (price-takers). This is true regardless of market concentration. We interpret this as evidence of the superior efficiency of leading firms and conclude that the higher profits earned by these firms is due to their superior efficiency and not collusive behavior.     

A NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF CAPACITATED POSTPONEMENT

Customer satisfaction can be achieved by providing rapid delivery of a wide variety of products. High levels of product variety require correspondingly high levels of inventory of each item to quickly respond to customer demand. Delayed product differentiation has been identified as a strategy to reduce final product inventories while providing the required customer service levels. However, it is done so at the cost of devoting large production capacities to the differentiation stage. We study the impact of this postponement capacity on the ability to achieve the benefits of delayed product differentiation. We examine a single‐period capacitated inventory model and consider a manufacturing system that produces a single item that is finished into multiple products. After assembly, some amount of the common generic item is completed as non‐postponed products, whereas some of the common item is kept as in‐process inventory, thereby postponing the commitment to a specific product. The non‐postponed finished‐goods inventory is used first to meet demand. Demand in excess of this inventory is met, if possible, through the completion of the common items. Our results indicate that a relatively small amount of postponement capacity is needed to achieve all of the benefits of completely delaying product differentiation for all customer demand. This important result will permit many firms to adopt this delaying strategy who previously thought it to be either technologically impossible or prohibitively expensive to do so.     

完美无缺的视力

在电影《星际迷航》中,轮机长乔迪·拉弗吉的眼睛里植入了一种24世纪发明的设备,让他能在黑暗中视物如同白昼。这种只在科幻世界中存在的超级视力,很有可能首先在一些失明的人身上变成现实。美国南加州大学的电机工程学教授阿曼德·R·小坦圭正在对可植入盲人眼内的微型摄像头进行研究。     

Gender and Promotion at Canadian Universities*

De 1984 à 1999, pour tous les professeurs à plein temps des universités canadiennes, les modèles de temps de défaillance accéléré démontrent que le temps médian de promotion de professeur adjoint à professeur agrégé est de 0,4 année plus long pour les femmes. Il n'y a pas de pic correspondant au refus de titularisation après cinq à sept ans de service, et les augmentations salariales des promotions sont stables avec le temps. Le temps médian de promotion de professeur agrégéà professeur titulaire est d'un an plus long pour les femmes que le temps médian pour les hommes, soit 8,3 années. Les différences entre les disciplines et entre les institutions n'ont qu'un petit impact sur les évaluations des différences entre les genres dans les promotions. From 1984 to 1999, for all full‐time faculty members at Canadian universities, accelerated failure time models show that the median time to promotion from assistant to associate professor is 0.4 years longer for women. There is no peak corresponding to denial of tenure after five to seven years of service and rates of promotion are stable over time. Women's median time for promotion from associate to full professor is one year longer than the median for men, 8.3 years. Variation between disciplines and between institutions has little impact on estimates of gender differences in promotion.     

Mapping Child-Care Social Work in the Final Years of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Response to the 'Looking After Children' System

Correspondence to Paul Michael Garrett, c/o, British Journal of Social Work, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL Summary This paper explores aspects of the Looking After Children: GoodParenting: Good Outcomes system (LAC) (Parker et at., 1991).It is suggested that the scheme, to be used with children andyoung people who are ‘looked after’ by local authorities,needs to be subjected to greater critical scrutiny. The paperseeks, therefore, to situate the LAC system in a social andpolitical context and highlights how it also relates to thedominant operational modalities of social work interventionin the late 1990s. In addition, the paper explores how ‘troublesome’children and ideas centred on ‘parenting’ featurein the LAC discourse. The discussion concludes with an examinationof Action and Assessment Records (Ward, 1995b), the centrepieceof the LAC system.     

International Business,Human Rights,and Moral Complicity: A Call for a Declaration on the Universal Rights and Duties of Business

The purpose of this article is to call for the formulation and adoption of a declaration on the universal rights and duties of business. We do not attempt to define the specific contents of such a declaration, but rather attempt to explain why such a declaration is needed and what would be some of its general characteristics. The catalyst for this call was the recognition that even under optimal conditions, good companies sometimes are susceptible to moral lapses, and when companies undertake ventures in authoritarian countries with poor human rights records, even those with the best intentions may find themselves drawn into complicity in human rights abuses. There, market exigencies may persuade them to leave their codes of ethics and commitments to human rights at home. Pragmatism, it would seem, requires thatthey accept the ethical inconsistencies that follow from a “When in Rome, do as they Romans do” outlook. When facing the moral dilemma about whether or not to invest in human rights abusing countries, companies are offered two alternatives: they can operate in those countries and accept potential complicity or they can stay away. We suggest, however, that a preferable option is to address the underlying problem, and to this end we advocate the promulgation of a declaration for business that is comparable to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Our proposed name for this is the “Declaration on the Universal Rights and Duties of Business.” To be effective, such a declaration would require enforcement mechanisms. To illustrate this issue, we focus on China, not because China is unique in its human rights abuses, but because China occupies such a central place in the globalization efforts of the major companies from around the world. A robust international declaration is needed to provide a common framework for the practice of consistent and fair business competition everywhere.