Stability and Preference Alignment in Matching and Coalition Formation

We study matching and coalition formation environments allowing complementarities and peer effects. Agents have preferences over coalitions, and these preferences vary with an underlying, and commonly known, state of nature. Assuming that there is substantial variability of preferences across states of nature, we show that there exists a core stable coalition structure in every state if and only if agents' preferences are pairwise‐aligned in every state. This implies that there is a stable coalition structure if agents' preferences are generated by Nash bargaining over coalitional outputs. We further show that all stability‐inducing rules for sharing outputs can be represented by a profile of agents' bargaining functions and that agents match assortatively with respect to these bargaining functions. This framework allows us to show how complementarities and peer effects overturn well known comparative statics of many‐to‐one matching.     

Competition in Financial Innovation

This paper examines the incentives offered by frictionless markets to innovate asset‐backed securities by owners who maximize the assets' values. Assuming identical preferences across investors with heterogeneous risk‐sharing needs, we characterize economies in which competition provides insufficient incentives to innovate so that, in equilibrium, financial markets are incomplete in all (pure strategy) equilibria, even when innovation is essentially costless. Thus, value maximization does not generally result in complete markets.     

Relations of School Children's Comforting Behavior to Empathy-Related Reactions and Shyness

The purpose of this study was to examine empathy-related and personal correlates of children's comforting reactions. Quantity and quality of third to sixth graders' comforting of a crying infant were assessed and their relations with situational and dispositional empathy-related responding, shyness, and vagal tone were examined. Quantity and quality of boys' comforting were related to reports of sympathetic/empathic responding to an empathy-inducing film, whereas quantity of girls' comforting was associated with low facial and heart rate markers of vicarious distress in another context. Quality of comforting was associated with markers of girls' vicarious distress. Comforting was negatively related to younger children's shyness and marginally, positive correlated with girls' vagal tone. Suppression of vagal tone was associated with quantity of comforting.     

The death of informants or when a fieldworker outlives the community studied

This paper analyses the phenomenon of the death of informants. Based on his own experience with the long-term (1999–2016) research of Voyvodovo – the only Czech village in Bulgaria, the author shows what the death of one’s informants means for the research and the researcher. The author argues that any long-term fieldwork entails emotional involvement of the researcher, and so the departure of his or her informants has a deep impact on the researcher’s well-being. The articles also address methodological consequences of the death of informants, namely, the case when the death of all of them leads to a situation that the group ceases to exist. The author shows that with the last member’s passing away Malinowski’s ‘native’s point of view’ is lost forever. The author also suggests that the topic of death of informants should be included into educational curricula for fieldwork training.     

Cloud shade by dynamic logistic modeling

During the daytime, the sun is shining or not at ground level depending on clouds motion. Two binary variables may be used to quantify this process: the sunshine number (SSN) and the sunshine stability number (SSSN). The sequential features of SSN are treated in this paper by using Markovian Logistic Regression models, which avoid usual weaknesses of autoregressive integrated moving average modeling. The theory is illustrated with results obtained by using measurements performed in 2010 at Timisoara (southern Europe). Simple modeling taking into account internal dynamics with one lag history brings substantial reduction of misclassification compared with the persistence approach (to less than 57%). When longer history is considered, all the lags up to at least 8 are important. The seasonal changes are rather concentrated to low lags. Better performance is associated with a more stable radiative regime. More involved models add external influences (such as sun elevation angle or astronomic declination as well as taking into account morning and afternoon effects separately). Models including sun elevation effects are significantly better than those ignoring them. Clearly, during the winter months, the effect of declination is much more pronounced compared with the rest of the year. SSSN is important in long-term considerations and it also plays a role in retrospective assessment of the SSN. However, it is not easy to use SSSN for predicting future SSN. Using more complicated past beam clearness models does not necessarily provide better results than more simple models with SSN past.     

Interactive effect of individual factors on nurses' health and sleep

Abstract

There is a tendency in studies concerning individual diferences in shiftwork tolerance to analyse the moderating effect of individual factors separately as if they acted independently. The aim of this study was to examine the interactive effect of individual factors (i.e. morningness, flexibility, languidity, neuroticism, extroversion) on nurses' health and sleep. A hundred female nurses (mean age 25.9 years, SD = 3.7 years) working a 2 × 12-h shift system were chosen from a larger study conducted among Intensive Care Unit staff. All subjects completed the Standard Shiftwork Index. Multiple regression analyses show that interactions of neuroticism and other factors (languidity, morningness) predict the majority of health and sleep complaints rather than neuroticism itself. Correlation analyses revealed that the interaction of neuroticism and languidity correlates higher with some indices of impaired health and sleep disturbances than when these factors are taken separately. The contribution of flexibility together with extroversion in interactions with neuroticism, and with neuroticism and languidity weaken the relations of languidity and neuroticism with health and sleep indices. The results show that some individual features tend to strengthen or counteract one another in relation to symptoms of shiftwork intolerance.     

The relative importance of planning and control systems in achieving good delivery performance

Amongst factors such as quick changeovers and workforce flexibility, managers in 533 UK manufacturing plants ranked a responsive planning and control system as the most important facilitator of good delivery performance on products made-to-order or assembled-to-order. The rankings indicate greater importance to companies in the Household and Engineering sectors than in Process and Electronics, where other factors are dominant. These results are combined with data such as customer lead times and item variety, to characterize and explain differences between the plants in these four sectors. Collectively the results indicate considerable differences in the production planning and control tasks. This implies that general statements on the importance of planning and control systems are inadequate. Practitioners need contextual information in order to ascertain when research is applicable to their circumstances.     

Warum es kaum Pensionsfonds in Deutschland gibt. Kapitalmarktrisiken,Finanzindustrie und die Politik der Mindestverzinsung

Studies of the rise of private defined-contribution pension plans have traditionally focused on social policy concerns about the allocation of risks and costs for beneficiaries and employers. There is however another dimension of pension privatization, which situates it in the context of financial markets and—more broadly—the economic system. Here, regulations forcing private pension providers to guarantee a minimum rate of return on individuals’ pension assets make a crucial difference for financial markets because they incentivize fund managers to invest a greater chunk of plan portfolios in fixed-income securities and therefore away from equities. While different segments of the financial industry have divergent preferences over minimum return guarantees, politicians are caught in a dilemma: Should they prioritize predictable benefit levels or the development of equity markets? Using the case of the introduction of the German Riester Rente, we argue that, as politicians linked the introduction of private defined-contribution plans with cuts in statutory pensions, insurance firms in coalition with trade unions insisted on minimum guarantees, thereby restricting the expansion of equity markets in Germany.