Bribes,power, and managerial control in corporate voting games

Proxy fights have received comparatively little attention relative to the more popular methods for corporate control transfer: merger and tender offers. This paper presents an analytic model of the proxy contest as a cooperative game with four players: management, passive shareholders, insurgent shareholders and a trust fund. The power of the players and the effectiveness of certain managerial actions is discussed.     

Children of problem gamblers

An anonymous 37-item Health Survey was administered to 844 randomly selected ninth- to twelfth-grade students in four Southern California public high schools. Systematic information was gathered about their general health, quality of life, school and work adjustment, involvement with a range of potentially addictive substances and activities, and indications of psychosocial maladjustment, including difficulties with the law and suicide attempts. A series of self-ratings of students who characterized one or both of their parents as having a compulsive gambling problem (N=52) were contrasted with those of their classmates who reported no gambling problem among their parents (N=792). Findings have been grouped into three major areas: (a) comparative levels and reported effects of involvement with health-threatening behaviors (i.e., smoking, drinking, drug use, overeating, and gambling); (b) comparative incidence of psychosocial risk indicators (i.e., broken home, unhappy childhood and teenage years, legal action pending, overall quality of youth rated as poor); and (c) comparative incidence of dysphoria, school and work problems, and suicide attempts. Across each of these areas children of parents said to gamble excessively were found to be at consistently greater risk than their classmates who did not describe their parents as having a problem with compulsive gambling. These findings strongly suggest that without early and competent intervention, children of parents who gamble excessively: (a) will be seriously disadvantaged when attempting to solve their present adolescent and future adult problems of living; and (b) as a consequence are, themselves, high-risk candidates for developing one or another form of dysfunctional adjustment, including an addictive pattern of behavior.     

Modeling Benzene Pharmacokinetics Across Three Sets of Animal Data: Parametric Sensitivity and Risk Implications

Typically, the uncertainty affecting the parameters of physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) models is ignored because it is not currently practical to adjust their values using classical parameter estimation techniques. This issue of parametric variability in a physiological model of benzene pharmacokinetics is addressed in this paper. Monte Carlo simulations were used to study the effects on the model output arising from variability in its parameters. The output was classified into two categories, depending on whether the output of the model on a particular run was judged to be generally consistent with published experimental data. Statistical techniques were used to examine sensitivity and interaction in the parameter space. The model was evaluated against the data from three different experiments in order to test for the structural adequacy of the model and the consistency of the experimental results. The regions of the parameter space associated with various inhalation and gavage experiments are distinct, and the model as presently structured cannot adequately represent the outcomes of all experiments. Our results suggest that further effort is required to discern between the structural adequacy of the model and the consistency of the experimental results. The impact of our results on the risk assessment process for benzene is also examined.     

Requirements for successful implementation of new manufacturing technologies

This paper addresses the issue of why many U.S. companies have had major problems implementing “programmable automation” technologies in a manner to exploit their full potential. Many competitors in Japan and Europe have been much more successful. The theme of the paper is that the real impediment to the effective use of this new manufacturing hardware lies in some deeply entrenched attitudes and ways of doing things that are incompatible with the requirements and unique capabilities of the new hardware. Barriers to successful implementation are explored and implications for managerial practice are discussed.     

Beyond the nature/society divide: Learning to think about a mountain

Sociological efforts to understand environment-society relationships fall primarily into four conceptual categories. The first three, involving analytical separation, analytical primacy, and balanced dualism, all draw distinctions between biophysical and social aspects of human experience, with subsequent analyses being based on thesea priori distinctions. The fourth or constructivist approach questions this naturalized dichotomy, calling attention instead to mutual contingency or conjoint constitution: What we take to be physical facts are likely to be strongly shaped by social construction processes, and at the same time, what we take to be strictly social will often have been shaped in part by taken-for-granted realities of the physical world. Technology offers important opportunities for tracing these interconnections, being an embodiment of both the physical and the social. The point is illustrated with a long-term historical analysis of a specific physiographic feature—a mountain—that has undergone little overtphysical change over the centuries, but has undergone repeated changes in its social meanings and uses. Few of the changes would have been possible in the absence of the mountain's physiographic characteristics; similarly, few would have occurred in the absence of changing sociocultural definitions and possibilities. The challenge for sociology is not just to recognize the importance of both the physical and the social factors, and certainly not to argue over the relative importance of the two, but to recognize the extent to which what we take to be physical and social factors can be conjointly constituted.The paper's subtitle is intended as a tribute to Aldo Leopold and to one of his most famous essays (1949).     

Some criteria for making decisions concerning the distribution of scarce medical resources

In this paper I proceed on the assumption that moral philosophers can and should contribute to the resolution of perplexing moral problems. The ones considered here relate to decisions concerning the distribution of scarce medical resources as between those in need of treatment. I draw on considerations of egalitarianism and concern for the maximization of the use of scarce resources in the task of satisfying basic human needs (such as for good health). I propose certain principles and offer some supporting suggestions as guidelines or rules for medical decisions with a view to providing a helpful decision procedure for the various persons (doctors, community panels and so on) whose task it is to make the life-or-death decisions involved in allocating certain scarce medical resources.     

Resource management schemes

Every large management organization undergoes the cyclic progress of planning, programming, budgeting, and rating of work tasks of projects to be accomplished by priority in the light of resource constraints controlling personnel strenghts and operating funds by fiscal periods. This is true, especially of governmental departments that are commodity oriented. There must be some ultimate goal of fine grain visibility that management can attempt to achieve or at least approach in order for the functional directors within the organization structure to relate and report most readily to provide required data for proficient resource management. Two essential requirements are visibility and integrated reporting as herein prescribed. Following the ascertainment of resource requirements in the light of projected work effort, some logical procedure should be employed in the rationale of resource adjustments. The Tolerance Box technique is herein described.