Strategic Alliance Outcomes: a Transaction‐Cost Economics Perspective

Empirical research on strategic alliances has been limited because previous studies examined alliance outcomes, and the factors associated with them, from a single partner in a manufacturing alliance. Furthermore, many of these studies have been done from a transaction cost perspective and researchers have inferred opportunistic behavior, rather than directly measuring it and observing its actual relationship with alliance performance. Building on previous transaction cost theory and research, this study seeks to address these gaps by analyzing factors associated with both opportunistic behavior and alliance performance within a major service sector, namely the US healthcare industry. After controlling for asset specificity and alliance age, we found that partner trustworthiness and contractual safeguards were negatively related to opportunistic behavior. Furthermore, opportunistic behavior was negatively related to alliance performance, as hypothesized. Interestingly, mutual equity investments were found to be unrelated to opportunistic behavior, counter to transaction‐cost logic. These findings refine and extend the transaction‐cost economics perspective regarding our understanding of strategic alliance behavior and outcomes, and offer executives in service‐based industries some practical ideas for assuring favorable strategic alliance outcomes.     

Social Loafing: A Field Investigation

Social loafing was investigated by testing a multilevel model among 23 intact work groups comprised of 168 employees representing two organizations. Results demonstrated that as hypothesized at the individual level, increases in task interdependence and decreases in task visibility and distributive justice were associated with greater occurrence of social loafing. At the group level, increased group size and decreased cohesiveness were related to increased levels of social loafing. Of particular interest was the finding that group member perceptions of perceived coworker loafing was associated with reduced social loafing, opposite of our predictions. We suggested that this unexpected finding may provide evidence of a social compensation effect.     

Loneliness and Adolescents’ Neural Processing of Self,Friends, and Teachers: Consequences for the School Self‐Concept

The present interdisciplinary study explored whether perceived loneliness is associated with ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) activation during self‐ and social judgments (friends and teachers) in adolescents. Moreover, we examined how vMPFC activity is related to the academic self‐concept (ASC). Results of manifest path analysis indicated that high perceived loneliness was related to lower neural response to self‐judgments. In turn, high neural response to self‐judgments was positively associated with the ASC, whereas there was a trendwise negative association between high neural response to teacher‐related judgments and ASC. This study reveals associations between perceived loneliness and neural processing of the self, underlining the idea that feeling isolated from others may hinder self‐insight and, by extension, the formation of a stable academic self‐concept.     

Inference for quantile measures of kurtosis,peakedness, and tail weight

Insight into measures of peakedness, heavy-tailedness, and kurtosis can be gained by studying Ruppert’s ratios of interquantile ranges. They are not only monotone in Horn’s measure of peakedness when applied to the central portion of the population, but also monotone in the practical tail-index of Morgenthaler and Tukey, when applied to the tails. Non-parametric confidence intervals are found for Ruppert’s ratios, and sample sizes required to obtain such intervals for a pre-specified relative width and level are provided. In addition, the empirical power of distribution-free tests for peakedness and bimodality are found for some symmetric distributions.     

Improving Risk Management: From Lame Excuses to Principled Practice

The three classic pillars of risk analysis are risk assessment (how big is the risk and how sure can we be?), risk management (what shall we do about it?), and risk communication (what shall we say about it, to whom, when, and how?). We propose two complements as important parts of these three bases: risk attribution (who or what addressable conditions actually caused an accident or loss?) and learning from experience about risk reduction (what works, and how well?). Failures in complex systems usually evoke blame, often with insufficient attention to root causes of failure, including some aspects of the situation, design decisions, or social norms and culture. Focusing on blame, however, can inhibit effective learning, instead eliciting excuses to deflect attention and perceived culpability. Productive understanding of what went wrong, and how to do better, thus requires moving past recrimination and excuses. This article identifies common blame‐shifting “lame excuses” for poor risk management. These generally contribute little to effective improvements and may leave real risks and preventable causes unaddressed. We propose principles from risk and decision sciences and organizational design to improve results. These start with organizational leadership. More specifically, they include: deliberate testing and learning—especially from near‐misses and accident precursors; careful causal analysis of accidents; risk quantification; candid expression of uncertainties about costs and benefits of risk‐reduction options; optimization of tradeoffs between gathering additional information and immediate action; promotion of safety culture; and mindful allocation of people, responsibilities, and resources to reduce risks. We propose that these principles provide sound foundations for improving successful risk management.     

Physiological Responses to Near-Miss Outcomes and Personal Control During Simulated Gambling

Near-miss outcomes during gambling are non-win outcomes that fall close to a pay-out. While objectively equivalent to an outright miss, near-misses motivate ongoing play and may therefore be implicated in the development of disordered gambling. Given naturalistic data showing increases in heart rate (HR) and electrodermal activity (EDA) during periods of real gambling play, we sought to explore the phasic impact of win, near-miss and full-miss outcomes on physiological arousal in a controlled laboratory environment. EDA and HR were monitored as healthy, student participants (n = 33) played a simulated slot-machine task involving unpredictable monetary wins. A second gambling distortion, perceived personal control, was manipulated within the same task by allowing the participant to select the play icon on some trials, and having the computer automatically select the play icon on other trials. Near-misses were rated as less pleasant than full-misses. However, on trials that involved personal choice, near-misses produced higher ratings of ‘continue to play’ than full-misses. Winning outcomes were associated with phasic EDA responses that did not vary with personal choice. Compared to full-misses, near-miss outcomes also elicited an EDA increase, which was greater on personal choice trials. Near-misses were also associated with greater HR acceleration than other outcomes. Near-miss outcomes are capable of eliciting phasic changes in physiological arousal consistent with a state of subjective excitement, despite their objective non-win status.     

Stream salamander responses to varying degrees of urbanization within Maryland’s piedmont physiographic province

The main objective of this study was to determine how stream salamander assemblages and species respond to varying levels of impervious surface cover within Maryland’s Piedmont physiographic province. We sampled stream salamanders in 21 first-order streams located in watersheds representing a range of impervious surface cover (0–24 %) across the northeastern part of Maryland’s Piedmont region. Habitat data, including stream substrate and riparian characteristics, were measured at each site. Eurycea bislineata was the predominant species of stream salamander encountered during this study (> 99 % of individuals) and most of these individuals were larvae (> 92 %). Consequently, statistical analysis was limited to E. bislineata larvae. We were unable to detect a difference in E. bislineata abundances or body mass index’s among varying levels of impervious surface cover % or any individual site habitat variables alone. These results suggest that in smaller watersheds within the Piedmont of Maryland, local habitat variables, in conjunction with land use variables, are necessary in determining the abundance and body mass index of E. bislineata larvae populations. This study makes a strong case for halting the over-simplification of the relationship between urbanization and the presence/abundance of stream salamanders.