Soziologisches Denken

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The abortion issue and Title VII employment discrimination: The microcosm of the law

This paper presents a discussion of a 1989 United States federal appeals court ruling in the case of Doe v. First National Bank. The case is the first ruling on the federal appellate level involving a claim of Title VII employment discrimination based upon alleged employer knowledge of and animus towards an employee who had undergone an abortion. Doe raises the ethical questions of how a highly charged, national social issue can be reduced to interpersonal dealings between a supervisor and her subordinate in the workplace. The facts of the case are presented in a chronological manner, followed by a discussion of both the court rulings in the case and the utility of employing this case as an excellent tool in the teaching of business ethics and society.     

“Sugar and Spice But Not Always Nice”: Gender Socialization and its Impact on Development and Maintenance of Aggression in Adolescent Girls

Aggression in girls is a problem that is gaining increased attention. The indirect forms of relational aggression historically used by girls to harm their victims are increasingly escalating into physical altercations. An understanding of the interplay between the developmental and contextual factors that contribute to learned aggression in girls is needed to inform program development that truly responds to the unique gender socialization of girls. This article examines parental, environmental, and peer factors for their contributions to the development of girls’ aggression. Implications for program development that teaches girls and their families alternative ways of expressing their needs and protecting themselves from harm is discussed.     

A direct derivation of the REML likelihood function

The original derivation of the widely cited form of the REML likelihood function for mixed linear models is difficult and indirect. This paper derives it directly using familiar operations with matrices and determinants.     

A multivariate version of Gini's rank association coefficient

In this paper, we introduce a multivariate generalization of the population version of Gini's rank association coefficient, giving a response to this open question posed in [4]. We also study some properties of this version, present the corresponding results for the sample statistic, and provide several examples.     

A lower-bound oracle inequality for a blockwise-shrinkage estimate

Efromovich-Pinsker and Stein blockwise-shrinkage estimates are traditionally studied via upper-bound oracle inequalities, which bound the estimate's risk from above by the oracle's risk plus a remainder term. These bounds allow one to establish sufficient conditions for attaining the oracle's risk. To explore necessary conditions, this article develops a lower-bound oracle inequality, which bounds the estimate's risk from below by the oracle's risk minus a remainder term. In particular, the lower bound implies that thresholds must vanish for attaining the oracle's risk.     

Out-of-Pocket Health Care Expenditures by Russian Consumers with Different Health Status

The paper uses the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey 2003 database to study the types of official and shadow out-of-pocket health care expenditures by consumers with high and low health status. The analysis shows that the inability of less healthy people to pay unofficially for more effective outpatient care results in their higher demand for official inpatient and outpatient treatment. This pattern creates the need to sustain excessive inpatient facilities and slows down health care restructuring. Yet, since the state is incapable of fulfilling its obligations for providing free health care and meet the current demand, in inpatient institutions all consumers, and less healthy ones in particular, spend considerable sums on drugs, even though the latter are guaranteed to be free. Consequently, the current Russian health system itself leads to replacing outpatient with inpatient care, which is more costly both for the patients and for the state.      

Axiomatic foundations for fairness-motivated preferences

Much work in social choice theory takes individual preferences as uninvestigated inputs into aggregation functions designed to reflect considerations of fairness. Advances in experimental and behavioural economics show that fairness can also be an important motivation in the preferences of individuals themselves. A proper characterisation of how fairness concerns enter such preferences can enrich the informational basis of many social choice exercises. This paper proposes axiomatic foundations for individual fairness-motivated preferences that cover most of the models developed to rationalise observed behaviour in experiments. These models fall into two classes: Outcome-based models, which see preferences as defined only over distributive outcomes, and context-dependent models, which allow rankings over distributive outcomes to change systematically with non-outcome factors. I accommodate outcome-based and context-sensitive fairness concerns by modelling fairness-motivated preferences as a reference-dependent preference structure. I first present a set of axioms and two theorems that generate commonly used outcome-based models as special cases. I then generalise the axiomatic basis to allow for reference-dependence, and derive a simple functional form in which the weight on each person’s payoff depends on a reference vector of how much each person deserves.     

Gamson’s law and hedonic games

This note adds one celebrated coalition formation game due to Gamson (Am Soc Rev 26:373–382 1961a, Am Soc Rev 26:565–573, 1961b) in the list of applications of the theory of hedonic games explored by Banerjee et al. (Soc Choice Welf 18:135–153, 2001) and Bogomolnaia and Jackson (Games Econ Behav 38: 204–230, 2002). We apply their results to study the original Gamson game and offer extensions both to a multi-dimensional characteristics space and to an infinite number of players.