Caveat Venditor? Museum Merchandising, Nonprofit Commercialization, and the Case of the Metropolitan Museum in New York

This paper reviews some of the underpinnings of the current commercialization debate in the nonprofit sector, based on an analysis of Metropolitan Museum of Art data from 1960 to 2002. The case suggests at least two avenues for additional research: First, while analysts tend to see the origins of the commercialization phenomenon in the fiscal setbacks of the 1980s, the economic crisis of the 1970s and the resulting erosion of endowment funds may also have been an as of yet unexplored driving force behind the commercialization trend. Second, current conceptual frameworks of the phenomenon adequately explain the motivations behind the observable rise of the museum's commercial activities. However, the changing rationales as well as economic fortunes of commercial activities in this case highlight the need for a better understanding of the long-term effects and consequences of commercial activity by nonprofit organizations, particularly in light of the current push for increased entrepreneurialism.

Aspirations,Segregation, and Occupational Choice

This paper examines the steady states of an overlapping generations economy with a given distribution of household locations over a one‐dimensional interval. Parents decide whether or not to educate their children. Educational decisions are affected by location: There are local complementarities in investment incentives stemming from aspirations formation, learning spillovers, or local public goods. At the same time, economy‐wide wages endogenously adjust to bring factor supplies into line with demand. The model therefore combines local social interaction with global market interaction. The paper studies steady‐state configurations of skill acquisition, both with and without segregation. The model is used to compare macroeconomic and welfare properties of segregated and unsegregated steady states. (JEL: D31, O15, D85)     

Modeling asset returns with alternative stable distributions *

In the 1960's Benoit Mandelbrot and Eugene Fama argued strongly in favor of the stable Paretian distribution as a model for the unconditional distribution of asset returns. Although a substantial body of subsequent empirical studies supported this position, the stable Paretian model plays a minor role in current empirical work.

While in the economics and finance literature stable distributions are virtually exclusively associated with stable Paretian distributions, in this paper we adopt a more fundamental view and extend the concept of stability to a variety of probabilistic schemes. These schemes give rise to alternative stable distributions, which we compare empirically using S&P 500 stock return data. In this comparison the Weibull distribution, associated with both the nonrandom-minimum and geometric-random summation schemes dominates the other stable distributions considered-including the stable Paretian model.     

German sociology of law

Although several founders of sociology had a German mother-tongue and German jurisprudence may be the leader in systematic legal dogmatism, these factors have not worked in tandem to produce an influential law and society movement in Germany.¹ To the contrary, these two scientific cultures were split throughout most of the twentieth century and thus left little opportunity for producing a sociology of law. This article outlines the development of the sociology of law in Germany, sketches its current state, and concludes with a cautious forecast.     

Stationen eines Coaching im ärztlichen Bereich Eine Fallstudie mit hypothetischen Beratungssituationen

Stages of a coaching in the medical area. A case study with hypothetical counseling situations This article presents typical points of a career in the medical field in Germany, structured by hypothetical coaching interventions including thorough methodological reflections. Career counseling, analysis of the organizational chart and culture as well as conflict counseling constitute the main focus of this paper. Creative methods such as painting and use of hand puppets supplement the therapeutic methods discussed, such as Socratic dialogue, role play exercises and an analysis of a sibling constellation.     

Semidefinite Programming Relaxations for the Quadratic Assignment Problem

Semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) are derived using the dual of the (homogenized) Lagrangian dual of appropriate equivalent representations of QAP. These relaxations result in the interesting, special, case where only the dual problem of the SDP relaxation has strict interior, i.e., the Slater constraint qualification always fails for the primal problem. Although there is no duality gap in theory, this indicates that the relaxation cannot be solved in a numerically stable way. By exploring the geometrical structure of the relaxation, we are able to find projected SDP relaxations. These new relaxations, and their duals, satisfy the Slater constraint qualification, and so can be solved numerically using primal-dual interior-point methods.For one of our models, a preconditioned conjugate gradient method is used for solving the large linear systems which arise when finding the Newton direction. The preconditioner is found by exploiting the special structure of the relaxation. See e.g., Vandenverghe and Boyd (1995) for a similar approach for solving SDP problems arising from control applications.Numerical results are presented which indicate that the described methods yield at least competitive lower bounds.     

Grouped data exponentially weighted moving average control charts

In the manufacture of metal fasteners in a progressive die operation, and other industrial situations, important quality dimensions cannot be measured on a continuous scale, and manufactured parts are classified into groups by using a step gauge. This paper proposes a version of exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control charts that are applicable to monitoring the grouped data for process shifts. The run length properties of this new grouped data EWMA chart are compared with similar results previously obtained for EWMA charts for variables data and with those for cumulative sum (CUSUM) schemes based on grouped data. Grouped data EWMA charts are shown to be nearly as efficient as variables-based EWMA charts and are thus an attractive alternative when the collection of variables data is not feasible. In addition, grouped data EWMA charts are less affected by the discreteness that is inherent in grouped data than are grouped data CUSUM charts. In the metal fasteners application, grouped data EWMA charts were simple to implement and allowed the rapid detection of undesirable process shifts.     

Executive Stock Options in Germany: The Diffusion or Translation of US-Style Corporate Governance?

Equity-based pay in the form of executive shareoptions (ESOs) is a controversial part of thetypical, US-style governance package, and ESOsin Germany are the focus of this paper. Aconventional view would see ESOs as a US-styleorganizational innovation diffusingglobally in general, and to Germany inparticular.As an alternative to innovation diffusion,however, a translation perspective wouldsuggest that the diffusion of apparentlysimilar governance devices around the worldhides the actual adoption of differentpractices.US/German comparative case studies arepresented as an empirical contribution thatgenerally shows a pattern so far consistentwith this translation view. In addition,intriguing and contrasting results are shownfor UK/German comparisons in the sense thatactual UK ESO plans are discovered to be moredistant from the US standard than German ones.