Staffing the Empirical Analysis of Verbal Behavior

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - Empirical articles in The Analysis of Verbal Behavior were inspected to evaluate the contributions of new and repeat investigators. The journal has attracted a...     

A new approach for disclosure control in the IAB establishment panel—multiple imputation for a better data access

For micro-datasets considered for release as scientific or public use files, statistical agencies have to face the dilemma of guaranteeing the confidentiality of survey respondents on the one hand and offering sufficiently detailed data on the other hand. For that reason, a variety of methods to guarantee disclosure control is discussed in the literature. In this paper, we present an application of Rubin’s (J. Off. Stat. 9, 462–468, 1993) idea to generate synthetic datasets from existing confidential survey data for public release.We use a set of variables from the 1997 wave of the German IAB Establishment Panel and evaluate the quality of the approach by comparing results from an analysis by Zwick (Ger. Econ. Rev. 6(2), 155–184, 2005) with the original data with the results we achieve for the same analysis run on the dataset after the imputation procedure. The comparison shows that valid inferences can be obtained using the synthetic datasets in this context, while confidentiality is guaranteed for the survey participants.     

Ethnic Prejudice and Discrimination in Europe

This article provides an introduction to research on European prejudice and discrimination. First, we list the distinctive characteristics of a European perspective and provide a short sketch of European immigration and ethnic groups. Europe has become a multicultural community. Nevertheless, public opinion and the continent's politics often do not reflect this empirical fact. Prejudice and discrimination directed at immigrants are a widespread phenomena across Europe. Several cross-European surveys support this conclusion, although theoretically driven surveys on prejudice and discrimination in Europe remain rare. Cross-European research studies classical and modern theories of prejudice and discrimination and attempts to uncover the psychological mechanisms that explain individual readiness to exclude ethnic groups. A brief sketch of recent European research is presented. This issue offers both important cross-national perspectives as well as needed comparisons with the more studied case of racial prejudice and discrimination in the United States.     

Relative Deprivation and Intergroup Prejudice

Using three diverse European surveys, we test the relationship between relative deprivation (RD) and anti-immigrant prejudice. We find that both group relative deprivation (GRD) and individual relative deprivation (IRD) are found primarily among working-class respondents who are politically alienated. We also find that GRD, but not IRD, serves as a proximal correlate of prejudice. IRD's effects on prejudice are largely mediated through GRD. In addition, GRD partially mediates the effects of such distal predictors of prejudice as education and family income. Finally, blaming the victim mediates in part the GRD link with prejudice. These results lead to a socially situated path model of RD's effects on prejudice with public policy implications.     

Speculation in Standard Auctions with Resale

In standard auctions resale creates a role for a speculator—a bidder who is commonly known to have no use value for the good on sale. We study this issue in environments with symmetric independent private‐value bidders. For second‐price and English auctions the efficient value‐bidding equilibrium coexists with a continuum of inefficient equilibria in which the speculator wins the auction and makes positive profits. First‐price and Dutch auctions have an essentially unique equilibrium, and whether or not the speculator wins the auction and distorts the final allocation depends on the number of bidders, the value distribution, and the discount factor. Speculators do not make profits in first‐price or Dutch auctions.     

POLITICAL REPUTATIONS AND CAMPAIGN PROMISES

We analyze conditions under which candidates' reputations may affect voters' beliefs over what policy will be implemented by the winning candidate of an election. We develop a model of repeated elections with complete information in which candidates are purely ideological. We analyze an equilibrium in which voters' strategies involve a credible threat to punish candidates who renege on their campaign promises and in which all campaign promises are believed by voters and honored by candidates. We characterize the maximal credible campaign promises and find that the degree to which promises are credible in equilibrium is an increasing function of the value of a candidate's reputation. (JEL: D8)     

A Periodic Inventory Model for Stocking Modular Components

We study the benefit obtained by exploiting modular product design in fulfilling exogenous demand for both a complete assembly and its components in a service parts inventory system. Our goal is to reduce overall service system costs by allowing assembly and/or disassembly (A/D) to occur at some unit cost per A/D action. In an extensive set of computational experiments, we compare a naïve stocking and operating policy that treats all items independently and ignores the modular product structure and related A/D capability to the optimal base stock policy, and to a policy that allows A/D from the naïve stocking levels. While extensive computational analysis shows that the optimal base stock policy improves the system cost between 3 to 26% over the naïve approach, simply allowing A/D from the naïve stocking levels captures a significant portion (an average of 67%) of the naïve–optimal gap. Our computational results demonstrate that the optimization shifts the component‐assembly mix from the naïve levels and that limiting A/D capacity affects this mix. Limiting A/D capacity can actually increase the expected number of A/D actions (versus the uncapacitated case), since the optimization shifts stocking levels to reduce the probability that “too many” actions will be required.