Risk aversion in bargaining: An experimental study

This paper reports the results of three experiments designed to test the predictions of the principal game-theoretic models of bargaining concerning the influence of risk aversion on bargaining outcomes. These models predict that risk aversion will be disadvantageous in bargaining except in situations in which potential agreements are lotteries with a positive probability of being worse than disagreement. The experimental results support the models' predictions. However, in the range of payoffs studied here, the effects due to risk aversion may be smaller than some of the focal point effects observed in previous experiments. Implications for further theoretical and experimental work are considered.     

The Influence of Service Orientation on B2B e‐Service Capabilities: An Empirical Investigation

E‐Services, or the company's portfolio of service offerings available to its customers through the Internet, are an emerging area of interest to operations management. Yet little is known about the operations and capabilities needed for provision of business‐to‐business (B2B) e‐services. This paper aims to make a contribution toward closing this gap. First, we develop a new construct of B2B e‐service capability, a term that captures a generic set of five interrelated and complementary dimensions: (1) e‐service recovery, (2) e‐customization, (3) ease of navigation, (4) service portfolio comprehensiveness, and (5) information richness. These combined operational abilities are associated with B2B service delivery, including its portal design, technology architecture, and mix of product and service offerings. They are posited to be necessary for delivering effective B2B e‐services. We also argue that, both service orientation (SO) and customer receptivity to technology, influence B2B e‐service capability. We empirically test a path model using structural equation modeling on a sample of 181 businesses that have deployed B2B e‐services. We find that the influence of SO on performance is not direct but rather mediated by the e‐service capability, a finding that holds for both goods producers and service providers. We suggest that a firm's SO may mitigate industrial customers' resistance toward conducting business online.     

Substantive Meanings of Missing Data in Family Research: Does “Don't Know” Matter?

In this article we analyze “don't know” responses from three sources of longitudinal data: the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (n = 14,528), the National Survey of Families and Households (n = 5,488), and the National Health Interview Survey Second Longitudinal Study of Aging (n = 1,131). We asked whether these responses are meaningful in family research, and, if so, how evaluating these responses can contribute to the development of theory, the discovery of novel findings, and identification of sensible methods for analyzing these nebulous responses. We found that “don't know” responses to questions about family members predicted less educational attainment, poor marital quality, and earlier mortality. Results suggest that this response category may have substantive meanings rather than indicating neutral responses or being missing data.     

Intersectionality and coalitions in social movement research—A survey and outlook

Over the last 30 years, intersectionality has become a prominent concept, but in social movement scholarship, its adoption has yet been limited. So far, the concept is primarily employed to analyze the mobilization of women of color and other gendered mobilizations. In this article, I argue that intersectionality matters for all social movements—both as an analytic and as a political strategy. It is important to understand that all social movements and movement organizations are shaped by multiple axes of privilege and discrimination, which influence who participates in these movements and how, what demands are pursued and which are neglected, and how the issues of the movements and movement organizations are framed. My review starts out with defining and distinguishing between structural intersectionality and political intersectionality. Then, I survey a range of social movements from an intersectional perspective. This is followed by a discussion of coalitions and other strategies to achieve political intersectionality. The article concludes with an outlook on future directions for intersectional analyses in social movement scholarship.     

How Activity Systems Evolve: Making │ Saving Salmon in British Columbia

The purpose of this article is to describe the history of a state-sponsored salmon enhancement project in British Columbia and to explicate the development of the former using cultural historical activity theory. We make thematic the notion of inner contradictions, which express themselves outwardly as a function of both quantitative and qualitative changes. We propose also that the Marxian notion of change of quality from quantity can fruitfully unpack how these dialectical units push activity systems forward.     

The nature of AIDS and babies

The rapidly growing menace to young children, Pediatric AIDS, is generally unrecognized, under-reported and too often misunderstood. This paper discusses the nature of AIDS with particular emphasis on, the symptoms, modes of transmission and the various treatment issues.     

Max Weber's ethics and the peace movement today

Conclusion The decisive change since Weber spoke of our responsibility before history has not been the demise of the German nation state after only seventy-five years but the sudden dawn of the nuclear age. Now the survival of populations, not of nation-states is at stake - a situation not anticipated by Weber and his contemporaries. It is quite possible that many millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, will die because of rational strategic decisions by political and military leaders, but it is no longer possible to legitimate a great war as a matter of honor, as Churchill and Weber did, or as an enterprise to make the world safe for democracy, as Wilson and Roosevelt did. If there can be no more victors, it also becomes impossible to load the responsibility before history on their shoulders, as Weber did in Politics as a Vocation.Today a new concept of responsibility is appropriate, which has a general and a specifically German aspect. The latter involves the German responsibility for the World Wars. Weber had vehemently rejected the Allied charge that Imperial Germany was primarily responsible for the war, even though he was very worried about what might be buried in the German archives. Today it can no longer be denied that Imperial Germany was largely guilty as charged. After the second war, it was impossible to deny the German responsibility. During his tenure as chancellor Helmut Schmidt pointed time and again to the Federal Republic's moral obligation to assure the Soviet Union that it would never again be attacked. Since the German nation does no longer exist, the foreign minister under Schmidt and Kohl, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, now speaks of a German-German community of responsibility (Verantwortungsgemeinschaft), in contrast to the community of fate shared with the Western allies. At the same time the peace movement has used the German responsibility for the Second World War and for organized genocide as a moral argument for a special German duty to help prevent another war.Before the First World War pacifism was propagated by only a handful of intellectuals. Afterwards the Nie wieder Krieg (Never again war) movement was supported by masses of people who had experienced the horrors of the Great War. Today the peace movement is no longer what it was for Weber, a cause for a few pacifist Utopians or of a generation that suffered through a world war. The danger of a nuclear holocaust has given the movement a novel historical significance. If the new kind of pacifism is not merely a matter of humanitarian commitment, which aims at a world without war, but a movement that struggles to help humanity survive, then it is equally a matter of good intentions and of responsibility - and Weber's distinction collapses.Weber could take it for granted that there would be generational succession and hence history in the future. We cannot do so any more. This has created a special kind of responsibility not before our descendants but for the very possibility that new generations will be able to live - a totally new ethical situation. Saving whole populations and even having to ensure the continuance of life has become a new ultimate value, transcending the salvation concerns of religious virtuosi and the political Utopias of revolutionaries as well as the traditional interests of the leaders of nation-states. Before this situation Weber's distinction between the two ethics loses its political applicability. Finally, the new ethical situation forces us to look beyond politics as a vocation as a matter merely of political leadership. Today the peace movement is an endeavor to make politics everybody's vocation in the face of perplexed governments who surrender the people to the rationality of military technology. During the Second World War the atom bomb was constructed in total secrecy. For many years afterwards its further development lay in the hands of a tiny number of political leaders and scientists, who withheld as much information as possible from the public. The tendency toward secrecy has remained strong, but a large part of the public is now fighting for disclosure. If Clemenceau believed that war was too important to be left to generals, the new wisdom has it that the dangers of a nuclear war are too great to leave the armaments race and military strategy to elected politicians without effective public participation.In contrast to Weber's polar concepts, his battle-cry our responsibility before history has not remained part of public memory. Perhaps it should be resurrected today with a changed emphasis as a peaceable call to take responsibility for history. This might help both sides in the current struggles over nuclear defense policies in western Europe and the United States to remember their human commonality in spite of highly emotional confrontations.

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Salient Value Similarity, Social Trust, and Risk/Benefit Perception

It was postulated that shared values determine social trust in institutions and persons related to a technology: One has trust in people holding similar salient values. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that social trust has a positive influence on perceived benefits and a negative impact on perceived risks. Results of a survey of University of Zürich students indicated that the proposed causal model explained perception of pesticides, nuclear power, and artificial sweetener very well. When social trust was controlled, the relation between risks and benefits perceived diminished. Results indicate that social trust is a key predictive factor of the perceived risks and benefits of a technology, and provide support for the salient values similarity theory of social trust.