Engaging with Comparative Risk Appraisals: Public Views on Policy Priorities for Environmental Risk Governance

Communicating the rationale for allocating resources to manage policy priorities and their risks is challenging. Here, we demonstrate that environmental risks have diverse attributes and locales in their effects that may drive disproportionate responses among citizens. When 2,065 survey participants deployed summary information and their own understanding to assess 12 policy‐level environmental risks singularly, their assessment differed from a prior expert assessment. However, participants provided rankings similar to those of experts when these same 12 risks were considered as a group, allowing comparison between the different risks. Following this, when individuals were shown the prior expert assessment of this portfolio, they expressed a moderate level of confidence with the combined expert analysis. These are important findings for the comprehension of policy risks that may be subject to augmentation by climate change, their representation alongside other threats within national risk assessments, and interpretations of agency for public risk management by citizens and others.     

GM Foods and the Misperception of Risk Perception

Public opposition to genetically modified (GM) food and crops is widely interpreted as the result of the public's misperception of the risks. With scientific assessment pointing to no unique risks from GM crops and foods, a strategy of accurate risk communication from trusted sources has been advocated. This is based on the assumption that the benefits of GM crops and foods are self-evident. Informed by the interpretation of some qualitative interviews with lay people, we use data from the Eurobarometer survey on biotechnology to explore the hypothesis that it is not so much the perception of risks as the absence of benefits that is the basis of the widespread rejection of GM foods and crops by the European public. Some respondents perceive both risks and benefits, and may be trading off these attributes along the lines of a rational choice model. However, for others, one attribute-benefit-appears to dominate their judgments: the lexicographic heuristic. For these respondents, their perception of risk is of limited importance in the formation of attitudes toward GM food and crops. The implication is that the absence of perceived benefits from GM foods and crops calls into question the relevance of risk communication strategies for bringing about change in public opinion.     

Just-in-time scheduling with controllable processing times on parallel machines

We study scheduling problems with controllable processing times on parallel machines. Our objectives are to maximize the weighted number of jobs that are completed exactly at their due date and to minimize the total resource allocation cost. We consider four different models for treating the two criteria. We prove that three of these problems are NP\mathcal{NP} -hard even on a single machine, but somewhat surprisingly, the problem of maximizing an integrated objective function can be solved in polynomial time even for the general case of a fixed number of unrelated parallel machines. For the three NP\mathcal{NP} -hard versions of the problem, with a fixed number of machines and a discrete resource type, we provide a pseudo-polynomial time optimization algorithm, which is converted to a fully polynomial time approximation scheme.     

Pricing and momentum of syndicated credit in Europe

We investigate the determinants of syndicated loan prices for European borrowers, spanning the entire period of credit expansion and crisis. We construct a large data base consisting of 2102 rated syndicated loan deals from 1990 to 2008 in twenty three countries and ten economic sectors. We investigate the effects on the spread paid over the risk free rate of three major groups of factors: loan characteristics, borrower characteristics and characteristics of country of the borrower, using both qualitative and quantitative variables in a hedonic regression. The results show that all three groups are significant joint determinants of prices of syndicated credit. Our results confirm the existing literature but also provide for first time results stemming form the risk characteristics of the borrower and the country of the borrower. It is shown that distance-to-default as well as aggregate risk associated with country of the borrower are of great concern to the lenders and hence significantly affect the pricing of syndicated loans. Furthermore, we report that financial institutions and public utilities are able to negotiate for cheaper loans, but this result is reversed when financing is for acquisition purposes. Overall, risk, liquidity, solvency and sustainable performance by both the borrower and its domicile country are key determinants of syndicated loan prices.     

Using Frontier Analysis to Evaluate Company Performance

The measurement of performance is critical to nearly all managerial disciplines. Yet little is known about the aggregation characteristics of the components of performance and how our notion of a ‘good performing firm’ relates to what we use as a dependent variable. In this paper we propose an approach to the measurement of performance that uses the logic of frontier analysis and the technique of data envelopment analysis. The approach is shown to be a reasonable representation of the multidimensional nature of performance and is shown to replicate, effectively, the components that strategic management scholars typically consider when discussing performance. It is also shown to be superior to the simpler alternatives based on traditional approaches to performance measurement.     

Institutional voids,international learning effort and internationalization of emerging market new ventures

Much of the existing scholarly works portray institutional voids (IVs) in emerging economies as impeding forces against the development of new ventures. However, little attention has been paid to how such voids generate positive outcomes in emerging market new ventures. Drawing on the institutional theory, we propose IVs as crucial enablers of new venture internationalization. In addition, we investigate both how and when IVs enhance the degree to which new ventures internationalize by examining international learning effort (ILE) as a mediator and two domestic market environmental factors (i.e., environmental dynamism and competitive intensity) as important contingencies. We test our moderated mediation model using primary data gathered from 211 new ventures from Ghana. We found that ILE mediates the relationship between IVs and new venture internationalization and that both environmental dynamism and competitive intensity moderate the indirect relationship between home-country IVs and new venture internationalization. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this study.     

Leadership déjà vu all over again

Much leadership literature neglects its historical-contextual antecedents and as a result over-emphasizes zeitgeist, or tenor of the time's social forces. This neglect impedes leadership research by encouraging academic amnesia and promoting a strong feeling of research déjà vu among many researchers and practitioners. In this article, we develop a leadership historical-contextual superstructure consisting of evolutionary antecedents, paradigmatic antecedents, purpose and definitional antecedents, stakeholder antecedents, levels of analysis and temporal antecedents, and research dissemination antecedents. We use this superstructure to analyze current work in the increasingly important relational leadership research stream to illustrate how the superstructure's use can aid leadership researchers and practitioners in avoiding leadership déjà vu and academic amnesia and help build a more cumulative field.     

Sequence Independent Lifting in Mixed Integer Programming

We investigate lifting, i.e., the process of taking a valid inequality for a polyhedron and extending it to a valid inequality in a higher dimensional space. Lifting is usually applied sequentially, that is, variables in a set are lifted one after the other. This may be computationally unattractive since it involves the solution of an optimization problem to compute a lifting coefficient for each variable. To relieve this computational burden, we study sequence independent lifting, which only involves the solution of one optimization problem. We show that if a certain lifting function is superadditive, then the lifting coefficients are independent of the lifting sequence. We introduce the idea of valid superadditive lifting functions to obtain good aproximations to maximum lifting. We apply these results to strengthen Balas' lifting theorem for cover inequalities and to produce lifted flow cover inequalities for a single node flow problem.