Gendered policies and practices that increase older men's risk of elder mistreatment

We aim to detail some of the ways that social policy and gendered practices put older men at risk of elder mistreatment. Research on the abuse and neglect that older adults experience has often focused on the characteristics of the victims and the dynamics within families, emphasizing factors such as the likelihood of an intergenerational cycle of violence, substance abuse and dependency, and older men's financial status as key risks in elder abuse. The effect on men from this type of analysis is that elder mistreatment remains an individual or family problem rather than being viewed as a larger societal concern. This article challenges the individualistic focus by outlining the importance of societal forces affecting older men's risk of mistreatment.     

Negotiating via Information Technology: Theory and Application

In this review article, we examine how people negotiate via e-mail and in particular, how the process and outcomes of e-negotiations differ from those of traditional face-to-face bargaining. We review the key tasks of negotiation and then undertake a review of the research literature that has examined e-negotiations. We outline four theories of interaction that provide insights about social behavior in e-media: rapport building, social contagion, coordination, and information exchange. Our research program has focused on the interpersonal factors and social identity factors that can enhance the quality of e-negotiations. E-negotiators often succumb to the temporal synchrony bias, the burned bridge bias, the squeaky wheel bias, and the sinister attribution bias. We discuss social psychological factors that can reduce these biases and the future of research on e-negotiations.     

Family Policies and Children's School Achievement in Single‐ Versus Two‐Parent Families

We investigate the gap in math and science achievement of third‐ and fourth‐graders who live with a single parent versus those who live with two parents in 11 countries. The United States and New Zealand rank last among the countries we compare in terms of the equality of achievement between children from single‐parent families and those from two‐parent homes. Following a multilevel analysis, we find single parenthood to be less detrimental when family policies equalize resources between single‐ and two‐parent families. In addition, the single‐ and two‐parent achievement gap is greater in countries where single‐parent families are more prevalent. We conclude that national family policies can offset the negative academic outcomes of single parenthood.     

Representing employee requirements in labour tour scheduling

In this paper, we use the methodology of simulation to evaluate six approaches for handling employee requirements in an LP-based labour tour scheduling heuristic. We model employee requirements both as minimum acceptable staffing levels—where understaffing is unacceptable—and as target staffing levels—where both under- and overstaffing are acceptable. For each representation of employee requirements, we evaluate forms of the heuristic that use problem-specific and problem-independent information on the costs of employee surpluses and, if appropriate, employee shortages. Over an extensive test data set, the target-staffing approach using problem-specific cost information outperformed all other procedures. Specifically, it generated schedules costing less than 87% of those developed using the approach most commonly found in the literature. Its schedules were also almost 5% cheaper than those of its closest competitor. We discuss the managerial and research implications of the findings and provide suggestions for future research.     

A LARGE-SCALE PERSONNEL ASSIGNMENT MODEL FOR THE NAVY*

The U.S. Navy has been trying for years to develop a model to automate its personnel assignment process The requirement of rotating navy personnel frequently between sea duty and shore duty in accordance with multiple policies makes modeling efforts difficult. However, without a model to optimize assignments with regard to multiple policies, navy managers do not know the real impact of personnel assignments. This limits their ability to make effective decisions. This paper summarizes our effort to develop a large-scale network model for the navy's assignment problem. The navy has accepted this model for implementation, replacing the current manual assignment process. The approach in this paper can be generalized to a wide variety of perosnnel assignment problems.