Why Parents Pay for College: The Good Parent,Perceptions of Advantage,and the Intergenerational Transfer of Opportunity

This article asks how parents think about the cost of a college education for their children. Based on data from more than ninety in‐depth interviews with upper‐middle‐class parents and children, it is clear that grooming children for college and then paying for their education is intimately linked with ideas about being a “good parent.” We present data on three related aspects of parents' consciousness about paying for college. First, data are presented on how parents view the benefits of college for their children. Second, data illustrate how parents think about the obligations associated with paying. Third, we report on what parents expect in return for their efforts and expenditures. Data also indicate that parents' views are contingent on their perceived ability to pay for the increasing costs of higher education. We conclude by considering how the implicit contract between upper‐middle‐class parents and children may change as new economic and structural uncertainties increase parents' anxieties and challenge their abilities to see themselves as good parents.     

Differences in Retail Inventory Investment Behavior During Macroeconomic Shocks: Role of Service Level

In this article, we analyze how retailers change their inventory investment behavior in response to macroeconomic shocks. We examine if service level, as measured by the ratio of stockout to inventory holding costs, can explain the differences in observed behavior across retailers. We use data on macroeconomic indicators and quarterly filings of US public retailers from 1985 to 2009 to estimate a dynamic model of short‐ and long‐term impact of macroeconomic shocks on inventory investment. Our results show that retailers with a high service level increase their inventory investment significantly more than those with a low service level during expansion shocks. Conversely, retailers with a low service level curtail their inventory investment significantly more than those with a high service level during periods of economic contractions. Thus, we show that the aggregate change in inventory investment documented in prior macroeconomics research is driven by different sets of retailers, as predicted by newsvendor logic. We draw implications of our findings to retailers as well as their suppliers.     

Managing Cost Salience and Procrastination in Projects: Compensation and Team Composition

The rising trend of projects with high‐skilled and autonomous contributors increasingly exposes managers to the risk of idiosyncratic individual behaviors. In this article, we examine the effects of an important behavioral factor, an individual's cost salience. Cost salience leads individuals to perceive the cost of immediate effort to be larger than the cost of future effort. This leads to procrastination in early stages and back‐loaded effort over the course of the project. We model the problem confronting the manager of a project whose quality is adversely impacted by such distortion of individual effort over time. Complementary to prior works focused on the planning and scheduling tasks of project management in the absence of human behavior, we find that managers should reward contributions made in earlier stages of a project. Our analysis also yields interesting insights on the project team performance: teams with diverse levels of cost salience will perform better than homogeneous teams. We also address another important facet of team composition, namely, the choice between stable and fluid teams, and find that the practice of creating fluid teams might have previously unrecognized benefits when behavioral aspects of projects are considered. We conclude with insights and organizational implications for project managers.     

Advertising in Asymmetric Competing Supply Chains

Advertising is a crucial tool for demand creation and market expansion. When a manufacturer uses a retailer as a channel for reaching end customers, the advertising strategy takes on an additional dimension: which party will perform the advertising to end customers. Cost sharing (“co‐operative advertising”) arrangements proliferate the option by decoupling the execution of the advertising from its funding. We examine the efficacy of cost sharing in a model of two competing manufacturer–retailer supply chains who sell partially substitutable products that may differ in market size. Some counterintuitive findings suggest that the firms performing the advertising would rather bear the costs entirely if this protects their unit profit margin. We also evaluate the implications of advertising strategy for overall supply chain efficiency and consumer welfare.     

Getting What You Pay For—Strategic Process Improvement Compensation and Profitability Impact

Profit‐maximizing firm owners who incentivize their managers with a bonus for process improvement create an intentional misalignment of their own objective and management attention. From the viewpoint of a single firm, such a local misalignment can never be profitable, but in this study we take a wider strategic perspective by investigating cost‐reducing process improvements of two firms competing in a Cournot market. We find that the use of a process improvement bonus (by firm A) can be profitable, by affecting the competitor's decision making. Informed about the reward structure at firm A, which provides an incentive for process improvement and thereby for increased production at that firm, the manager of the competing firm (B) is inclined to produce less if the owner of firm B only rewards profit. This leads to a higher profit for firm A. However, we also show that firm B's best strategy is to also offer a process improvement bonus, even if that firm is a cost laggard (with higher costs for process improvement), and that this leads to reduced profit for both firms in many situations unless one of them is sufficiently superior in its ability to improve processes. These results are robust for uncertain process improvement outcomes, multidimensional process improvement decisions, and information asymmetry in the owner–manager relationship.     

Optimal Procurement Design of an Assembly Supply Chain with Information Asymmetry

We study a decentralized assembly supply chain in which an assembler (she) assembles a set of n components, each produced by a different supplier (he), into a final product to satisfy an uncertain market demand. Each supplier holds private cost information to himself, for which the assembler only has a subjective estimate. Furthermore, the assembler believes that the suppliers' costs follow a joint discrete probability distribution. The assembler aims to design an optimal menu of contracts to maximize her own expected profit. The assembler's problem is a complex multi‐dimensional constrained optimization problem. We prove that there exists a unique optimal menu of contracts for the assembler, and we further develop an efficient algorithm with a complexity of O(n) to compute the optimal contract. In addition, we conduct a comprehensive sensitivity analysis to analyze how environmental parameters affect individual firm's performance and the value of information to the assembler, to each supplier, and to the supply chain. Our results suggest that each supplier's private cost information becomes more valuable to the assembler and each supplier when the average market demand increases or when the final product unit revenue increases. Surprisingly, when a supplier's cost volatility increases and its mean remains the same, the value of information to the assembler or to each supplier does not necessarily increase. Furthermore, we show that when the suppliers' cost distributions become more positively correlated, the suppliers are always worse off, but the assembler is better off. However, the value of information for the assembler might increase or decrease.     

制度、制度效率和制度变迁

制度从本质上讲,是在多人社会中用来协调人们之间的合作与竞争关系,以降低交易成本,实现合作剩余的一系列规则或管束人们的一种行为规范。高效率的制度安排并不必然意味对低效率制度安排的替代。放松管制,允许制度创新自由进行,旧制度安排将会在新制度安排的竞争下,按照效率的原则逐渐被淘汰,实现低效率制度安排模式向高效率制度安模式的变迁。     

构建网状式的利益表达渠道

有序和有效的利益表达渠道是建设和谐社会的重要条件,是减少社会矛盾冲突的一项基础性工作。我国现有的利益表达渠道尚存在信息传递不畅、表达成本高等问题,建立网状式的利益表达渠道是解决这些问题的应对之策。     

中西“软文化”差异的语境解读

文化包含了物质文化、方式文化和精神文化。物质文化是文化中看得见摸得着的部分,是文化的物质外壳,被称为硬文化;而方式文化和精神文化是文化的深层结构,称之为软文化。文化的物质层面更富时代性,在文化的发展中是最活跃的因素;而处在深层的软文化相对稳定,不易改变。硬文化很大程度上是软文化的外化表现;在文化差异中起决定性作用的往往是软文化。要想充分地了解一种文化,必须把握其软文化的特征。