20世纪中国小说叙事之流变

20世纪中国小说有"国家叙事"与"日常叙事"两大叙事法则。"国家叙事"为主流,表现"人生飞扬",其共性强。30-40年代,国家叙事原创性强,有茅盾社会分析模式、丁玲意识形态模式、路翎现代心理模式;50-70年代,原创性弱,基本上是茅盾与丁玲二式整合为"史诗"模式;80-90年代,出现超越史诗,悲剧、象征、隐喻多样模式。"日常叙事",从苏曼殊、张爱玲到池莉、余华,表现"人生安稳",个性化强。两种叙事法则共同成就中国百年小说的辉煌。     

Corporate Governance: A New Limit to Real Options Valuation?*

Including real options in firms ’ value raises numerous difficulties. Limitations concerning the relevance of option pricing models outside financial markets are the most salient, but carrying out a valuation implies other assumptions, especially on firms’ governance. In particular, assessing whether a real option should be included within a firm’s boundaries and how its value should be shared, is difficult. Most of these issues result from the different property rights on real options: who creates and who can exercise the option? We discuss existing answers to these difficulties and propose a matrix based on property rights to help practitioners decide whether a real option can be valued appropriately or not by real options models. We support our discussion with a case study based on an R&;D firm valuation.     

Motivating proactive subsidiary innovation: Agent-based theory and socialization models in global R&D

An integration of agency theory and socialization models is developed and used to explain the types of governance and organizational structures associated with self-initiated subsidiary innovation. This theorizing suggests that: 1) The hub structure is the greatest user of behavior-based contracting and engenders the fewest self-initiated innovations; 2) The federation structure is the greatest user of outcome-based contracting and engenders the most self-initiated innovations, but these are primarily oriented to business level strategy rather than corporate; and, 3) The network structure is the greatest user of goal internalization and is the strongest generator of self-initiated innovations which are oriented to corporate-level strategy. The empirical evidence from extant studies of other researchers in the field is consistent with these propositions. Implications for management practice, research and theory are discussed in the paper.     

20世纪运用人地关系思维研究中国历史文化的理论与实践述评

回顾一百年中国历史研究中人地关系的研究 ,主要取得了以下成就。 (1)从天地生的综合研究来看 ,从长时段和宇宙星系一体来看 ,地理环境对人类社会肯定起有决定的作用 ,只是在一定的时间和地域里 ,人类可以加速或延缓历史发展的进程 ,在一些具体问题上起有决定作用。(2 )不能简单地说生产力越高 ,地理环境对人类社会的作用越小 ,只能说社会生产力越高 ,人类越是在更广泛领域内和更深刻的程度上接受地理环境的制约。 (3)地理环境一方面通过物质资料生产方式影响人类社会、上层建筑 ,一方面直接影响民族性格 ,造就文明的差异 ,这两者并不冲突 ,这更能体现地理环境对人类社会影响的复杂性。     

Overconfident health workers provide lower quality healthcare

While a growing body of evidence suggests that healthcare workers in low and middle-income countries often provide poor quality of care, the reasons behind such low performance remain unclear. The literature on medical decision-making suggests that cognitive biases, or failures related to the way healthcare providers think, explain many diagnostic errors. This study investigates whether one cognitive bias, overconfidence, defined as the tendency to overestimate one’s performance relative to others, is associated with the low quality of care provided in Senegal. We link survey data on the overconfidence of health workers to objective measures of the quality of care they provide to standardised patients – enumerators who pose as real patients and record details of the consultation. We find that about a third of providers are overconfident – meaning that they overestimate their own abilities relative to their peers. We then show that overconfident providers are 26% less likely to manage patients correctly and exert less effort in clinical practice. These results suggest that the low levels of quality of care observed in some settings could be partly explained by the cognitive biases of providers, such as overconfidence. Policies that encourage adequate supervision and feedback to healthcare workers might reduce such failures in clinical decision-making.     

Gender differences in financial risk tolerance

The purpose of this research is to explore gender differences in financial risk tolerance using a large, nationally representative dataset, the Survey of Consumer Finances. The impact of the explanatory variables in the model is allowed to differ between men and women to decompose gender differences in financial risk tolerance. The results indicate that gender differences in financial risk tolerance are explained by gender differences in the individual determinants of financial risk tolerance, and that the disparity does not result from gender in and of itself. The individual variables that moderate the relationship between gender and high risk tolerance are income uncertainty and net worth, with income uncertainty moderating the relationship between gender and some risk tolerance. Financial fiduciaries should understand the differences in income uncertainty and net worth between men and women and how those differences relate to risk tolerance.     

The association between experiential and material expenditures and subjective well-being: New evidence from Hungarian survey data

In the last decade, a number of studies using experimental designs have stated that spending money on experiences rather than on material goods tends to make people happier. In this research we used a novel survey approach to examine the relationships between experiential and material expenditures and life satisfaction. In two studies based on cross-sectional survey data from nationally representative samples in Hungary, we estimated linear and non-linear models. We found no significant evidence supporting the greater return received when buying experiences. Even in the non-linear models the difference between the marginal utilities was not statistically significant at any expenditure rate, although the marginal utility of experiential purchases appeared to be linear, whereas the marginal utility of material purchases was rather decreasing. Nevertheless, our results suggest that a reallocation of an average person’s expenditures (spending more on experiences and less on material goods) might be associated with a slightly higher well-being.