Relative Performance Evaluation and Risk Taking in Delegated Investment Decisions*

Providing proper incentives to firm managers is increasingly important in the current competitive environment. Analytical research has suggested that evaluating a manager's performance relative to that of a peer group, in conjunction with standard-based pay, can induce efficient risk-sharing between firm owners and managers while maintaining the latter's incentives to exert effort. To date, direct empirical tests of this proposition have not been reported. This study uses a laboratory experiment to test the effect of relative performance evaluation on the risk-aversion of delegated investment decisions. Project-specific risk is operationalized using operating leverage, in part because the variability of a project's operating profits generally increases with this variable, and in part because many of the new manufacturing approaches held to be important to competitive advantage require significant capital investments and attendant increases in operating leverage. Across two levels of environmental uncertainty, subjects under a relative (as opposed to absolute) performance standard selected investments with significantly higher project-specific risk. Also, as environmental uncertainty increased, subjects under an absolute standard significantly reduced the riskiness of their investments. In contrast, subjects shielded from environmental uncertainty by a relative standard chose investments of about equal riskiness under both low and high uncertainty conditions. If supported by future research, these findings would suggest that relative performance evaluation may reduce managers' reluctance to adopt risky capital investments, especially in firms operating in high-risk economic or technological environments.     

Dogmatism and Systems Development Personnel Performance

This research explores the relationship between the personal variable, dogmatism, and the performance evaluations of systems analysts within a Fortune 500 company. The Rokeach Dogmatism Scale was used to measure the analysts’ level of dogmatism. The analysts’ performance measurement was the product of the company's annual evaluation process. The results of the research indicate that personnel with the highest dogmatism scores generally receive the extreme performance ratings. The results of this study provide further support to consider dogmatism as an important personal variable influencing systems analyst job performance.     

How can value co-creation be integrated into a customer experience evaluation?

With the arrival of the service economy, businesses across different sectors have to rely increasingly on service design, with its focus on the viewpoints of customers and their experiences. Existing frameworks for evaluating customer experience tend to neglect the connection between customer experience and value co-creation, which is critical for enhancing the performance of service design. The aim of this conceptual paper is, therefore, to develop a customer experience evaluation framework that is coherently integrated with the value co-creation construct. It is achieved by intersecting the most relevant insights from prior approaches to evaluating customer experiences with a theoretical interpretation of service value as value in the experience that is always co-created and uniquely determined by the customer's personal lived and imagined experiences. The proposed framework is original in its theorizing of the evaluation process as a transformation from a customer experience evaluation to a synchronized evaluation of value in the experience and value co-creation throughout and beyond the service process. The framework proposes to utilize it in both major service redesign and on-the-spot service improvements, which are extremely relevant to businesses operating in highly competitive environments. The proposed framework is designed to guide future empirical evaluations, accommodate new theoretical extensions, and inform practical applications to design service offerings as unique and preferred experiences for customers.     

Applications and Implementation THE ALLOCATION OF TIME IN ACADEME: RENT-SEEKING IMPLICATIONS

The allocation of time in academe is influenced by artificial constraints such as wage-fund pools and quotas on promotion and tenure. These constraints affect the potential productivity of professors. An analysis of the time-allocation process and of rent-seeking implications for that process suggests various ways to shift supply curves to counteract the effects of these constraints.     

英、美、荷高等教育专业认证模式比较与借鉴

专业认证是世界高等教育外部保障体系的重要组成部分,目前世界高等教育专业认证主要有三种模式:专业认证从属型模式、专业认证与院校认证并重型模式、专业认证主导型模式.了解世界高等教育专业认证模式的形成和发展,对我国高等教育专业评估的未来发展有一定的借鉴意义.     

Three Steps Strategy to Search for Optimum Classification Trees

This article presents a new strategy to construct classification trees. According to the proposed scheme, we focused on keeping the record of sequences of each constructed classification tree; both in terms of splitting predictors and their splitting values in an array. So overall we have as many arrays as we have drawn samples. At this stage, a three steps strategy is introduced, which is used to search for the optimum classification tree. The proposed strategy provides comparable or improved results in terms of generalized error rates than tree and rpart (packages available for classification purposes in the R) using four of the well-known evaluation functions, that is, the Gini, the Entropy, the Twoing, and the Exponent-based function to split nodes for many real-life datasets.     

New pathways in the evaluation of programmes for men who perpetrate violence against their female partners

Today, evaluation research in the field of intervention programmes for men who perpetrate violence against their female partners still makes a fragmentary impression. Across Europe various evaluation studies have been performed. However, the methodologies applied are too heterogeneous to allow the combination of the results in a meta-analytical way. In this paper we propose a future pathway for organising outcome evaluation studies of domestic violence perpetrator programmes in community settings, so that today’s problems in this field can be overcome. In a pragmatic framework that acknowledges the limited pre-conditions for evaluation studies in the area of domestic violence perpetrator programmes as it is today, feasible approaches for outcome evaluation are outlined, with recent developments in the field taken as starting points. The framework for organising future evaluation studies of work with perpetrators of domestic violence is presented together with a strategy to promote this framework. International networks of practitioners and researchers play a central role in this strategy through upskilling the area of practical work, preparing the ground for evaluation research and improving cooperation between practitioners and researchers. This paper is based on the results of the European funded project IMPACT (under the Daphne-III-funding programme of the European Commission).     

Building a community-based culture of evaluation

In this article we argue for a community-based approach as a means of promoting a culture of evaluation. We do this by linking two bodies of knowledge – the 70-year theoretical tradition of community-based research and the trans-discipline of program evaluation – that are seldom intersected within the evaluation capacity building literature. We use the three hallmarks of a community-based research approach (community-determined; equitable participation; action and change) as a conceptual lens to reflect on a case example of an evaluation capacity building program led by the Ontario Brian Institute. This program involved two community-based groups (Epilepsy Southwestern Ontarioand the South West Alzheimer Society Alliance) who were supported by evaluators from the Centre for Community Based Research to conduct their own internal evaluation. The article provides an overview of a community-based research approach and its link to evaluation. It then describes the featured evaluation capacity building initiative, including reflections by the participating organizations themselves. We end by discussing lessons learned and their implications for future evaluation capacity building. Our main argument is that organizations that strive towards a community-based approach to evaluation are well placed to build and sustain a culture of evaluation.     

The importance of matching the evaluation population to the intervention population: Using Medicaid data to reach hard-to-reach intervention populations

Subject recruitment is a challenge for researchers and evaluators, particularly with populations that are traditionally hard to reach and involve in research, such as low-income and minority groups. However, when the evaluation sample does not reflect a program's intended audience, the discrepancy may lead to evaluation results that are not valid for that audience. We conducted evaluation activities for a state Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education (SNAP-Ed) intervention that promotes consumption of fruits and vegetables (F&V) in low-income areas. Previous program evaluations efforts had failed to obtain a sufficient proportion of individuals identified as low-income based on their participation in SNAP. We used state Medicaid data as a means of identifying low-income families to recruit for a telephone survey (n = 311) and an in-depth qualitative interview (n = 30) that we designed for the program being evaluated. We chose to focus on the dynamics of parent-child communication around F&V because we considered this previously unevaluated component of the intervention vital to understanding program effectiveness. Our results indicated that the Medicaid database provided an appropriate sample and that parents reported frequent F&V requests from their children. Parents also reported that they would positively respond to requests in many different settings, such as grocery stores (92.6%), restaurants (88.1%), and fast food restaurants (80.4%).     

The use of Outcome Harvesting in learning-oriented and collaborative inquiry approaches to evaluation: An example from Calgary,Alberta

The Community Development Learning Initiative (CDLI) in Calgary, Alberta, Canada aims to be a network that brings together neighbourhood residents, community development practitioners and other supporters to learn and act on neighbourhood-based, citizen-led community development projects. In 2013, the CDLI initiated The Evaluation for Learning and Dialogue Project to provide the opportunity for organizations and supporters to work together to establish a shared vision and goals through discussions about evaluation learning and outcomes. It was intended that the project would be a useful learning tool for participating organizations by enabling them to engage in an evaluative methodological process, and record relevant information and to compare and learn from each other’s projects. Outcome Harvesting was chosen as the evaluation methodology for the project. This article reviews critical learning from the project on the use of Outcome Harvesting methodology in the evaluation learning and outcomes of local community development projects, and it provides lessons for other jurisdictions interested in implementing this methodology.