The firm and managerial misdirection of worker effort

This article models how a level of management between workers and the owner of a firm can affect the owner's decision either to internally integrate a function to make inputs or to contract out to buy inputs from an independent supplier. In the model, a self-serving manager can direct her workers to perform activities that serve her interests rather than those of the firm. This reduces the effectiveness of worker performance incentives intended to promote efforts that benefit the owner. Incentives may have to be increased to a level such that the owner prefers to buy inputs rather than make them internally.     

Market stability: backward-bending supply in a laboratory experimental market. 1999 Presidential address Western Economic Association

This article investigates the stability properties of markets with backward-bending supply curves. Parameters are chosen so that the two classic models of price dynamics, the Walrasian model and the Marshallian model, give opposite predictions. The results are (1) market instability can be observed, and (2) in the backward-bending case stability is captured by the Walrasian model and the Marshallian model of dynamics is rejected. Previous experiments have demonstrated that the Marshallian model works in the forward-falling case. Thus, which theory of dynamics is appropriate for a market depends on the underlying reasons for demand and supply shapes.     

Balancing acts: drag queens, gender and faith

While engaged in research on the same-sex marriage debate in mainline denominations, I interviewed 23 LGBT Christians, four of whom were drag queens. While it is not possible to generalize from such a small sample, the drag queens in this study insist on maintaining their identity as Christians despite the hegemonic discourse that renders faith and LGBT identities mutually exclusive. They developed innovative approaches to reconciling their gender and sexual identities with their spirituality. Their innovations are potentially liberating not just for them personally, but for LGBT people generally because they challenge Christianity's rigid dichotomies of gender and sexuality.     

Balance of care—a user's view of a new approach to joint strategic planning

Planning for care of the Elderly has to face the problems of an increasing elderly population; a wide range of alternative ways of caring for them (at widely differing costs); the fact that services are provided by several different organisations all facing difficult financial constraints; a range of professional opinion about the desirability or otherwise of alternative patterns of care and use of resources; a lack of data on how care is at present distributed; the lack of a structure for organising such data as are available; and the lack of an appropriate computer-based model for manipulating the large number of data elements necessary to describe and help to evaluate alternative plans for the future. The Balance of Care approach to the Joint Strategic Planning of Health and Social Services provision for the Elderly, is being used in pilot applications in two Areas in the UK. Its contribution to the solution of the problems outlined above is described by authors from the two Areas. The approach and the underlying model can be extended to strategic planning for other client groups requiring non-acute care.