An Intake Team in Action in a Social Services Department

Summary This article describes the intake system in operation in a socialservices department of an inner London borough before the establishmentof a special intake team, and outlines the reasons why changewas felt to be necessary. The structure, functions and mainactivities of the intake team are described with some relevantstatistics and case material and an attempt is made at evaluationof the team's achievements. The study of this new intake system and of the intake team wasbased on the records of clients seen in April 1972 (when theteam had been operating for three months); on a follow-up studyin July of that year; on observations made during this period;on the many discussions with the team members, and finally ona number of informal interviews with social workers who werenot members of the intake team. The study was coloured by thememory of the author's own experience of the old system     

ON IMPERFECT EVALUATION AND EARNING DIFFERENTIALS

This paper investigates the relationship between the technology for evaluating performance and optimal contract choice. Specifically, the paper examines the different compensation packages that arise when occupations differ in evaluation technology, workers are risk averse, work effort is endogenous, and there exists asymmetric information. In occupations in which it is less difficult to measure output, it is shown that compensation is more closely tied to output; the implications for work effort, the sorting of workers by ability, and average compensation are developed. Analysis of a new data set confirms our predictions concerning earning differentials and wage growth.
The powerful 1.6 million-member National Education Association and other teacher organizations have traditionally fought the notion of rewarding better teachers with more money, arguing that there is no objective way to measure a teacher's competence and that it would lead to favoritism, and bad morale [ Time , June 20, 1983].     

Explaining the Identifiable Victim Effect

It is widely believed that people are willing to expend greater resources to save the lives of identified victims than to save equal numbers of unidentified or statistical victims. There are many possible causes of this disparity which have not been enumerated previously or tested empirically. We discuss four possible causes of the identifiable victim effect and present the results of two studies which indicate that the most important cause of the disparity in treatment of identifiable and statistical lives is that, for identifiable victims, a high proportion of those at risk can be saved.