The belonging model of trust

Although we know that high‐quality employee–organization relationships are beneficial, these relationships are complex and not fully understood, especially among employees of nonprofit organizations. In particular, we know little about how these employees perceive trust, which may overlook an important contributor to effective management. We begin to address this issue by testing a new theoretical model that conceptualizes perceived insider status, psychological ownership, and organizational identification as foundations for the perception of justice and subsequent trust. Our results indicate that psychological ownership and perceived insider status relate to trust through procedural and interpersonal justice. These results contrast those typically found in for‐profit contexts in that organizational identification did not predict justice and that distributive and informational justice did not predict trust.     

A stable estimator of the information matrix under EM for dependent data

This article develops a new and stable estimator for information matrix when the EM algorithm is used in maximum likelihood estimation. This estimator is constructed using the smoothed individual complete-data scores that are readily available from running the EM algorithm. The method works for dependent data sets and when the expectation step is an irregular function of the conditioning parameters. In comparison to the approach of Louis (J. R. Stat. Soc., Ser. B 44:226–233, 1982), this new estimator is more stable and easier to implement. Both real and simulated data are used to demonstrate the use of this new estimator.     

Probleme eines Feldzugangs zu Eliten

While young researchers in the field of social sciences are taught how to identify potential target groups for their interviews as well as to identify the appropriate survey and interpretation techniques, the actual access to the field poses a difficult problem (there is great potential for frustration when some requests for interviews are rejected). Usually, the specific motives for such a non-response stay unresolved. Access is even harder when the target group includes representatives of elite groups (e. g. top managers) - a group that is characterised by intense time pressure and typical behaviour patterns (both are factors which increase the difficulty of access to that group). This article aims to give a detailed outline of this problem from contribution and status related perspectives and to provide solutions for young researchers to enable them experiencing the field entry process (as far as putting a foot in the manager’s office) as challenging, but controllable.     

An Analysis of Stability Sets in pure Coordination Games

We calculate the Lebesgue–measures of the stability sets of Nash-equilibria in pure coordination games. The results allow us to observe that the ordering induced by the Lebesgue–measure of stability sets upon strict Nash-equilibria does not necessarily agree with the ordering induced by risk–dominance. Accordingly, an equilibrium selection theory based on the Lebesgue–measure of stability sets would be necessarily different from one which uses the Nash-property as a point of orientation.     

Estimating and testing generalized linear models under inequality restrictions

We consider maximum likelihood estimation and likelihood ratio tests under inequality restrictions on the parameters. A special case are order restrictions, which may appear for example in connection with effects of an ordinal qualitative covariate. Our estimation approach is based on the principle of sequential quadratic programming, where the restricted estimate is computed iteratively and a quadratic optimization problem under inequality restrictions is solved in each iteration. Testing for inequality restrictions is based on the likelihood ratio principle. Under certain regularity assumptions the likelihood ratio test statistic is asymptotically distributed like a mixture of χ², where the weights are a function of the restrictions and the information matrix. A major problem in theory is that in general there is no unique least favourable point. We present some empirical findings on finite-sample behaviour of tests and apply the methods to examples from credit scoring and dentistry.     

MASTERING THE ART OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Online communication has become a central part in the communication repertoires of political actors in Western mass democracies. In Switzerland, where broadband, internet use, and media literacy are amongst the highest in the world, all major political parties run their own website and are active on social media. This article seeks to show how Swiss political parties deal with social media, how they implement it and how they use social media. The study builds on empirical data from a structural analysis of party websites, the official Facebook sites, and Twitter feeds. These social media sites were analysed for their resonance, update frequency, and thematic clusters focusing on information, mobilization, and participation. A weekly assessment of the user numbers illustrates the development of user resonance throughout the 2011 election year. While political parties claim to appreciate the dialogue and mobilization potentials of social media, they mainly use social media as an additional channel to spread information and electoral propaganda. The overall resonance is still on a very low level. The data seem to sustain the normalization hypothesis, as larger parties with more resources and voters are better able to generate effective communication and to mobilize online than small and marginal parties.     

Density-Tempered Marginalized Sequential Monte Carlo Samplers

We propose a density-tempered marginalized sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) sampler, a new class of samplers for full Bayesian inference of general state-space models. The dynamic states are approximately marginalized out using a particle filter, and the parameters are sampled via a sequential Monte Carlo sampler over a density-tempered bridge between the prior and the posterior. Our approach delivers exact draws from the joint posterior of the parameters and the latent states for any given number of state particles and is thus easily parallelizable in implementation. We also build into the proposed method a device that can automatically select a suitable number of state particles. Since the method incorporates sample information in a smooth fashion, it delivers good performance in the presence of outliers. We check the performance of the density-tempered SMC algorithm using simulated data based on a linear Gaussian state-space model with and without misspecification. We also apply it on real stock prices using a GARCH-type model with microstructure noise.     

The Role of Insurance in Social Protection in Latin America

Social protection schemes in Latin America face serious short falls in the financial resources available to meet their needs. New types of insurance envisaged in reforms should help to contain costs and increase coverage. However, in strengthening schemes' coverage it is highly probable that considerable demand for additional financial resources will arise to address the need to introduce the principle of solidarity into the system. This article examines reforms in the financing of social security for healthcare and pensions, highlighting the implications of various public-private combinations for financial management and coverage.