Adaptive Build-up and Breakdown of Trust: An Agent Based Computational Approach

This article employs Agent-Based Computational Economics (ACE) to investigate whether, and under what conditions, trust is viable in markets. The emergence and breakdown of trust is modeled in a context of multiple buyers and suppliers. Agents develop trust in a partner as a function of observed loyalty. They select partners on the basis of their trust in the partner and potential profit, with adaptive weights. On the basis of realized profits, they adapt the weight they attach to trust relative to profitability, and their own trustworthiness, modeled as a threshold of defection. Trust and loyalty turn out to be viable under fairly general conditions.     

In Search of ‘Managerial Work’: Past,Present and Future of an Analytical Category

Based on a comprehensive review of literature, the paper examines how ‘managerial work’ as a fluid analytical category has been approached methodologically, theoretically and empirically for more than 60 years. In particular, it highlights the existence of competing scholarly understandings regarding its nature, performance, meaning and politics. The authors suggest that subsequent empirical investigations have too often worked, methodologically and theoretically, to slot in, and thus effectively reduce, the term to a particular pre‐existing box, rather than exploring open‐endedly the what and how, but also the why of ‘managerial work’ as a distinct mode of situated ordering. Having represented the concept's past and present by identifying four distinct research approaches reflected in representative publications, the authors suggest that more attention should be devoted to a mode of analytical departure that promises to address directly the suggested shortcomings in the literature. Specifically, it is argued that much could be gained if contemporary notions of practice were brought into the study of managerial work. To this end, the authors outline the contours of a practice‐based approach as a sensitizing framework for understanding managerial work by highlighting the situated, relational, sociomaterial, meaning‐making and consequence‐oriented analytical foci the approach suggests, and suggesting a number of conjoint research questions, as well as acknowledging subsequent limitations.     

Trust in American Government: Longitudinal Measurement Equivalence in the ANES, 1964–2008

For over 50 years (1958–2012) the American National Election Studies (ANES) survey has been measuring citizens’ evaluations of the trustworthiness of the “government in Washington”—an indicator that has been widely used to monitor the dynamics of political trust in the US over time. However, a critical assumption in using attitudinal constructs for longitudinal research is that the meaning-and-interpretation of such items should be comparable across groups of respondents at any one point in time and across samples over time. Using multigroup confirmatory factor analysis for ordered-categorical data, we test the measurement equivalence assumption with data collected by the ANES from 1964 to 2008. The results confirm that the ANES’ political trust scale has the same basic factorial structure over time. But for two key items, several threshold parameters were found to be different across time points, indicating that the meaning-and-interpretation of these questions, and especially the question about whether the government in Washington wastes money that people pay in taxes, varies significantly over time.

     

Letter to the Editor: Respecting the Plurality of Value and the Messiness of Scientific Practice

Evaluations of authorship and recommendations for authorship policies best heed the plurality of valuation cultures that traverse scientific practices and respect the messiness of scientific practices, for those are reflected in authorship and authorship sequence decisions.     

Macro-Economic Factors in Credit Risk Calculations: Including Time-Varying Covariates in Mixture Cure Models

The prediction of the time of default in a credit risk setting via survival analysis needs to take a high censoring rate into account. This rate is because default does not occur for the majority of debtors. Mixture cure models allow the part of the loan population that is unsusceptible to default to be modeled, distinct from time of default for the susceptible population. In this article, we extend the mixture cure model to include time-varying covariates. We illustrate the method via simulations and by incorporating macro-economic factors as predictors for an actual bank dataset.     

Psychosocial Factors of Migration: Adaptation and Application of the Health Belief Model

Psychosocial factors influencing behaviour play a central role in health research but seem under‐explored in migration research. This is unfortunate because these factors, which include knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, intentions and personality traits, provide essential and potentially effective handles for linking migration and migrant‐integration policies. We demonstrate that the health belief model (HBM) conceptualization of behavioural intentions contributes constructs that can further our understanding of migration intentions, thereby broadening the foundations for migration policies. We adapt the HBM to migration behaviour and then test it empirically by using survey data on international migration from West Africa and the Mediterranean region to the European Union. The results confirm that indicators of “perceived threat to living conditions”, “perceived benefits” and “perceived barriers to migration”, “cues to action” and “self‐efficacy” contribute considerably to the explanation of migration intentions. We conclude that psychosocial factors deserve greater prominence in migration theories and empirical research, and we recommend that migration surveys consider this framework to identify relevant indicators of psychosocial factors of international migration and develop appropriate survey questions to measure them.     

Design recommendations for the creation of icons for the elderly

During employment of icons in order to represent system functions, specific user requirements from elderly people have not been scientifically gathered and thus will merely be considered during the process of system design. The survey, with explicit consideration of technology acceptance and experience of 120 elderly probands, looked into the comprehension of four different classes of non-animated graphical representations. It was shown that among elderly, the use of photos compared to pictograms or clip art leads to a significantly higher recognition rate. The mapping of actions rather than objects leads to a further reduction of the error probability and is thus, especially in the context of telemedicine, preferable for the target group.     

The relevance of temporal iconicity with instruction manuals for elderly users

Gerontolinguistic obtains a growing importance with the increase of elderly users due to Demographic Change. Since acceptance and ease of use of supportive systems for elderly, such as "E-Nursing-Assistants", are highly dependent on the age suitable design of readable instructions, an age-appropriate linguistic concept is of high value for usability. There has been only little research on the relevance of foreign words, signal words, textual arrangement, optical accentuation of key terms and temporal iconicity concerning older users. Thus, an efficient design of age suitable manual instructions within a medical context still remains to be done. The objective of this research was to evaluate the relevance of the previously mentioned factors in the context of written instructions. For this, an empirical survey was designed which was given to 45 study participants. The subjects of the experiment were given 4x3 instructions after a pretest questionnaire. The aim was to execute these instructions as correctly and quickly as possible. Furthermore the instructions were rated regarding comprehensibility with a retrospective questionnaire.     

All for one or one for all? Authorship and the cross-sectoral valuation of credit in nutrition science

The passionate pursuit of authorships is fuelled by the value they represent to scholars and scientists. This article asks how this value differs across scientists and how these different processes of valuation inform authorship articulation, strategies, and publication behavior in general. Drawing from a qualitative analysis of authorship practices among nutrition scientists employed at universities, contract research organizations, and in food industry, I argue that two different modi operandi emerge when it comes to authorship. These different ways of working produce different collaborative approaches, different credit distribution strategies amongst collaborators, and different value placed upon (the pursuit of) authorship. These different valuation processes are neither explicit nor recognizable to those reading (and judging) author lists. As a consequence, in the politics of authorship, the names standing atop a scientific publication in nutrition science represent different types of value to both the individuals and employing organizations.