bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
An Evaluation of the Initial Year of Zero-Base Budgeting in the Federal Government
Authors: Sherlekar Virendra S. , Dean Burton V. 
Published: November 2008

This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the Zero-Base Budgeting (ZBB) process during the initial year of its implementation in the Federal Government. The evaluation includes ten Departments and six agencies of the Federal Government representing 74 percent of the total budget authority of 560 billion dollars. It is based on the information received in responses from federal agencies to the Office of Management and Budget Eleven major criteria were formulated for use in evaluating the applicability of the ZBB process and its performance in the individual agencies. A scoring model was used to determine the effectiveness of the ZBB process within each agency, as well as across agencies. ZBB was perceived by federal agencies as an effective tool for use in the allocation of limited resources. The following aspects of ZBB were ranked in the order in which they yield the greatest benefits in producing effective budgets: (a) priority ranking of agency programs, (b) participation of management in decisionmaking, and (c) conducting trade-offs within and across programs. In most cases, the increased participation (extent and quality) resulted in the establishment of a close link with top management and an enhanced understanding of organizational objectives, priorities, and resource allocations to various programs. The use of ZBB was not intended to and did not, in fact, produce significant tangible cost savings in federal agency 1979 budgets, but did result in reallocations of resources to activities with higher priority. Most federal agencies believed that the use of ZBB required excessive expenditures of time and effort. The agencies felt that ZBB was not particularly applicable to “uncontrollable” programs and hence the time and effort spent on using ZBB in these decision units was not beneficial. The agencies faced problems in developing “minimum level” packages which represent lowest level budgets for the organizational units. Most agencies used an arbitrary percentage reduction from the existing level to force uniformity across all decision units. Use of a predefined “minimum level” may have precluded a zero-base analysis of the decision units which is the major cornerstone of ZBB. Priority ranking of decision packages at the subordinate management level was usually carried out by managers using their own independent judgments. At the top agency level, most agencies used formal ranking procedures and collegial panels to produce the initial ranking of agency-wide decision packages. The difficulties agencies faced in determining priorities of the decision packages included ranking those functions/activities that were dissimilar and/or interrelated and considering those activities not having measurable outputs or distinct workload measures.
An Activity Analysis Approach to Unit Costing with Multiple Interactive Products
Authors: Itami Hiroyuki , Kaplan Robert S. 
Published: November 2008

Average variable costs are not directly defined for multiple products produced in complex production settings. An activity analysis model can be used for basic cost measurement and for building a linear programming model of manufacturing operations. The model can then be used not only to compute the optimal production plan and associated marginal costs but also to assign average costs to final products. The activity analysis framework enables many overhead costs, such as maintenance, overtime, shift premiums, and indirect labor and materials, to be treated within the model. Thus, they are absorbed directly into the cost of final products rather than allocated indirectly through an overhead charge. Three average costing methods based on sacrifice value (marginal costs) and benefit value (marginal revenue) of products are considered. The method based entirely on the market value of products has less desirable properties than allocation methods which use the dual variables (marginal costs) from the programming model. Another benefit is that various cost allocation methods using input-output analysis can be considered as special cases of average costing methods presented in this paper.
Review of Data Related to Energy Use in Residential and Commercial Buildings
Authors: Hirst Eric 
Published: November 2008

This paper reviews data dealing with energy use in residential and commercial buildings and their determinants. Three types of data are discussed: data prepared by and for the federal government on overall trends in buildings energy use, data prepared by and for the federal government related to the details of energy use, and data collected at the state and utility level. The major conclusion from this review is that existing national data sources are inadequate for answering the kinds of questions being raised on buildings energy use and conservation. These questions concern overall trends, recent changes, determinants of changes, roles of the private sector and government intervention in implementing conservation measures, and the effectiveness of different kinds of government programs. Relevant data are being collected by many state energy offices and by gas and electric utilities. However, the existence of these potentially-useful subnational data sources is not widely known.
Theme Appreciation as a Construct for Organizational Change
Authors: Keidel Robert W. 
Published: November 2008

This paper develops an organizational change construct from the activities of the Jamestown (New York) Area Labor-Management Committee, a community-based program of labor-management cooperation. As part of this program, projects to increase productivity and to improve the quality of working life were undertaken by internal labor-management committees in ten factories over a four-year period. Although each organizational experience was episodic, these efforts collectively gave rise to community “themes”—such as skills development, gains-sharing, and layout redesign—which served to stimulate further organizational change, often in unanticipated ways. Diffusion typically was from part of one organization to part of another, rather than from a part, to the whole, of the same organization. In effect, a community “theme-set” evolved out of many piecemeal organizational projects. The various themes then served to integrate the micro projects and the Area Committee's macro objectives. Singly and in combination, the eight themes comprising the set rendered general (community) objectives more concrete, and concrete (organizational) projects more general. A two-phase change process is described, and a thematic reappreciation is made. The concept of theme developed in this paper then is considered in light of other, related concepts. Based on the timing of theme appearance and the degree of organizational appreciation, four theme subsets are distinguished. Development within each subset is elaborated, and the subsets are contrasted in terms of certain theme attributes. Four partial explanations are posited for general appreciation of themes: (1) community coherence, (2) organization-theme fit, (3) the existence of alternative participative options, and (4) the nature of the intervention process. After subsequent developments in Jamestown are shown to support theme appreciation, the paper examines the relevance of theme appreciation to change within organizations—irrespective of links to a community program. Three issues are treated: (1) unit of analysis, (2) the role of non-participants in organizational change, and (3) organization-wide transformation. In each case, the potential value of theme-appreciation is suggested. The paper concludes by expressing some cautions about pseudo-appreciation of themes.
Managerial Strategic Behavior in State-Owned Enterprises—Business and Political Orientations
Authors: Zif Jehiel 
Published: November 2008

Two different functions, managing the business in the product or service markets and managing public support in the political markets, must be performed by managers of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Each organization has to strike a strategic balance between these two functions. The way this is done is indicative of the organizational orientation and behavior. The greater the relative emphasis on managing public support, the stronger is the political orientation in our terminology. The greater the relative emphasis on managing the business, the stronger is the business orientation. This paper proposes that explanation of behavior of SOEs can be improved by taking into account the orientation of management toward the mix of business and politics. Although the combination of business and political goals of SOE has long been recognized, the mix of business and political activities as a strategic variable was rarely distinguished. This strategic variable is operationally defined, measured and explained. An insight into the purposes of business and political activities is gained through an analysis of the external and internal orientation of management. The organization may concentrate internally, on its own needs and goals, or externally, on the needs and goals of the outside publics. This distinction can be useful in descriptive as well as normative research. Management orientation, whether business or political, is associated with a specific set of behavioral tendencies or implications. These implications are expressed in propositions which state that an increase in the political and external orientation of management are related to an increased likelihood that: 1. Sales rather than profit goals would be emphasized. 2. Low prices relative to costs would be charged. 3. Goals would be relatively unstable. 4. Goals would be stated in unclear or vague terms. 5. Performance evaluation would be carried out on an irregular basis. 6. Public support would be sought prior to action. 7. Top management would be recruited from the public sector. An exploratory survey of 50 executives of SOEs in fourteen Latin American, Asian and African countries was used to test the propositions. With few exceptions, the empirical results support the above propositions. Further research, which will include additional variables and a larger sample, can increase the reliability of the findings and improve our understanding of the factors which influence management orientation.
The Boundary Between Planning and Incremental Budgeting: Empirical Examination in a Publicly-Owned Corporation
Authors: Lioukas S. K. , Chambers D. J. 
Published: November 2008

This paper is a study within the field of public budgeting. It focuses on the capital budget, and it attempts to model and analyze the capital budgeting process using a framework previously developed in the literature of incremental budgeting. Within this framework the paper seeks to determine empirically whether the movement of capital expenditure budgets can be represented as the routine application of incremental adjustments over an existing base of allocations and whether further, forward-looking adjustments can be found. Its setting is a British publicly-owned corporation. The paper proposes an extended model of incremental budgeting which explains absolute change in budget allocations by introducing variables expressing: current expenditure outturn, over- or under-spend of previous allocations, previous budgetary cuts, and wider financial pressures in the corporation's environment. Planning variables are then included in an attempt to uncover purposive behavior. The analysis reveals different patterns of allocation for peripheral and for mainstream investments. The former appear to grow in an incremental fashion with no response to leading planning variables. The latter exhibit responsiveness to planning variables, and allocations do not take the form of routine incremental adjustments to the existing base. An interpretation of the results is undertaken. The analysis points to revisions of existing theory and suggests fresh ways of looking at, and systematically modeling, the organizational system of resource allocation.
Comparison among Certain Inspection Policies
Authors: Munford A. G. 
Published: November 2008

Certain continuous production processes and early warning systems must be inspected in order to detect failures that would otherwise not be apparent. An optimal inspection policy is a sequence of inspection times which minimizes the average cost per inspection cycle relative to some cost model. Under both an existing cost model, and a new cost model proposed in this paper, the computation of such policies is difficult. Three sub-optimal inspection policies are proposed, each, like the optimal policy, having decreasing times between successive inspections when the time to system failure has increasing hazard rate. Numerical comparisons are given for both cost models in the case of Weibull failure times.
Early Diagnosis of MIS Implementation Failure: Promising Results and Unanswered Questions
Authors: Ginzberg Michael J. 
Published: November 2008

Much of the research on MIS implementation which has been conducted in the past decade has focused on identifying and measuring the organizational characteristics which appear to be particularly conducive to either success or failure of system development efforts. While such research is useful in providing insight about the implementation problem, it provides little guidance for the management of ongoing implementation efforts. The study described in this paper attempts to address the implementation management question by exploring the use of MIS users' pre-implementation expectations about a system as indicators of the likely success of that system. System development efforts can be viewed as multi-stage processes. During the first of the stages, Definition, most of the key decisions about the system as the user will see it are made, e.g., system goals, scope, overall approach. The Definition stage, however, typically accounts for no more than 25% of the resources required for system development. Thus, the decisions which will have the greatest effect on the users' acceptance or rejection of a system are made prior to the bulk of spending on the project, and an assessment of the project's probability of success or failure should be possible at that time. The results of a number of implementation studies suggest that implementation failure is more likely when users hold unrealistic expectations about a system. Research in other areas, especially product evaluation and job satisfaction, also shows a connection between realism of expectations and outcomes (e.g., satisfaction). Thus, user expectations held at the end of the Definition stage might serve as early warning indicators of MIS implementation outcomes. If these expectations prove to be reliable indicators of subsequent success or failure, it would enable system developers to diagnose likely problems and to take corrective action at an early project stage. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of user expectations as predictors of project success or failure. The results strongly suggest that users who hold realistic expectations prior to implementation are more satisfied with the system and use it more than users whose pre-implementation expectations are unrealistic. While the results are encouraging, further research is necessary in a number of areas—e.g., better definition of key expectations, simpler tools for measuring expectations, proper timing of expectations measurement—before reliable instruments for measuring expectations in ongoing projects will be available. The paper outlines, however, some steps which can be taken now to help assure that potential system users develop realistic expectations.
On the Estimation of Bid Distributions in Real Estate Markets
Authors: Tryfos Peter 
Published: November 2008

The price at which a real property is sold depends on the initial asking price, the distribution of potential bids for the property by interested buyers, the quality and intensity of the advertising message, and the manner in which the initial asking price is revised if the property is not immediately sold. The model of real estate transactions developed in this paper shows that—contrary perhaps to current views—there is no simple relationship between selling prices and the distribution of potential bids. However, under certain conditions, estimates of the distribution of potential bids for any property can be obtained on the basis of a sample of past transactions, recording the asking price, selling price, and the physical characteristics of the properties sold.
The Sampling Relationship Between Sharpe's Performance Measure and its Risk Proxy: Sample Size, Investment Horizon and Market Conditions
Authors: Chen Son-Nan , Lee Cheng F. 
Published: November 2008

Sharpe's, Treynor's and Jensen's measures have been extensively used for the performance evaluation of mutual funds or portfolios. These three widely used performance measures have been found to be highly correlated with their corresponding risk measures by a number of empirical studies. This paper focuses the investigation on the possible sources of the bias associated with the empirical relationship between the estimated Sharpe's measure and its estimated risk measure. In general, the sample size, the investment horizon and the market conditions are three important factors in determining the strong relationship between the ex-post Sharpe's measure and its estimated risk surrogate. The interesting findings of this study are as follows: (1) the estimated Sharpe's measure is uncorrelated with the estimated risk measure either when the risk free rate of interest equals the expected return on the market portfolio over the sample period or when the sample size is infinite, (2) the estimated Sharpe's measure is positively (or negatively) correlated with the estimated risk measure if the risk-free rate of interest is greater than (or less than) the expected return on the market portfolio, (3) an observation horizon shorter than the true investment horizon can reduce the dependence of the estimated Sharpe's measure on its estimated risk measure, and (4) an observation horizon longer than the true investment horizon will magnify the dependence. The results have indicated that, in conducting empirical research, a shorter observation horizon and a large sample size should be used to reduce the bias associated with the estimated Sharpe's measure.
Evaluating Program and Managerial Efficiency: An Application of Data Envelopment Analysis to Program Follow Through
Authors: Charnes A. , Cooper W. W. , Rhodes E. 
Published: November 2008

A model for measuring the efficiency of Decision Making Units (=DMU's) is presented, along with related methods of implementation and interpretation. The term DMU is intended to emphasize an orientation toward managed entities in the public and/or not-for-profit sectors. The proposed approach is applicable to the multiple outputs and designated inputs which are common for such DMU's. A priori weights, or imputations of a market-price-value character are not required. A mathematical programming model applied to observational data provides a new way of obtaining empirical estimates of extrernal relations—such as the production functions and/or efficient production possibility surfaces that are a cornerstone of modern economics. The resulting extremal relations are used to envelop the observations in order to obtain the efficiency measures that form a focus of the present paper. An illustrative application utilizes data from Program Follow Through (=PFT). A large scale social experiment in public school education, it was designed to test the advantages of PFT relative to designated NFT (=Non-Follow Through) counterparts in various parts of the U.S. It is possible that the resulting observations are contaminated with inefficiencies due to the way DMU's were managed en route to assessing whether PFT (as a program) is superior to its NFT alternative. A further mathematical programming development is therefore undertaken to distinguish between “management efficiency” and “program efficiency.” This is done via procedures referred to as Data Envelopment Analysis (=DEA) in which one first obtains boundaries or envelopes from the data for PFT and NFT, respectively. These boundaries provide a basis for estimating the relative efficiency of the DMU's operating under these programs. These DMU's are then adjusted up to their program boundaries, after which a new inter-program envelope is obtained for evaluating the PFT and NFT programs with the estimated managerial inefficiencies eliminated. The claimed superiority of PFT fails to be validated in this illustrative application. Our DEA approach, however, suggests the additional possibility of new approaches obtained from PFT-NFT combinations which may be superior to either of them alone. Validating such possibilities cannot be done only by statistical or other modelings. It requires recourse to field studies, including audits (e.g., of a U.S. General Accounting Office variety) and therefore ways in which the results of a DEA approach may be used to guide such further studies (or audits) are also indicated.
Performance of a Regulatory Agency as a Function of its Structure and Client Environment: A Simulation Study
Authors: Thompson W. A. , Vertinsky I. , Kira D. , Scharpf F. W. 
Published: November 2008

This paper examines some of the interrelationships between the formal organization of a regulatory agency and its task environment. Central to the analysis is the development of a simulation model of a regulatory agency. The model depicts the agency as an hierarchical assemblage of decision units whose overall goal is to satisfy clients without antagonizing competitive interests. The model of the agency incorporates the formal structure of authority, the communication network and the process of exchange of informal obligations between agency decision units. The agency's task environment is composed of clients, each of whom communicates his problems to be solved to a different decision unit. As we posit a number of competitive and complementary relationships between clients, the resolution of a problem for one client will impose positive and negative externalities on other clients. While the goals of different decision units may come into conflict, decision units in the model cannot act independently; a coalition is required to resolve a problem. Simulation experiments were conducted to investigate the proposition that formal organizational structure will affect agency performance. In particular we hypothesized: (I) that alignment of agency structure (formal lines of authority) with environmental structure (relationships between clients) will significantly affect organizational performance; and (II) that organizational performance will be highest when all clients with mutual interests (competitive and complementary) are served by a single division of the agency. Organizational performance was measured by: input effectiveness—number of internal messages required to solve a problem; processing capacity—average waiting time per message; and agency responsiveness—a client satisfaction index combining waiting time for solution and agency response. Results of the simulation experiments confirmed hypothesis I and rejected hypothesis II. In task environments which favored prompt resolution of problems, inter-divisional communication was facillitated by separating complementary interests into different divisions while concentrating competitive interests within divisions. In environments which favored inaction, the reverse organization had best performance.