bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
An Economist’s Perspective on Probability Matching
Authors: Vulkan Nir 
Published: March 2003

The experimental phenomenon known as ‘probability matching’ is often offered as evidence in support of adaptive learning models and against the idea that people maximise their expected utility. Recent interest in dynamic‐based equilibrium theories means the term re‐appears in Economics. However, there seems to be conflicting views on what is actually meant by the term and about the validity of the data.The purpose of this paper is therefore threefold: First, to introduce today’s readers to what is meant by probability matching, and in particular to clarify which aspects of this phenomenon challenge the utility‐maximisation hypothesis. Second, to familiarise the reader with the different theoretical approaches to behaviour in such circumstances, and to focus on the differences in predictions between these theories in light of recent advances. Third, to provide a comprehensive survey of repeated, binary choice experiments.
Assessment of hidden and future customer needs in Finnish business‐to‐business companies
Authors: Kärkkäinen Hannu , Piippo Petteri , Puumalainen Kaisu , Tuominen Markku 
Published: March 2003

The development of new products should be based on the needs expected to exist even several years ahead – at the moment of market introduction and during the whole lifecycle of the product. To develop successful new products in the toughening business environment, companies should be able to surpass customers’ expectations and to assess emerging customer needs proactively. Early, thorough understanding of the customer’s real needs, including the assessment of hidden and future customer needs and requirements, plays a very important role in the successful development of new products.The purpose of our paper is to study the assessment of new (hidden and future) customer needs for product development in Finnish business‐to‐business companies. We have carried out a survey in 93 Finnish business‐to‐business companies and SBUs to study their common problems in the assessment of unrecognized customer needs and potentially effective ways in clarifying new customer needs and dealing with important problems. On the basis of the results, we propose several possible ways to facilitate the assessment of unrecognized customer needs.
Explaining Normativity: On Rationality and the Justification of Reason
Authors: Raz Joseph 
Published: March 2003

Aspects of the world are normative in as much as they or their existence constitute reasons for persons, i.e. grounds which make certain beliefs, moods, emotions, intentions or actions appropriate or inappropriate. Our capacities to perceive and understand how things are, and what response is appropriate to them, and our ability to respond appropriately, make us into persons, i.e. creatures with the ability to direct their own life in accordance with their appreciation of themselves and their environment, and of the reasons with which, given how they are, the world presents them.An explanation of normativity would explain the various puzzling aspects of this complex phenomenon. In particular it would explain how it is that aspects of the world can constitute reasons for cognitive, emotive, and volitional responses; how it is that we can come to realise that certain cognitive, emotional or volitional responses are appropriate in various circumstances, and inappropriate in others; and how it is that we can respond appropriately. This paper explores an aspect of the last of these questions.
Rights and Resources—Libertarians and the Right to Life
Authors: Harris James W. 
Published: March 2003

The author addresses Robert Nozick's claim that: “The particular rights over things fill the space of rights, leaving no room for general rights to be in a certain material condition.” Hence Nozick insists that rights are violated if citizens are compelled to contribute to others' welfare, however urgent their needs may be. The author argues that it is characteristic of libertarian theories that they invoke the moral sanctity of private property against welfarist or egalitarian conceptions of social justice. Nozick's version of the libertarian critique has three conceptual pillars–“right,”“thing” and “space.” On that basis Nozick claims that talk of welfare “rights” can be condemned on the plane of rights. This is true, Nozick maintains, even of “the right to life.” The author contends that this argument fails. It equivocates over the idea of “rights”; and it misconceives crucial features of property. Nozick deploys exclusive “domain rights,” whilst attacking “important‐interest rights.” His historical‐entitlement theory fails as a justification of private property. The author argues that, so far as material objects are concerned, private property institutions depend upon trespassory rules which do not impose morally binding obligations unless basic needs are catered for. Furthermore, private property institutions also comprise monetary resources to which the spatial metaphor of exclusive rights does not apply. Holdings vested in any particular person at any particular time are stamped, morally, with a mix of contestable and mutable property‐specific justice reasons. Hence it is fallacious to suppose that ownership rights together exhaust all normative space over “things.”The major objection to speaking of everyone's having a right to various things such as equality of opportunity, life, and so on, and enforcing this right, is that these “rights” require a substructure of things and materials and actions; and other people may have rights and entitlements over these. [≡] The particular rights over things fill the space of rights, leaving no room for general rights to be in a certain material condition. (Nozick 1974, 238)
International Competition for Multinational Investment
Authors: Haaland Jan I. , Wooton Ian 
Published: March 2003

We examine the economic justification for providing investment subsidies to foreign‐owned multinationals. These provide employment opportunities and generate demand for domestic intermediate inputs, produced by domestic workers with increasing returns to scale. Offering subsidies to multinationals may be in the national interest if the investment raises the net value of domestic production. When agglomerative forces are sufficiently strong, a subsidy that attracts the first foreign firm may induce several to enter, establishing a thriving modern sector. With a limited number of foreign enterprises, countries may compete to attract investment. This subsidy competition transfers much of the rents to the multinationals.JEL classification: F12; F23
Is it Harmful to Allow Partial Cooperation?
Authors: Beaudry Paul , Cahuc Pierre , Kempf Hubert 
Published: March 2003

In economics, politics and society, examples abound in economics, politics and society where agents can enter partial cooperation schemes, i.e., they can collude with a subset of agents. Several contributions devoted to specific settings have claimed that such partial cooperation actually worsens welfare compared to the no‐cooperation situation. Our paper assesses this view by highlighting the forces that lead to such results. We find that the nature of strategic spillovers is central to determining whether partial cooperation is bad. Our propositions are then applied to various examples as industry wage bargaining or local public goods.JEL classification: C72; E62; J5
The Saving Behaviour of a Two‐person Household
Authors: Browning Martin 
Published: March 2003

The facts that wives are typically younger than their husbands and that women typically live longer than men imply that wives may have more incentive to save for old age than do husbands. A theoretical model of the determination of household saving and portfolio choice is introduced which takes into account differences in preferences for saving. The most important result is that the level and the composition (portfolio) of saving and the time path of consumption are dependent on the distribution of income within the household.JEL classification: D1; D7
Swimming with the Tide: Solidary Wage Policy and the Gender Earnings Gap
Authors: Edin Per‐Anders , Richardson Katarina 
Published: March 2003

This paper addresses the consequences of wage compression for the gender wage gap in Sweden during the period 1968–1991. We find that the effects of changes in the wage structure on women's wages have varied over time and have been partly counteracting. Changes in industry wage differentials have systematically worked against women, while changes in the returns to human capital and unobserved characteristics have contributed to reductions in the gender wage gap. Changes in the wage structure were particularly important between 1968 and 1974 when there was a dramatic reduction in overall wage inequality. JEL classification: J16; J31; J51
The Power of Perception: Children's Appearance as a Factor in Adults’ Predictions of Gender‐typical Behavior
Authors: Rogers Cindy M. , Ritter Jean M. 
Published: March 2003

AbstractWe examined the influence of 3‐year‐olds’ facial characteristics on adults’ predictions of children's gender‐typical behaviors. Eighty‐nine adults viewed 12 photographs of children's faces differing in masculinity/femininity but matched for attractiveness. Half of the adults were told the sex of each child; half were not. Adults reported that masculine‐looking girls would be more likely to engage in masculine gender‐typical behavior and less likely to engage in feminine gender‐typical behavior compared with feminine‐looking girls. Adults also indicated that feminine‐looking boys would be more likely to engage in feminine gender‐typical behavior and less likely to engage in masculine gender‐typical behavior compared with masculine‐looking boys. When presented with both gender information and appearance cues, adults relied more heavily on the perceptual cue of appearance when predicting gender‐typical behaviors for both boys and girls.
Challenging Professional Roles: Lay Carers’ Involvement in Health Care in the Community
Authors: Pickard Susan , Jacobs Sally , Kirk Susan 
Published: March 2003

AbstractThe bulk of care in the community is carried out by lay carers. Recent policy initiatives to support them in the United Kingdom are outlined. There remains evidence of significant gaps in support from professional health and social‐care workers including community nurses. This paper reports three studies of lay carers: those caring for older people, carers of technology‐dependent children, and home‐care workers involved in the “direct payments” scheme. Findings are reported in the areas of decisions about appropriate caring roles, the lay–professional boundary, training and respite opportunities and the expertise of lay carers. Recommendations for policy and practices are made.
The “Flypaper Effect” Is Not an Anomaly
Authors: Roemer John E. , Silvestre Joaquim 
Published: March 2003

The empirical nonequivalence between grants by a central government and increases in community income (the “flypaper effect”) has been considered anomalous. But the “anomaly” label is naïve: in a multiconsumer community, equivalence demands an unlikely match of tax rules and income‐growth patterns.We go beyond the single‐policy‐variable, median‐voter model and apply Roemer’s concept of Party Unanimity Nash Equilibrium, which allows for party competition in multidimensional policy spaces. We compute the equilibria for a model with two independent policy variables (intercept and slope of an affine tax schedule) and obtain numerical values that agree with the empirical literature.
Handling Missing Data in Diaries of Alcohol Consumption
Authors: Longford Nicholas T. , Ely Margaret , Hardy Rebecca , Wadsworth Michael E. J. 
Published: March 2003

Summary
Missing data can rarely be avoided in large scale studies in which subjects are requested to complete questionnaires with many items. Analyses of such surveys are often based on the records with no missing items, resulting in a loss of efficiency and, when data are missing not at random, in bias. This paper applies the method of multiple imputation to handle missing data in an analysis of alcohol consumption of the subjects in the Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development. The outcomes studied are derived from the entries in diaries of food and drink intake over seven designated days. Background variables and other responses related to alcohol consumption and associated problems are used as collateral information. In conventional analyses, subpopulation means of quantities of alcohol consumed are compared. Since we are interested in the harmful effects of alcohol, we make inferences about the percentages of those who consume more than a given quantity of net alcohol. We assess the contribution to the analyses made by the incomplete records and outline a more integrated way of applying multiple imputation in large scale longitudinal surveys.
Capitation Funding in the Public Sector
Authors: Smith Peter C. , Rice Nigel , Carr-Hill Roy 
Published: March 2003

Summary
A fundamental requirement of government at all levels—national and local—is to distribute the limited funds that it wishes to spend on particular public services between geographical areas or institutions, which are effectively competitors for such funds. Increasing use is now being made of capitation methods for such purposes, in which a standard estimate of expected expenditure is attached to a citizen with given characteristics. Statistical methods are playing an important role in determining such capitations, but they give rise to profound methodological problems. This paper examines the rationale for capitation and discusses the associated methodological issues. It illustrates the issues raised with two examples taken from the UK public sector: in personal social services and hospital care. Severe limitations of the data mean that small area data are used as the unit of observation, giving rise to considerable complexity in the model to be estimated. As a result, a range of methodologies including two-stage least squares and multilevel modelling methods are deployed. The paper concludes with a suggestion for an approach which would represent an improvement on current capitation methods, but which would require data on individuals rather than on small areas.
A Simple Method for Estimating a Regression Model for κ Between a Pair of Raters
Authors: Lipsitz Stuart R. , Williamson John , Klar Neil , Ibrahim Joseph , Parzen Michael 
Published: March 2003

Summary
Agreement studies commonly occur in medical research, for example, in the review of X-rays by radiologists, blood tests by a panel of pathologists and the evaluation of psychopathology by a panel of raters. In these studies, often two observers rate the same subject for some characteristic with a discrete number of levels. The κ-coefficient is a popular measure of agreement between the two raters. The κ-coefficient may depend on covariates, i.e. characteristics of the raters and/or the subjects being rated. Our research was motivated by two agreement problems. The first is a study of agreement between a pastor and a co-ordinator of Christian education on whether they feel that the congregation puts enough emphasis on encouraging members to work for social justice (yes versus no). We wish to model the κ-coefficient as a function of covariates such as political orientation (liberal versus conservative) of the pastor and co-ordinator. The second example is a spousal education study, in which we wish to model the κ-coefficient as a function of covariates such as the highest degree of the father of the wife and the father of the husband. We propose a simple method to estimate the regression model for the κ-coefficient, which consists of two logistic (or multinomial logistic) regressions and one linear regression for binary data. The estimates can be easily obtained in any generalized linear model software program.
Additive Nonparametric Regression With Autocorrelated Errors
Authors: Smith Michael , Wong Chi-Ming , Kohn Robert 
Published: March 2003

Summary
A Bayesian approach is presented for nonparametric estimation of an additive regression model with autocorrelated errors. Each of the potentially non-linear components is modelled as a regression spline using many knots, while the errors are modelled by a high order stationary autoregressive process parameterized in terms of its autocorrelations. The distribution of significant knots and partial autocorrelations is accounted for using subset selection. Our approach also allows the selection of a suitable transformation of the dependent variable. All aspects of the model are estimated simultaneously by using the Markov chain Monte Carlo method. It is shown empirically that the approach proposed works well on several simulated and real examples.
Ordered Multivariate Extremes
Authors: Nadarajah S. , Anderson C. W. , Tawn J. A. 
Published: March 2003

Summary
Multivariate extreme value models and associated statistical methods are developed for vector observations whose components are subject to an order restriction. The approach extends the multivariate threshold methodology of Coles and Tawn, Joe and co-workers and Smith and co-workers. The results are illustrated by an analysis of extreme rainfalls of different durations, and by a study of the problem of linking a long series of daily rainfall extremes with a partially overlapping shorter series of hourly extremes.
Minimum Aberration and Model Robustness for Two-Level Fractional Factorial Designs
Authors: Cheng Ching-Shui , Steinberg David M. , Sun Don X. 
Published: March 2003

Summary
The performance of minimum aberration two-level fractional factorial designs is studied under two criteria of model robustness. Simple sufficient conditions for a design to dominate another design with respect to each of these two criteria are derived. It is also shown that a minimum aberration design of resolution III or higher maximizes the number of two-factor interactions which are not aliases of main effects and, subject to that condition, minimizes the sum of squares of the sizes of alias sets of two-factor interactions. This roughly says that minimum aberration designs tend to make the sizes of the alias sets very uniform. It follows that minimum aberration is a good surrogate for the two criteria of model robustness that are studied here. Examples are given to show that minimum aberration designs are indeed highly efficient.
A Nonparametric Test for Current Status Data With Unequal Censoring
Authors: Sun Jianguo 
Published: March 2003

Summary
Nonparametric tests for the comparison of different treatments based on current status data are proposed. For this problem, most methods proposed in the literature require that observation times on all subjects follow the same distribution. In other words, censoring distributions are identical between the treatment groups. In this paper, we focus on the situation where the censoring distributions may be different for subjects in different treatment groups and the test that can take this unequal censoring into account is given. The asymptotic distribution of the test proposed is derived. The method proposed is applied to data arising from a tumorigenicity experiment.
Weighted Empirical Adaptive Variance Estimators for Correlated Data Regression
Authors: Lumley T. , Heagerty P. 
Published: March 2003

Summary
Estimating equations based on marginal generalized linear models are useful for regression modelling of correlated data, but inference and testing require reliable estimates of standard errors. We introduce a class of variance estimators based on the weighted empirical variance of the estimating functions and show that an adaptive choice of weights allows reliable estimation both asymptotically and by simulation in finite samples. Connections with previous bootstrap and jackknife methods are explored. The effect of reliable variance estimation is illustrated in data on health effects of air pollution in King County, Washington.
On a Class of m out of n Bootstrap Confidence Intervals
Authors: Lee Stephen M. S. 
Published: March 2003

Summary
It is widely known that bootstrap failure can often be remedied by using a technique known as the ‘m out of n’ bootstrap, by which a smaller number, m say, of observations are resampled from the original sample of size n. In successful cases of the bootstrap, the m out of n bootstrap is often deemed unnecessary. We show that the problem of constructing nonparametric confidence intervals is an exceptional case. By considering a new class of m out of n bootstrap confidence limits, we develop a computationally efficient approach based on the double bootstrap to construct the optimal m out of n bootstrap intervals. We show that the optimal intervals have a coverage accuracy which is comparable with that of the classical double-bootstrap intervals, and we conduct a simulation study to examine their performance. The results are in general very encouraging. Alternative approaches which yield even higher order accuracy are also discussed.
Failure Time Regression With Continuous Covariates Measured With Error
Authors: Zhou Halbo , Wang C.-Y. 
Published: March 2003

Summary
We consider failure time regression analysis with an auxiliary variable in the presence of a validation sample. We extend the nonparametric inference procedure of Zhou and Pepe to handle a continuous auxiliary or proxy covariate. We estimate the induced relative risk function with a kernel smoother and allow the selection probability of the validation set to depend on the observed covariates. We present some asymptotic properties for the kernel estimator and provide some simulation results. The method proposed is illustrated with a data set from an on-going epidemiologic study.
Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Spatial Models by Markov Chain Monte Carlo Stochastic Approximation
Authors: Gu Ming Gao , Zhu Hong-Tu 
Published: March 2003

Summary
We propose a two-stage algorithm for computing maximum likelihood estimates for a class of spatial models. The algorithm combines Markov chain Monte Carlo methods such as the Metropolis–Hastings–Green algorithm and the Gibbs sampler, and stochastic approximation methods such as the off-line average and adaptive search direction. A new criterion is built into the algorithm so stopping is automatic once the desired precision has been set. Simulation studies and applications to some real data sets have been conducted with three spatial models. We compared the algorithm proposed with a direct application of the classical Robbins–Monro algorithm using Wiebe's wheat data and found that our procedure is at least 15 times faster.
Perfect Slice Samplers
Authors: Mira A. , Møller J. , Roberts G. O. 
Published: March 2003

Summary
Perfect sampling allows the exact simulation of random variables from the stationary measure of a Markov chain. By exploiting monotonicity properties of the slice sampler we show that a perfect version of the algorithm can be easily implemented, at least when the target distribution is bounded. Various extensions, including perfect product slice samplers, and examples of applications are discussed.