A unique dataset collected from the personnel records of a large company is used to study the relationship between on-the-job training and worker productivity. The analysis shows how information contained in a company database is useful for eliminating heterogeneity bias in the estimation of training's impact on wages and job performance.
A decade of work in marketing meta-analysis has produced empirical generalizations concerning parameters in models of advertising, price, diffusion, and consumer behavior. Results from these meta-analyses should replace the now discredited zero null hypotheses of such parameters in future work. Probably more important than nonzero "grand mean" average effects is an approach called Parametric Adjustability, which provides estimated parameter values for specific conditions reflecting markets and research technologies.
This chapter examines the changing nature of interactions between government and private developer and the character of their joint projects. In particular, it examines the objectives of public/private development; the process involved in forming public/private partnerships; and the practical problems and policy issues associated with public/private development.
Frieden and Sagalyn note that, in the 1970s, a city's favorite solution to solving its problems was to build a mall. Although in the complete chapter (Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities, MIT Press) the authors focus on four case studies of varying political and social conditions, this selection contains only the most prominent example of a downtown retail success story, Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace.
We consider a production/distribution system represented by a general directed acyclic network. Each node is associated with a specific "product" at a given location and/or production stage. An arc (i, j) indicates that item i is used to "produce" item j. External demands may occur at any of the network's nodes. These demands occur continuously at item-specific constant rates. Components may be assembled in any given proportions. The cost structure consists of inventory carrying, viable, and fixed production/distribution costs.
We consider the problem of simultaneously allocating servers and demands in a service system with independent multiple facilities. We assume a fixed number of facilities and total servers which must service a given Poisson arrival stream. We also assume that service times are identically distributed and independent of the server or facility. The allocation decision is one of simultaneously determining the number of servers and the fraction of the total arrival stream for each facility in order to optimize a givne performance measure.
The question of whether lay attributors are biased in their discounting of 1 cause given an alternative cause has not been resolved by decades of research, largely due to the lack of a clear standard for the rational amount of discounting. The authors propose a normative model in which the attributor's causal schemas and discounting inferences are represented in terms of subjective probability.