ESCALATION OF COMMITMENT AND CEO DEPARTURES: THEORY AND EVIDENCE

The escalation of commitment process involves a decision-maker continuing commitment to an investment after receiving negative information. This study develops a principal-agent model to explore how escalation decisions are linked with departures of CEOs from the position. With asymmetric information, a CEO has an incentive to conceal prior decision errors by escalating commitment to failing investments and leaving the firm before the outcome of investment decisions is disclosed publicly. Results of empirical analysis based on a sample of over 3,000 US firms are consistent with the theory and demonstrate that firms’ reporting of low financial performance relative to their industry as well as initiation of new discontinued operations are preceded, and not followed, by unplanned CEO departures.

Exclusive Breast Feeding and Its Determinants in Infants Born in Zanjan Hospitals: A Longitudinal Study

Background: Exclusive breastfeeding (EBF), especially during the first six months of life, is one of the primary health indicators in infants. Objectives: The present study intended to describe the frequency of EBF in infants and its determinants until six months after birth. Methods: This longitudinal study was conducted on 673 mother-newborn pairs visiting obstetrics and gynecology departments of two main hospitals in Zanjan. Information on the frequency of EBF up to six months, socio-demographic and reproductive information, and attitudes of mothers towards breastfeeding was gathered using questionnaires. Data were analyzed using chi-square test and logistic regression in SPSS. Results: The proportion of neonates who were receiving EBF at discharge was 95.7%. The EBF proportions in the second week, the first, fourth, and sixth months were 95%, 88.1%, 80.7%, and 77.3%, respectively. The multivariate analysis of data indicated that living in urban areas (P = 0.02), lower education of mothers (P = 0.008), having more than three years of birth interval (P = 0.006), no experience of breastfeeding in mothers (P = 0.01), no prior decision for breastfeeding in mothers (P < 0.0001), and use of artificial nipples (P = < 0.0001) were independently associated with non-EBF. Conclusions: In this study, despite a high proportion of EBF at discharge, we found that the proportion of EBF reduced during six months. The determinants of non-EBF at six months, including urban and less educated mothers, highlight a need to promote awareness regarding EBF and perform interventions for women at a greater risk for early breastfeeding cessation.

Optimal use of simplified social information in sequential decision-making

Social animals can improve their decisions by attending to those made by others. The benefit of this social information must be balanced against the costs of obtaining and processing it. Previous work has focused on rational agents that respond optimally to a sequence of prior decisions. However, full decision sequences are potentially costly to perceive and process. As such, animals may rely on simpler social information, which will affect the social behaviour they exhibit. Here, I derive the optimal policy for agents responding to simplified forms of social information. I show how the behaviour of agents attending to the aggregate number of previous choices differs from those attending to just the most recent prior decision, and I propose a hybrid strategy that provides a highly accurate approximation to the optimal policy with the full sequence. Finally, I analyse the evolutionary stability of each strategy, showing that the hybrid strategy dominates when cognitive costs are low but non-zero, while attending to the most recent decision is dominant when costs are high. These results show that agents can employ highly effective social decision-making rules without requiring unrealistic cognitive capacities, and indicate likely ecological variation in the social information different animals attend to.

Defining Deference

Ordinary language often treats deference as an all-or-nothing matter; if one defers to another’s judgment (for example, about where to go to dinner), one effectively lets the other party make the decision. Very few of the doctrines identified by federal courts as instances of deference meet this standard. Instead, the term “deference” is applied in a wide range of circumstances involving varying weights, ranging from Skidmore deference, in which the decision-maker must at least take into account the prior decision but need not give it any pre-fixed degree of weight, to rational basis review, in which the prior decision controls unless it is so absurd that no reasonable person could have reached it on any conceivable set of facts. Any inductively derived definition of deference must capture this range. Accordingly, deference is best defined through an inductive methodology such as “The giving by a legal actor of some measure of consideration or weight to the decision of another actor in exercising the deferring actor’s function.” Deference can be mandatory, because it is commanded by positive law, or discretionary, and it can be justified in particular settings for reasons of legitimacy (legitimation deference), accuracy (epistemological deference), cost (economic deference), or communication (signaling deference).

Digital Discrimination

This chapter focuses on a particular normative concern associated with machine decision-making that has attracted considerable attention in policy debate—the problem of bias in algorithmic systems, which gives rise to various forms of ‘digital discrimination’. Digital discrimination entails treating individuals unfairly, unethically, or just differently based on their personal data that is automatically processed by an algorithm. Digital discrimination often reproduces the existing instances of discrimination in the offline world by either inheriting the biases of prior decision-makers, or simply reflecting widespread prejudices in society. The chapter highlights various forms and sources of digital discrimination, pointing to a rich and growing body of technical research seeking to develop technical responses aimed at correcting for, or otherwise removing, these sources of bias.

University Students’ Value Orientation Toward Integrity Behind Their Decision To Cheat Or Not Cheat In Exams

Organizational values characterize every activity, including the behavior of the members of an organization, and their decision-making. However, there are moments in which the members of the organization violate the values, even though they know they should not. It also happens to university students. This fact brings us to reflect on how the values are interpreted in value orientation. By employing the phenomenological method using Kohlberg’s constructivist theory of moral development stages, this study explored the value orientation towards integrity in business school students’ decisions to cheat or not. The result indicates that even for students who face the same decision to cheat or not, their decision is affected by how they understand the value of integrity, which depends on their value orientation and their cognitive moral development. Most respondents had a mindset of egoistic value orientation, which is more concerned with the benefits and payback when making a decision. Most cases happened without there being a prior decision to cheat; the decision is made at the time of the exam by considering the emerging internal or external situational factors.

Combining Time and Physical Workload Analysis on Cold Press Working Group for Operator Management in Manufacturing Company

Efficiency improvement in manufacturing company is essential to ensure the cycle of continuous improvement. Prior decision was reducing 6 operators in the cold press team work into 5 workers. Thus significant changes, of course, would resulted in the change of the workload experienced by each operator. The research objective in this study is validating from the productivity of the reduction conducted by measuring the workload with combining Full Time Equivalent (FTE) and Cardiovascular Load Percentage (%CVL). The result states that there are differences in measurement results workload from both methods. Based on the FTE method, all Cold Press operator’s workload has an index in average of 1.4128 with all was above 1.28 indicating the “Overload” condition. On the other hand, based on the physical workload method obtained that % CVL in average was 8.272% with all operator was below 30% which indicates the workload of all Cold Press operators were in a not experiencing fatigue category. Keywords: Workload, FTE, %CVL, productivity, Physical Workload.

Introduction

This introductory chapter discusses the judiciary problems that may arise from the increasing number of multi-fora disputes in the international arbitration. International arbitration is widely considered to be the principal method of dispute resolution for international commercial disputes, which commonly involve multiple parties, contracts, and issues. The multiplicity of the subjects involved in the disputes often results in conflicts concerning the proper forum to be applied, and give rise to the question: if a national court renders a decision on the jurisdiction of the arbitral tribunal, would the arbitrators be bound by the prior decision, or could they decide anew whether they have jurisdiction? If the arbitrators are bound by a national court judgment, the parties’ arbitration agreement may be frustrated. On the other hand, if the arbitrators are not bound by the prior judgment and decide that there is a valid arbitration agreement, parallel court and arbitration proceedings may ensue.

Escalation Of Commitment In Groups And The Moderating Effects Of Information Framing

The escalation effect occurs when managers elect to commit additional resources to a project where the unfavorable economic prospects indicate the project should be canceled. It has been suggested that the context in which the decision is reached (e.g., a managers responsibility for the original decision to invest in a project) may influence a managers decision choices (Staw 1981). Bazerman (1984) suggests that framing of information used by decision-makers may explain the escalation effect. This study investigates whether responsibility for a prior decision will affect decision-making in interactive groups in an escalation situation. Additionally, this study looks at the effect of framing on the groups decisions and examines the ability of framing to moderate the escalation effect resulting from responsibility. The results suggest that groups are subject to escalating commitment when they are responsible for a prior related investment decision. The results also provide evidence that groups are influenced by the framing of decision-relevant information, and further, that the framing may have the ability to moderate the effects of responsibility. Implications for organizational decision making are provided.

Non-Discrimination and the Many Faces of Private Law in the Union – Some Thoughts After the “Test-Achats” Judgment

The case discusses the “Test-Achats” judgment of the ECJ in the overall context of the EU-non-discrimination principle in relations traditionally governed by private law and party autonomy. This principle has come from employment law and has been extended to consumption matters, at least with regard to such incriminated characteristics as gender, ethnic origin, and nationality. Even if the consequences of the ECJ judgment on the insurance market, including protection of insured persons themselves, by imposing “unisex”-tariffs from 21.12.2012 on may be viewed critically, the Court only draws the legal consequences of a prior decision of the EU legislator which cannot be delayed for an indefinite time span by the Member States (author's headnote).