Creating Public Sector Pedestals and Examining Falls from Grace: Examining ICMA Ethical Sanctions

The International City and County Management Association, (ICMA), ensures that members who engage in misconduct are identified and sanctioned. Dozens of public sanctions have been issued over the past 20 years, and this paper considers the substance of these penalties. The article identifies the processes used to ensure compliance with its code of ethics. We report the types of ethical violations ICMA has discovered through these processes. A more systematic way of recording what is occurring is necessary if strategies are to be devised to help current and upcoming public administrators avoid similar violations. Finally, we ask public administrators who have been sanctioned by ICMA to explain how and why the ethics violations occurred and the impact of the public censure on their personal lives and careers.     

The British general election of 2010 under different voting rules

The 2010 British election resulted in what the British refer to as a “hung Parliament” for the first time in over a generation. This result further heightened the debate over the fairness and utility of the nation’s centuries-old first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. Survey data are used to simulate the election outcome under four different electoral systems beyond FPTP: round-robin pair-wise comparisons, the Borda count, the alternative vote, and Coombs' method. Results suggest that in 2010, the Liberal-Democrats were Condorcet preferred to all other parties and would have won a national election under every tested method except the alternative vote, the method supported by the Liberal-Democrats during the referendum in May 2011 and, of course, FPTP as actually used.     

美国数字电视专利分析

一、问题 美国数字电视专利近几年一直是家电业普遍关注的问题,也是媒体的热点话题.美国市场作为全球市场的前沿和制高点,其数字电视(Digital Television 以下简称DTV)的发展进程备受关注也是理所当然.     

Bundled Discounts, Leverage Theory, and Downstream Competition

Under plausible circumstances, a monopolist in one market canuse its control of prices in that market to force competingdownstream buyers to sign tying contracts that will lever itsmonopoly into another market. Specifically, the monopolist ofthe tying good can place each downstream buyer in a prisoner'sdilemma by offering them more favorable pricing on the tyinggood if they sign a requirements-tying contract covering thetied good. Since a buyer benefits on receiving more favorablepricing on the tying good and the competitors do not, and suffersif the competitors receive more favorable pricing on the tyinggood and the buyer does not, buyers will sign the tying contracteven when they would earn higher profits if they all refusedto sign. This enables a monopolist in one market to inefficientlyexclude an entrant in another market.     

How leadership enhances employees’ knowledge sharing: the intervening roles of relational and organizational identification

Knowledge exchange among employees is crucial to organizational effectiveness. Leadership can enhance or detract from employees’ willingness to share knowledge. This study examines how leadership affects knowledge sharing in a knowledge-intensive work setting. It proposes and tests a model which posits that (1) transformational leadership affects the extent to which employees identify with their manager; (2) this relational identification, mediated by the quality of LMX (Leader-Member Exchange), leads to greater identification with the organization and its goals, which in turn results in greater knowledge sharing. The sample consisted of two hundred and three R&D employees engaged in advanced technological projects. Path analysis results indicated that there are both direct and indirect (through LMX) relationships between transformational leadership and relational identification: relational identification promotes organizational identification which, in turn, is positively related to knowledge sharing. These results highlight the importance of transformational leadership and LMX for promoting relational and organizational identification, thereby facilitating employee knowledge sharing.