Reducing the risk of insurance fraud by appearances of online surveillance

The efforts to tackle the growing problem of insurance fraud have focused primarily on examining suspicious claims and claimants after the accident has happened, ignoring a risk-reduction opportunity that exists even before the policy is purchased. The current paper aims to address this gap. In Study 1, a group of 40 participants were asked to input their personal details on a simulated comparison site. It showed that the numbers of obtained online quotes (i.e., how many times participants obtained them) and time spent to produce them by completing all the relevant information were positively correlated with misrepresentation of personal details for financial gain. In Study 2, a separate group of 120 participants took part in navigating a different simulated comparison site. The results suggest that equipping the site with mere appearances of online surveillance reduced the time that they took to input their details and minimized their manipulation for financial gain. Elaborating on the important theoretical and practical implications, the paper identifies a relatively easy and effective method of discouraging prospective policyholders from misrepresenting their details online.     

Poverty and Survival

A recent literature highlights the uncertainty concerning whether economic growth has any causal protective effect on health and survival. But equal rates of growth often deliver unequal rates of poverty reduction and absolute deprivation is more clearly relevant. Using state-level panel data for India, we contribute the first estimates of the impact of changes in poverty on infant survival. We identify a significant within-state relationship which persists conditional upon state income, indicating the size of survival gains from redistribution in favour of households below the poverty line. The poverty elasticity declines over time after 1981. It is invariant to controlling for income inequality but diminished upon controlling for education, fertility and state health expenditure, and eliminated once we introduce controls for omitted trends.     

Collective Leadership and Context in Public Administration: Bridging Public Leadership Research and Leadership Studies

This article challenges the view that public leadership research should maintain a separate perspective in the study of public leadership. It discusses the benefits of further embedding the public leadership research domain within leadership studies, constructing a cross‐fertilization that contributes to advance both. The article maps key concerns in relational leadership theories, contrasting them with current work in the public leadership research domain and offering suggestions to close the gap. It highlights public leadership scholarship's competitive advantage to contribute to theorizing about leadership, given the importance of context for building contemporary theories of relational leadership.     

Quantitative evaluation of europium in blue ballpoint pen inks/offset printing inks tagged with europium thenoyltrifluoroacetonate by spectrofluorometry and ICP-AES

Tagging of writing/printing inks with suitable inorganic taggants such as rare-earth chelates has the potential to help document examiners identify fraud in sensitive written/printed documents. Selection of rare-earth chelates as taggants primarily depends on the satisfactory sensitivity of analytical determination and the absence of the taggants in normal varieties of inks used for document writing/printing. Spectrofluorometric determination of trace amounts of europium in blue ballpoint pen inks and offset printing inks tagged with europium thenoyltrifluoroacetonate was carried out with sodium tungstate solution. Sodium tungstate acts as a specific reagent that enhances the fluorescence intensity of the Eu3+ ion. The excitation and emission wavelengths are 270 nm and 605 nm respectively. The results were compared with the data obtained with ICP-AES. Satisfactory recoveries were observed with precision better than 5% RSD and comparable accuracy. Under the optimized experimental conditions, detection limits and quantitation limits were determined. The detection limits obtained by spectrofluorometry and ICP-AES were 0.01 microg/mL and 0.006 microg/mL respectively whereas the limits of quantitation were about 0.03 microg/mL and 0.018 microg/mL respectively. The spectrofluorometric method is rapid, selective, sensitive and accurate for the determination of europium in blue ballpoint pen ink and offset printing inks and may be suitable for application in the examination of sensitive documents to aid in document related crime investigation. The advantages and limitations of the tagging approach and proposed analytical techniques are discussed.     

Understanding Cooperative Behavior in Labor Management Cooperation: A Theory-Building Exercise

This article proposes a theory of how mandated institutional cooperation transforms into individual cooperative behavior. Using qualitative strategies, we draw insights about cooperation in three public-sector efforts of labor-management cooperation (LMC). We report an association between critical shifts in the roles of stakeholders and the change from adversarial to cooperative labor relations. While managers became team players along with their employees, labor representatives assumed managerial responsibilities. These changes were also associated with a service-oriented perspective, better understanding of the other's experiences, and a view of cooperation as partnership. At the heart of these transformations, we found critical changes in communication patterns associated with incrementally growing levels of trust. We propose a model that depicts the links between collective and individual levels of organizational action related to LMC. We conclude that the positive shifts in mental models regarding work and the value of cooperation justify the promotion of LMC efforts.     

Philosophy and feminism

Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus (eds) Women in Western Political Philosophy (Wheatsheaf Books) Brighton, Sussex, 1987; Gail Tulloch, Mill and Sexual Equality (Harvester Wheatsheaf) Hemel Hempstead, 1989; Andrea Nye, Feminist Theory and the Philosophies of Man (Routledge) New York, London, 1988.