Panacea or Snake Oil? Interest‐Based Bargaining in the U.S. Airline and Rail Industries

This study of interest‐based bargaining (IBB) examined past usage, current preferences, and future intentions to use this approach in U.S. airline and railroad labor negotiations. Based on a survey of eighty‐four union and management chief negotiators, we found that the personal attributes of the chief negotiator (orientation toward relationships, personal conflict handling style, and competency in IBB approaches) were strong predictors of the past use of IBB. However, personal affinities and styles became irrelevant as experience with IBB accumulated. The negotiator's preferences for IBB in general were strongly correlated to his or her awareness of other carriers' and unions' experiences with IBB, as well as to his or her own direct experience. The negotiator's intention to use IBB in the future was also related to the quality of the contract personally obtained through IBB practices. The study also revealed the unpopularity of IBB among labor negotiators relative to their management counterparts.     

Exposure to Community Violence and Protective and Risky Contexts Among Low Income Urban African American Adolescents: A Prospective Study

This study examined protective and risky companionship and locations for exposure to community violence among African American young adolescents living in high crime, urban areas. The Experience Sampling Method (ESM), an in vivo data collection method, was employed to gather information from 233 students (62% female) over 3 years, beginning in the 6th grade. Questionnaire variables of exposure to community violence were regressed onto ESM companionship and location variables, cross-sectionally and longitudinally, separately for boys and girls. At different points, time spent with parents, in school, and outside in private space was associated with less exposure to violence for boys and girls, while time spent with girls was protective for boys. In addition, time spent outside in public and with older peers was associated with increased risk for boys and girls. These findings are discussed in relation to previous and potential future research, and to strategies to prevent exposure to community violence.     

Fledgling Psychopathic Features and Pathological Delinquency: New Evidence

Fledgling psychopathy is a construct that has proven useful in organizing the nomological network of conduct problems and psychopathology in children and adolescents. Drawing on data from an institutionalized sample of delinquents (n?=?252), the current study compared ADHD, CD, and ADHD+CD youth on psychopathic personality features and their association with pathological delinquency. Youths with ADHD+CD were significantly more psychopathic than their peers. Although callousness, unemotionality, and remorselessness are generally theorized to define the fledgling psychopathic youth, ROC-AUC models found that thrillseeking and impulsiveness were the strongest classification variables for delinquency and violent delinquency at the 90th percentiles. Implications for research and practice with antisocial youth are proffered.     

Validation of tool mark analysis of cut costal cartilage

This study was designed to establish the potential error rate associated with the generally accepted method of tool mark analysis of cut marks in costal cartilage. Three knives with different blade types were used to make experimental cut marks in costal cartilage of pigs. Each cut surface was cast, and each cast was examined by three analysts working independently. The presence of striations, regularity of striations, and presence of a primary and secondary striation pattern were recorded for each cast. The distance between each striation was measured. The results showed that striations were not consistently impressed on the cut surface by the blade's cutting edge. Also, blade type classification by the presence or absence of striations led to a 65% misclassification rate. Use of the classification tree and cross-validation methods and inclusion of the mean interstriation distance decreased the error rate to c. 50%.     

Protection for Whom? Creditor Conflict and Bankruptcy

In the absence of a bankruptcy law, private debt collectionremedies generally result in an ad hoc disposal of the debtor'sassets, which reduces the aggregate value of creditors' claims.We show that creditors will often choose not to write privatecontracts that would prevent this inefficient behavior, eventhough these contracts would be to the mutual benefit of allcreditors. Our analysis therefore provides an economic rationalefor the existence of a bankruptcy law that makes a collectiveresolution compulsory for all creditors. We argue that sucha mandate is a requisite part of any effective bankruptcy system,including proposals for market-based resolutions of insolvency.     

When Fairness is Especially Important: Reactions to Being Inequitably Paid in Communal Relationships

This article focuses on when justice is especially important to people and, in doing so, explores the social conditions under which the importance of justice may change in social interactions. More specifically, the authors examine how different types of relationships affect evaluations of equitable and inequitable situations. It is argued that when people are confronted with friends as interaction partners, as opposed to unknown others, they are motivated to attend to the needs of their friends (Clark & Mills, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 12–24, 1979) and, therefore, they are not only concerned with their own outcomes, but also with their friends’ outcomes. As predicted on the basis of this line of reasoning, two experiments demonstrate that when people’s interaction partners are friends, people are indeed more satisfied with being underpaid and less satisfied with being overpaid compared to when their interaction partners are unknown others. In the discussion, it is argued that these findings suggest that justice is especially important to people when they are in communal relationships.

Persistence of innovation: stylised facts and panel data evidence

This paper investigates whether firms innovate persistently or discontinuously over time using an innovation panel data set on German manufacturing and service firms for the period 1994–2002. It turns out that innovation behaviour is permanent at the firm level to a very large extent. Using a dynamic random effects discrete choice model and a new estimator recently proposed by Wooldridge (2005), I further shed some light on the driving forces for this phenomenon. The econometric results show that past innovation experience is an important determinant for manufacturing as well as for service sector firms, and hence confirm the hypothesis of true state dependence. In addition, the results highlight the important role of knowledge provided by skilled employees and unobserved individual heterogeneity in explaining the persistence of innovation.

The reasonable physician standard: the new malpractice standard of care?

We are in the midst of a tremendous, but essentially unacknowledged, shift in the standard applicable in medical malpractice cases across the United States. The author provides a preliminary survey of this fluid area of the law, and provides rationales for the changes. At the same time, it is not yet clear whether the net impact of these changes will be for the better or for the worse--particularly in light of the simultaneous increase in societal emphasis of cost-conscious care.