Knowledge Sharing and the Psychological Contract: Managing Knowledge Workers across Different Stages of Employment

Purpose – An employee’s willingness to share knowledge may be contingent on whether the organization equitably fulfills its reward obligations. This paper seeks to examine how managers and organizations can be vehicles for managing psychological contract perceptions favoring knowledge sharing among current employees, newcomers, and applicants. Design/methodology/approach – The authors propose an integrative model to discuss psychological contract issues within each stage of employment and HRM initiatives that can encourage knowledge-sharing behaviors. Findings – The implicit psychological contracts that often influence knowledge worker attitudes for sharing knowledge are easy to overlook and challenging to manage. Managers must properly assess the nature of psychological contracts maintained by such workers so that knowledge-sharing messages address employees’ key motivators. Different psychological contracts exist at various stages of employment. Several prescriptions for effectively managing each type of psychological contract and reducing perceptions of PC breach were offered. Research limitations/implications – Empirical studies should seek to investigate whether different psychological contracts actually exist within a field setting. In addition, how workers move between transitional, transactional, balanced and relational psychological contracts should be empirically examined. Originality/value – The authors sought to better understand the different psychological contract perceptions of knowledge workers at various stages of employment, which has not been done to date. Such workers are keenly aware of the impact of their knowledge and effective management for sharing rather than hoarding becomes a critical success factor for knowledge-intensive organizations

Building an honest microfinance organization: Embezzlement and the optimality of rigid repayment schedules and joint liability

We consider the agency problem of a staff member managing microfinancing programs, who can abuse his discretion to embezzle borrowers' repayments. The fact that most borrowers of microfinancing programs are illiterate and live in rural areas where transportation costs are very high make staff's embezzlement particularly relevant as is documented by Mknelly and Kevane (2002). We study the trade-off between the optimal rigid lending contract and the optimal discretionary one and find that a rigid contract is optimal when the audit cost is larger than gains from insurance. Our analysis explains rigid repayment schedules used by the Grameen bank as an optimal response to the bank staff's agency problem. Joint liability reduces borrowers' burden of respecting the rigid repayment schedules by providing them with partial insurance. However, the same insurance can be provided by borrowers themselves under individual liability through a side-contract.Microfinance, Group Lending, Joint Liability, Embezzlement, Hierarchy, Contract

Enforcement against contract violation in Chinese construction projects: impacts of trust and perceived intentionality

Violations happen frequently in construction projects due to opportunistic intentions and/or the lack of awareness of obligations and/or honest attempts to react to unforeseen circumstances. Dealing with contract violations plays an important role in managing projects. The aim of the research is to investigate the impact of trust, analyzed in terms of the goodwill-based and competence-based trust, on both contract and social enforcement after a contract violation. A questionnaire survey, partially based on semi-structured interviews, was used for data collection. All the data is from the Chinese construction industry since it provides a fertile context to explore the research questions. The results show that: 1) reputation is used as social enforcement in practice and the severity of it is reflected by the scope of the disclosure, 2) the two dimensions of trust have opposite influences on the severity of contract and social enforcement via different mediating effects of perceived intentionality. Specifically, goodwill-based trust reduces the severity of enforcement via decreasing perceived intentionality, while competence-based trust increases the severity of enforcement by increasing perceived intentionality. A comprehensive and nuanced understanding for managing contract violation is generated in this research, which will help project managers to manage the contract violation and the interfirm relationships more effectively

Cooperatives and Area Yield Insurance:A Theoretical Analysis

The purpose of this paper is to theoretically investigate the potential benefits that arise from a cooperative selling a government subsidized area-yield contract (i.e., the Group Risk Plan). The indeminities in area-yield contracts are triggered by a geographically determined yield (e.g., a county-wide yield average) instead of the more conventional individual actual production history. Therefore, an area-yield contract would be appropriate for managing the cooperative's systemic throughput risk. The cooperative would also capture some of the substantial government subsidies that are normally given to a private insurance company. Our primary finding is that farmers should be indifferent when considering the decision to purchase area-yield insurance from a private company or encompass that business in their cooperative. We derive this result for the specific case of costless insurance and assume a Pareto Optimal contract. Under these assumptions, the government subsidies that the cooperative would hope to capture are simply a net deduction in their premiums. In other words, the benefit they capture from the subsidies is the same when they purchase the insurance from an outside firm or internally.Cooperatives, Area Yield Insurance, Optimal indemnity

Hedging versus not hedging: strategies for managing foreign exchange transaction exposure

This paper compares a number of strategies for managing foreign exchange exposures. The strategies are never hedging, hedging every exposure using a forward exchange contract, and hedging on selective occasions using a forward exchange contract. With regard to the selective hedging, the decision as to whether to hedge or not depends on the future spot exchange rate as determined by a number of forecasting techniques. The techniques include the random walk, the large premia model and a volatility model. The paper considers the USD vis a vis the AUD, SGD and JPY. The results are mixed and show that for the period 1992 to 2003 the Australian exporter is better off always hedging while the Singapore and Japanese exporters are better off never hedging. The various management strategies are compared using Sharpe’s model and the minimum variance model though it seems the results are not sensitive to use of either.Selective foreign exchange currency hedging; random walk; large premia model;

Harvey: A Greybox Fuzzer for Smart Contracts

We present Harvey, an industrial greybox fuzzer for smart contracts, which are programs managing accounts on a blockchain. Greybox fuzzing is a lightweight test-generation approach that effectively detects bugs and security vulnerabilities. However, greybox fuzzers randomly mutate program inputs to exercise new paths; this makes it challenging to cover code that is guarded by narrow checks, which are satisfied by no more than a few input values. Moreover, most real-world smart contracts transition through many different states during their lifetime, e.g., for every bid in an auction. To explore these states and thereby detect deep vulnerabilities, a greybox fuzzer would need to generate sequences of contract transactions, e.g., by creating bids from multiple users, while at the same time keeping the search space and test suite tractable. In this experience paper, we explain how Harvey alleviates both challenges with two key fuzzing techniques and distill the main lessons learned. First, Harvey extends standard greybox fuzzing with a method for predicting new inputs that are more likely to cover new paths or reveal vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Second, it fuzzes transaction sequences in a targeted and demand-driven way. We have evaluated our approach on 27 real-world contracts. Our experiments show that the underlying techniques significantly increase Harvey's effectiveness in achieving high coverage and detecting vulnerabilities, in most cases orders-of-magnitude faster; they also reveal new insights about contract code.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1807.0787

Cross-Hedging Distillers Dried Grains Using Corn and Soybean Meal Futures Contracts

Ethanol mandates have led to an increase in the production of distillers dried grains (DDGs), a co-product of ethanol production that is incorporated into livestock rations. As with most competitive industries, there is some level of price risk in handling DDGs, and there is no DDG futures contract available for managing price risk. Commonly, DDGs are hedged using only corn futures. Our results suggest that cross-hedge risk may be reduced by including soybean meal futures in an encompassing cross-hedge strategy. Further, we also conclude soybean meal futures currently may be slightly more effective at reducing risk than in the past.cross-hedge, distillers dried grains, ethanol, price risk, Agribusiness, Demand and Price Analysis,