ETARA PC version 3.3 user's guide: Reliability, availability, maintainability simulation model

A user's manual describing an interactive, menu-driven, personal computer based Monte Carlo reliability, availability, and maintainability simulation program called event time availability reliability (ETARA) is discussed. Given a reliability block diagram representation of a system, ETARA simulates the behavior of the system over a specified period of time using Monte Carlo methods to generate block failure and repair intervals as a function of exponential and/or Weibull distributions. Availability parameters such as equivalent availability, state availability (percentage of time as a particular output state capability), continuous state duration and number of state occurrences can be calculated. Initial spares allotment and spares replenishment on a resupply cycle can be simulated. The number of block failures are tabulated both individually and by block type, as well as total downtime, repair time, and time waiting for spares. Also, maintenance man-hours per year and system reliability, with or without repair, at or above a particular output capability can be calculated over a cumulative period of time or at specific points in time

Self-Handicapping and Managers’ Duty of Care

This symposium essay focuses on the relationship between managers\u27 duty of care and self-handicapping, or constructing obstacles to performance with the goal of influencing subsequent explanations about outcomes. Conventional explanations for failures of caretaking by managers have focused on motives (greed) and incentives (agency costs). This account of manager behavior has led some modern jurists, concerned about recent corporate scandals, to advocate for stronger deterrent measures to realign manager and shareholder incentives. * Self-handicapping theory, by contrast, teaches that bad manager behavior may occur even when incentives are well-aligned. Highly successful individuals in particular come to fear the pressure of replicating past success. To avoid the regret associated with the future failure that they anticipate, such individuals then create hurdles (through active or passive self-sabotage) or excuses. When failure comes, individuals hope to shift attention from their merits to the handicap. Research shows that self-handicapping works. Indeed, managers in failing firms who self-handicap may escape with their reputations and compensation burnished. * In this essay, I summarize an extensive body of research on self-handicapping that surprisingly has not been well explored by corporate law theorists. I then suggest that modern corporate scandals traditionally understood as products of failures of monitoring - like Enron - might be better explained in part as a function of self-handicapping by managers. This explanation supports recent efforts to move beyond a purely carrot-and-stick model of corporate governance. Finally, I briefly discuss mechanisms to reduce self-handicapping by corporate officers, in particular, making them self-aware and selecting executives less prone to engage in this type of wasteful activity. The law has a potential role to play in this process, but its proper focus is directors\u27 negligence in hiring, not managers\u27 failures in taking business risks

How Relevant is Jury Rationality?

This essay reviews Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide by Cass Sunstein, et al. The book provides a good example of a recent trend: the use of behavioralist research to justify surprisingly paternalistic legal reforms. While critics of behavioralism often contend that its theoretical foundations are weak, this approach is unlikely to prove an effective rejoinder in the new debate about what kinds of paternalism are made permissible by human irrationality . A better approach: (1) notes the lack of a nexus between behavioralism and the supposed emergent necessity of paternalist reforms; and (2) suggests that juror unwillingness to apply cost-benefit formula provides the true motivating force for the new paternalism in law and economics. Rather than asking if jurors act rationally (and punishing them if they will not), we should instead question what law and economists mean when they use the word rational as an initial matter

Colliding Worlds of Dispute Resolution: Towards a Unified Field Theory of ADR

In the essay that follows, I advocate for greater acceptance of the diversity of belief and practice in the field of dispute resolution and contend that the unifying elements of law and dispute resolution practice predominate over those elements that divide practitioners. After providing definitions of some of the primary forms of dispute resolution (in Part II), the article describes tensions in the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) field (in Part III), quoting some of the harsh criticism that mediators, Collaborative practitioners, and other dispute resolvers have leveled at each other. Part III also expresses the concern that demonization and harsh rhetoric may distort the process of choosing an appropriate dispute resolution process to match the specific needs in an individual case, and may be hard to justify as a matter of logic when one considers the vast diversity of dispute resolution cases and processes. Part IV describes both the blurring of boundaries that has occurred in the ADR field and the increasing hybridization of processes within the ADR field, as well as the positive value in such cross-fertilization. Part V offers empirical data collected from 199 divorce cases in which various processes were used-ranging from mediation and Collaborative Practice at one end of the spectrum to litigation at the other end. Part VI advances the view that not only are there broad common elements among the various forms of dispute resolution but there are also common elements that unite the practice of law and dispute resolution practice; accordingly, while there are differing legal and ethical principles that guide. Part VII describes the common elements that unite the field of dispute resolution and advocates for a big tent philosophy that will enable practitioners of all kinds-lawyers, mediators, and others-to work more successfully together and do a better job of matching clients\u27 needs with the services that we offer

The Best Puffery Article Ever

This Article provides the first extensive legal treatment of an important defense in the law of fraud and contracts: puffery. Legal authorities commonly say they make decisions about whether defendants should be able to utter exaggerated, optimistic, lies based on assumptions about buyer behavior, concluding that consumers do not rely on such speech. However, as the Article shows, such analyses are proxies for a deeper analytical question: does the speech encourage or discourage a type of consumption activity that the court deems welfare maximizing? The Article presents a novel constitutional analysis of puffery doctrine that focuses on the meaning of misleading speech, a term of art at the heart of the Supreme Court\u27s contested and still evolving commercial speech jurisprudence. Missing from that jurisprudence is a satisfactory account of how consumers and investors react to speech that is not literally false but which has false implications. I present such an account, focused on the incentives and capabilities of sellers to exploit buyers\u27 cognitive vulnerabilities. I draw on economic, marketing, psychology and consumption literatures. * I conclude by offering a novel liability proposal. Because legal authorities are incapable of satisfactorily drawing a line between harmful and innocuous puffery, the law should make sellers presumptively liable if their speech contains exaggerated, but vague boasts. This approach would place the onus on sellers to balance the costs and benefits of puffery, and thus lead both to more satisfying doctrine and a more optimal level of fraud

Introduction

My introduction to the issues that the Uniform Mediation Act seeks to resolve occurred about a dozen years ago when a senior partner at Hill & Barlow, the Boston law firm where I practiced for 17 years, came to me with a question. He wanted to know whether he could recommend mediation as a safe process for discussing some delicate tax issues that had arisen during the breakup of a business partnership. Evidently the partners had taken some aggressive positions on their partnership tax returns, and one of the big issues in the dissolution of the partnership was the allocation of the potential tax liability. No one is going to feel safe discussing these issues with a third-party, the senior partner said, unless we can be fairly confident about confidentiality