Maritime law registries in South Africa and Greece : transactions to be registered, legal effects of registration

The importance of ships to a nation, either in peace or war time is great and has been recognised since early times. The fact that ships and seamen, wherever they come from, or to whichever nation they belong, are exposed to the same dangers and are dealing with the same problems, has made maritime law uniform. This system of law has been one of the few, if not the only one that has been uniform for a period of thousands of years. Its rules were formed by the customs of the sea and the effort of seamen to overcome their · · common problems with the result that, although the political and social circumstances on land changed very often, the principles of maritime law remained unchanged

Is diversity (un)biased? Project selection decisions in executive committees

Problem definition: Is a committee comprised of more or less cognitively diverse members better at approving the “good” projects and rejecting the “bad” ones? Academic/Practical Relevance: We contribute in the operations management literature by accounting for the fact that critical selection decisions are often made by a committee rather than a single decisionmaker. Understanding how the magnitude of diversity affects the decision quality of such a committee is an important consideration for practitioners. Results: We utilize a game-theoretic model to show that diverse perspectives are rarely “averaged out”. Instead, diversity leads to systematic biases in project selection. To mitigate the effect of diverse perspectives, managers need to uncover the sources of diversity: do they originate from different individual valuations and preferences, or they express different assimilations of the information that arises during the project execution? We show that this distinction is crucial. Higher preference diversity always leads to higher likelihood of making the wrong decision. Higher interpretive diversity, may be beneficial for the organization. Managerial Implications: A clear managerial action is the need to identify and reduce such preference diversity. Senior management can achieve this by highlighting the need for more transparency in the pipeline of the business units. Moreover, our analysis shows that interpretive diversity can be a powerful managerial lever to influence the propensity for Type I and II errors. The latter might be easier to manage than the organizational structure

How do you search for the best alternative? Experimental evidence on search strategies to solve complex problems

Through a controlled two-stage experiment, we explore the performance of solution search strategies to resolve problems of varying complexity. We validate theoretical results that collaborative group structures may search more effectively in problems of low complexity, but are outperformed by nominal structures at higher complexity levels. We call into question the dominance of the nominal group technique. Further close examination of search strategies reveals important insights: the number of generated solutions, a typical proxy for good problem-solving performance, does not consistently drive performance benefits across different levels of problem complexity. The average distance of search steps, and the problem space coverage play also critical roles. Moreover, their effect is contingent on complexity:a wider variety of solutions is helpful only in complex problems. Overall, we caution management about the limitations of generic, albeit common rules-of-thumb such as "generate as many ideas as possible”

Product selling vs. pay-per-use service: a strategic analysis of competing business models

We present a model that suggests possible explanations for the observed proliferation of “pay-per-use" (PPU) business models over the last two decades. Delivering “fractions" of a product as a service offers a cost advantage to customers with lower usage but requires extra delivery costs. Previous research focused on information goods (with negligible production costs) and predicted that PPU, when arising as a differentiation to selling in equilibrium, fundamentally achieves lower profits than selling. We extend the theory by covering goods with any production cost, in duopolistic competition. We show that PPU business models can be more profitable than selling (especially at mid-range production costs), as long as their delivery costs are not too high, a requirement that is more easily fulfilled as new technologies reduce these costs. Moreover, if firms are imperfectly informed about their customers' usage profiles, PPU's effective pricing of customers' varying usage offers an additional advantage over selling. This requires companies to employ accounting methods that do not inappropriately allocate production costs over stochastic usage levels. If PPU service provision suffers from queueing inefficiencies, this does not fundamentally change the relative profitability of the PPU and selling models, provided that PPU providers can attract sufficiently high demand to benefit from pooling economies

What drives the Acceptability of Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA)? Modeling acceptability of ISA

6370 individuals responded in Belgium (Flanders region) and 1158 persons in The Netherlands on a web-survey about ISA. A model has been estimated, by using SEM, to find out which predefined indicators would be relevant to define the acceptability of ISA. Background factors, contextual issues, and ISA-device related factors were used as indicators to predict the level of acceptability. The factors that were used in the model were based on the methods used in past ISA trials, acceptance and accep-tability theories and models. The effectiveness of ISA (1), equity (2), effectiveness of ITS (3) and personal and social aims (4), were the four variables that had the largest total effect on the acceptability of ISA. Effectiveness was found a relevant predictor for acceptance in many trials (Morsink et al, 2006). The model showed that the willingness of drivers to adopt ISA increases if they experience the system in practice: if people are convinced that ISA will assist to maintain the legal speed in different speed zones, the acceptance will be higher (Van der Pas et al., 2008). Hence, trials seem a good way to demonstrate the effectiveness of ISA. However, trials typically do not allow many people to try out ISA. Therefore, communi-cation strategies that focus on the ISA-effectiveness would be helpful to convince people about the benefits of using such a system. Often when new driver support technologies are intro-duced – especially when it could restrict certain freedom in driving – a majority of the population is reluctant when it comes to ‘buy or use’ the system. In some studies (see Morsink et al., 2006; Marchau et al., 2010) the willingness to pay was reported to be a good predictor for acceptability. However, in the present study the effect of willing-ness to pay was very low or even absent; hence it may be as-sumed that better indicators are put in the model than the willing-ness to pay. With respect to context indicators, ‘personal and social aims’ seemed to be the variable with the highest influence on accep-tability. Drivers, who rate social aims above personal aims with respect to speed and speeding, will accept ISA more. Personal and social aims had also a high influence on most of the device spe-cific indicators. Furthermore, drivers who speed for their personal benefit were found to rather speed more often. Drivers who speed in high-speed zones would also be less inclined to accept ISA. This is in line with previous findings (e.g. Jamson et al., 2006), frequent speeders would support ISA less; those drivers who would benefit most of ISA would be less likely to use it. This is an important finding when considering the strategies for implementing ISA. Some studies (e.g. Morsink et al., 2006) indicated that to increase the acceptability, implementation strategies and campaigns could focus on other benefits of ISA (like reducing speeding tickets, emissions etc.). According to our study these secondary effects have rather small effects to increase acceptability. Drivers who like to speed would even care less for these secondary benefits of ISA. The youngest group of drivers (<25 years old) would influence responsibility awareness negatively. These younger drivers are also less convinced that certain behaviour or circumstances could cause accidents. Many studies indicated that young drivers over-estimate their own driving skills, drive faster and are less aware of accident causes (Shinar et al., 2001). For the implementation of ISA – although there is no direct relationship between younger age and acceptability – a different strategy is needed to convince this group of drivers. Awareness campaigns and communication should be deployed during their education, however, road safety education and training stops during secondary school or higher education (OECD, 2006). Drivers between 25 and 45 years old would also be less inclined to accept ISA, mainly considered out of indirect effects in the esti-mated model. This group of drivers may be labelled as one of the most active groups of drivers. Another aspect is that both of the "significant found age groups were influenced by social norms. This may be very important in implementation strate-gies. For instance, role models could be used in ISA driving. This strategy was also used in the Belgian trial to gain more publicity and attention. The positive image and the improved information communication of ISA as a possible measure in road-safety have led to several voted resolutions in the Belgian federal parliament and senate (Vlassenroot et al. 2007)

The limits of planned obsolescence for conspicuous durable goods

An extensive body of literature argues for the benefits of planned obsolescence, the strategy of designing products with low durability to induce repeat purchases from the consumers and allow the firm to sell a larger volume. Yet, several firms avoid planned obsolescence and instead offer products with high durability. In this paper, we offer a demand-side rationale for a high-durability product design strategy: the exclusivity seeking consumer behavior associated with conspicuous consumption. In the presence of consumers who value exclusivity, we find that firms benefit from designing products with higher durability in conjunction with a high-price, low-volume introduction strategy. A higher durability in such a context leads to greater resale value, allowing the firm to charge a higher price and lower the sales volume to achieve the product exclusivity valued by the consumers. This contrasts with the planned obsolescence strategy that capitalizes on the high sales volume achieved by setting a low new product price. We also show that offering higher durability and charging a higher price are complementary levers to respond to consumers who value exclusivity. Our analysis unearths insights regarding the effect of exclusivity-seeking behavior on a firm’s demand and pricing. We show that firms’ durability choice may explain the joint increase in price and demand for conspicuous goods

Behavioral Microfoundations of New Practice Adoption: The Effects of Rewards, Training and Population Dynamics

Organizations face challenges when trying to effectively introduce new operational practices that substitute for existing ones. We study how the dynamics due to social comparisons between employees give rise to individual strategic considerations and eventually shape the organizational adoption outcome. We develop an evolutionary game theory model that accounts for these microlevel individual adoption decisions and their impact on macrolevel population adoption equilibria. Social comparisons invoke dynamics that expand the possible outcomes beyond the traditional nonadoption versus full-adoption dichotomy. Specifically, ahead-seeking social comparisons drive the long-term coexistence of practices because employees seek to differentiate their choices from those of others. Meanwhile, behind-averse comparisons create a bandwagon effect that determines adoption depending on the initial fraction of adopters—that is, employees who are trained upfront. These dynamics are robust to various settings: different conceptualizations of social comparisons, each employee responding to more than one kind of social comparison, and nonhomogeneous social comparisons across employees. Moreover, they are material to organizations that seek to maximize their profit when introducing a new practice, by setting the levels of upfront training and adoption rewards. Our results call for senior managers to account for such behavioral traits when managing the introduction of new practices. Profitable adoption critically relies upon matching rewards and training to the type of social comparison