Gender & Leadership: Do Human Resource Policies and Practices Affect a Woman’s Ascent in Organizations?

As more women began assuming leadership roles in organization, researchers established a number of consistencies in the promotion of women into the upper ranks of an organization. Jonsen, Maznevski, and Schneider have taken a look at these differences in their study, “Gender Differences in Leadership: Believing is Seeing.” In this study they examine three ways in which organizations view women and the Human Resource policies and programs that support these views. Based on this and other research, I conducted a study in hopes of assessing the validity and existence of these views as they are evident in Southern New England organizations. Through interviews with ten prominent women in eight organizations, I have found that these views are evident in many organizations. Some organizations, however, have Human Resource Programs that do not fit into these categories and should therefore be classified into separate paradigms. Additionally, a clear disconnect has been assessed between the programs an organization has in place and those programs that women believe they would benefit the most from. This leads me to believe that there is a lack of communication between employees and human resource departments

On unilateral divorce and the "selection of marriages" hypothesis

This paper revisits the issue of the unilateral divorce law, taking into account that: 1/ the decisions to engage in marriage and then to divorce or to stay married are fundamentally sequential decisions; 2/ household consumption has a large joint component, generating economies of scale. The unilateral divorce law is modelled through the combination of exclusive rights on the marriage dissolution and a monetary transfer to the parent having custody of the children. We analyze the influence of alternative compensation rules both in the short run (probability and efficiency of divorce) and in the long run (selection of marriages). We also show that a decrease in the costs of divorce proceedings has by no means commonplace consequences on marriage ontracting; particularly when consideration of parent's altruism and child support is introduced, more marriages are contracted when the cost of divorces decreases.marriage models, unilateral divorce law, the parents'altruism and protective measures for children

Cognitive dissonance, risk aversion and the pretrial negotiation impasse

There exist evidence that asymmetrical information do exist between litigants: not in a way supporting Bebchuk (1984)'s assumption that defendants' degree of fault is a private information, but more likely, as a result of parties' predictive power of the outcome at trial (Osborne, 1999). In this paper, we suggest an explanation which allows to reconcilie different results obtained in experimental economics. We assume that litigants assess their estimates on the plaintiff's prevailing rate at trial using a two-stage process. First, they manipulate the available information in a way consistent with the self-serving bias. Then, these priors are weighted according to the individual's attitude towards risk. The existence of these two different cognitive biases are well documented in the experimental literature. Within this framework, we study their influence in a model of litigation where the self-serving bias of one party is private information. We show that the influence of the former is consistent with the predictions of the "optimistic approach" of trials. However, we show that the existence of risk aversion and more generally non neutrality to risk, is more dramatic in the sense that it has more unpredictable effects.litigation, pretrial bargaining, cognitive dissonance and self-serving bias, risk aversion

Detection avoidance and deterrence: some paradoxical arithmetics.

This paper extends Malik's (1990) analysis to the case where criminals' avoidance efforts and public expenditures in the detection of criminals are strategic complements in the aggregate technology of control of illegal behaviours. In this set up, we show that whenever criminals' avoidance efforts are more sensitive to the frequency than to the severity of sanctions, it is always socially efficient to set the fine at the maximal possible level. However, several paradoxical consequences occur: there may exist overdeterrence at optimum; more repressive policies lead to less arrestations of offenders while more crimes may be committed; at the same time, the society may be closer to the first best number of crimes.deterrence, avoidance activities, optimal enforcement of law.

An analysis of bounded rationality in judicial litigations: the case with loss/disappointment averses plaintiffs

For psychologists, bounded rationality reflects the presence of cognitive dissonance and/or inconsistency, revealing that people use heuristics (Tversky and Kahneman (1974)) rather than sophisticated processes for the assessment of their beliefs. Recent research analyzing litigations and pretrial negotiations also focused on boundedly rational litigants (Bar-Gill (2005), Farmer and Peccorino (2002)) relying on a naïve modelling of the self-serving bias. Our paper in contrast introduces the case for disappointment averse litigants, relying on the axiomatic of Gull (1991). We show that this leads to a richer analysis in comparative statics; at the same time, this proves to be … disappointing: for the purposes of public policies in favour of the access to justice, recommendations are quite ambiguous.conflicts, litigation, negotiation, disappointment aversion.

Too much or not enough crimes? On the ambiguous effects of repression

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the optimal enforcement of the penal code when criminals invest in a specific class of avoidance activities termed dissembling activities (i.e. self-protection efforts undertaken by criminals to hedge their illegal gains in case of detection and arrestation). We show that the penal law has two screening effects: it separates the population of potential criminals between those who commit the crime and those who do not, and in the former group, between those who undertake dissembling efforts and those who do not. Then, we show that it is never optimal to use less than the maximal fine in contrast to what may occur with avoidance detection (i.e. efforts undertaken in order to reduce the probability of arrestation: Malik (1990)); and furthermore, that the optimal penal code may imply overdeterrence. Finally, we show that any reform of the penal code has ambiguous effects when criminals undertake dissembling activities which are a by-product of illegal activities, since increasing the maximum possible fine may increase or decrease the number of crimes committed and may increase or decrease the proportion of illegal gains hedged by criminals.deterrence; avoidance detection; dissembling activities; optimal enforcement of law

Detection avoidance and deterrence: some paradoxical arithmetics

This paper extends Malik's (1990) analysis to the case where criminals' avoidance efforts and public expenditures in the detection of criminals are strategic complements in the aggregate technology of control of illegal behaviours. In this set up, we show that whenever criminals' avoidance efforts are more sensitive to the frequency than to the severity of sanctions, it is always socially efficient to set the fine at the maximal possible level. However, several paradoxical consequences occur: there may exist overdeterrence at optimum; more repressive policies lead to less arrestations of offenders while more crimes may be committed; at the same time, the society may be closer to the first best number of crimes.deterrence; avoidance activities; optimal enforcement of law

DETERRENCE OF A CRIMINAL TEAM: HOW TO RELY ON ITS MEMBERS' SHORT COMINGS ?

In this paper, we assume that a criminal organization is an agency where the Principal and the Agent have different sensibilities towards the risk of arrestation and punishment, and at the same time have different skills with respect to general organization tasks, crime realization or detection avoidance activities (i.e. allowing to reduce the probability of detection). In this set up, we first compare two regimes of exclusive sanctions (either the sanctions are borne by the Principal/beneficiary of the crime, or they are borne by the Agent/perpetrator of the crime), and we analyze the comparative efficiency of the various instruments which are at the disposal of public authorities to prevent corporation in criminal activities (frequency of control and level of monetary penalties). Finally, we study a case with joint liability.criminal teams, corporate criminality, state dependent risk aversion, deterrence, monetary penalties versus detection.

Safety and the Allocation of Costs in Large Accidents

We study the characteristics of optimal levels of care and distribution of risk in a extended unilateral accident model, where 1/ parties are Rank Dependant Expected Utility maximizers, which allows us to capture two important behavioral characteristics in risk, both pessimism (probability transformation) and risk aversion; 2/ there exists an aggregate/uninsurable risk in case of accident ; 3/ tortfeasors have the opportunity to invest in damages reduction activities having a monetary cost of effort. Important results show that the optimal care is larger than under the risk neutral/small risks case, it depends on the aggregate wealth of society but does not depend on wealth distribution. We then examine whether ordinary liability rules, with or without insurance, can be used to implement the first-best outcome.K13

ON INSURANCE CONTRACT DESIGN FOR LOW PROBABILITY EVENTS

This paper extends the analysis of insurance contracts design to the case of "low probability events", when there is a probability mass on the "no accident-zero loss"-event. The optimality of the deductible clause is discussed both at the theoretical and empirical levels.Optimal insurance design, low probability events.