Modelling long-distance route choice using mobile phone call detail record data: A case study of Senegal

The growing mobile phone penetration rates have led to the emergence of large-scale call detail records (CDRs) that could serve as a low-cost data source for travel behaviour modelling. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no previous study evaluating the potential of CDR data in the context of route choice behaviour modelling. Being event-driven, the data are discontinuous and only able to yield partial trajectories, thus presenting serious challenges for route identification. This paper proposes techniques for inferring the users' chosen routes or subsets of their likely routes from partial CDR trajectories, as well as data fusion with external sources of information such as route costs, and then adapts the broad choice framework to the current modelling scenario. The model results show that CDR data can capture the expected travel behaviour and the derived values of travel time are found to be realistic for the study area

Fairness, envy, guilt and greed: building equity considerations into agency theory

In this article we examine the extent to which fairness considerations are salient to senior executives, and consider the implications for agency theory, tournament theory and the design of top-management incentives. We look for patterns in a unique data set of senior executive preferences and seek explanations for these patterns using a model of fairness first advanced by Fehr and Schmidt in 1999. We propose a number of amendments to Fehr and Schmidt’s model. We challenge some of the standard tenets of agency theory and tournament theory, demonstrating why equity considerations should be taken into account. We add to the growing literature on behavioural agency theory

Relational Contracts and Organizational Capabilities

A large literature identifies unique organizational capabilities as a potent source of competitive advantage, yet our knowledge of why capabilities fail to diffuse more rapidly—particularly in situations in which competitors apparently have strong incentives to adopt them and a well-developed understanding of how they work—remains incomplete. In this paper we suggest that competitively significant capabilities often rest on managerial practices that in turn rely on relational contracts (i.e., informal agreements sustained by the shadow of the future). We argue that one of the reasons these practices may be difficult to copy is that effective relational contracts must solve the twin problems of credibility and clarity and that although credibility might, in principle, be instantly acquired, clarity may take time to develop and may interact with credibility in complex ways so that relational contracts may often be difficult to build

Renegotiation and Relative Performance Evaluation: Why an Informative Signal may be Useless

Although Holmström's informativeness criterion provides a theoretical foundation for the controllability principle and inter firm relative performance evaluation, empirical and field studies provide only weak evidence on such practices. This paper refines the traditional informativeness criterion by abandoning the conventional full-commitment assumption. With the possibility of renegotiation, a signal's usefulness in incentive contracting depends on its information quality, not simply on whether the signal is informative. This paper derives conditions for determining when a signal is useless and when it is useful. In particular, these conditions will be met when the signal's information quality is either sufficiently poor or sufficiently rich

Attitudes toward westbound refugees in the East German press

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67107/2/10.1177_002200277001400303.pd

Measurement scheduling for recursive team estimation

We consider a decentralized LQG measurement scheduling problem in which every measurement is costly, no communication between observers is permitted, and the observers' estimation errors are coupled quadratically. This setup, motivated by considerations from organization theory, models measurement scheduling problems in which cost, bandwidth, or security constraints necessitate that estimates be decentralized, although their errors are coupled. We show that, unlike the centralized case, in the decentralized case the problem of optimizing the time integral of the measurement cost and the quadratic estimation error is fundamentally stochastic, and we characterize the ε-optimal open-loop schedules as chattering solutions of a deterministic Lagrange optimal control problem. Using a numerical example, we describe also how this deterministic optimal control problem can be solved by nonlinear programming.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45246/1/10957_2005_Article_BF02275352.pd