11,152 research outputs found
Low-powered incentives
We study low-powered incentives in a model that captures important features of workplaces in which incentive-pay approaches are minimally relevant. Our motivation is that incentive pay, while not rare, is clearly far less common than are agency problems: many firms with agency problems nonetheless pay fixed compensation and offer continued employment to all but those workers judged "unsatisfactory" according to largely subjective criteria. We find that low-powered incentives can achieve efficient outcomes in simple workplaces and function surprisingly well even when the environment is characterized by unobservable performance heterogeneity and a high degree of complementarity among workers.Wages
Economic models of employee motivation
Workers, being human beings, present employers with a range of tricky problems. Humans, unlike filing cabinets, can be crooked, subversive, surly, or indolent, even if they are paid on time. In this article we explore economists' main models of how compensation is used to address employee motivation and how these models help to explain puzzling features of the labor market.Wages ; Management ; Labor market
Valuable jobs and uncertainty
Little attention has been given to the link between variation in a firm's circumstances and the resolution of agency problems that pervade the relationship between a firm and its employees. We construct stochastic versions of standard efficiency-wage and performance-bonding models and find that this connection has important and apparently inescapable consequences. Compensation levels depend on characteristics of the firm. The possibility of the firm's exit drive an important counterfactual prediction in both classes of model: compensation rises in dying firms. This result illustrates the need for careful attention to the circumstances under which valuable jobs are liquidated.Job analysis ; Employment (Economic theory) ; Labor turnover
An annular lithium-drifted germanium detector for studying nuclear reaction gamma-rays
Fabrication and development of annular lithium drifted germanium detector for studying nuclear reaction gamma ray
On equivariant characteristic ideals of real classes
Let be an odd prime, an abelian totally real number field,
its cyclotomic -extension,
We give an explicit description of the equivariant characteristic ideal of
over for all odd by applying M. Witte's formulation of an equivariant main conjecture (or
"limit theorem") due to Burns and Greither. This could shed some light on
Greenberg's conjecture on the vanishing of the -invariant of
$F_\infty/F.
Design and experimental evaluation of a turbopump lift-off seal Final report
Hydrostatic life-off seal zero leakage and static sealing and rubbing tests for use in liquid hydrogen turbine pump
Summary of observed results when chilling the M-1 fuel turbopump to liquid hydrogen temperature
Cooling tests of M-1 rocket engine turbopump with liquid hydroge
Reducing the linewidth of a diode laser below 30 Hz by stabilization to a reference cavity with finesse above 10^5
An extended cavity diode laser operating in the Littrow configuration
emitting near 657 nm is stabilized via its injection current to a reference
cavity with a finesse of more than 10^5 and a corresponding resonance linewidth
of 14 kHz. The laser linewidth is reduced from a few MHz to a value below 30
Hz. The compact and robust setup appears ideal for a portable optical frequency
standard using the Calcium intercombination line.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures on 3 additional pages, corrected version,
submitted to Optics Letter
Observation of long range magnetic ordering in pyrohafnate Nd2Hf2O7: A neutron diffraction study
We have investigated the physical properties of a pyrochlore hafnate Nd2Hf2O7
using ac magnetic susceptibility \chi_ac(T), dc magnetic susceptibility
\chi(T), isothermal magnetization M(H) and heat capacity C_p(T) measurements,
and determined the magnetic ground state by neutron powder diffraction study.
An upturn is observed below 6 K in C_p(T)/T, however both C_p(T) and \chi(T) do
not show any clear anomaly down to 2 K. The \chi_ac(T) shows a well pronounced
anomaly indicating an antiferromagnetic transition at T_N = 0.55 K. The long
range antiferromagnetic ordering is confirmed by neutron diffraction. The
refinement of neutron diffraction pattern reveals an all-in/all-out
antiferromagnetic structure, where for successive tetrahedra, the four Nd3+
magnetic moments point alternatively all-into or all-out-of the tetrahedron,
with an ordering wavevector k = (0, 0, 0) and an ordered state magnetic moment
of m = 0.62(1) \mu_B/Nd at 0.1 K. The ordered moment is strongly reduced
reflecting strong quantum fluctuations in ordered state.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures and 2 tables; to appear in Phys. Rev.
A controlled experiment for the empirical evaluation of safety analysis techniques for safety-critical software
Context: Today's safety critical systems are increasingly reliant on
software. Software becomes responsible for most of the critical functions of
systems. Many different safety analysis techniques have been developed to
identify hazards of systems. FTA and FMEA are most commonly used by safety
analysts. Recently, STPA has been proposed with the goal to better cope with
complex systems including software. Objective: This research aimed at comparing
quantitatively these three safety analysis techniques with regard to their
effectiveness, applicability, understandability, ease of use and efficiency in
identifying software safety requirements at the system level. Method: We
conducted a controlled experiment with 21 master and bachelor students applying
these three techniques to three safety-critical systems: train door control,
anti-lock braking and traffic collision and avoidance. Results: The results
showed that there is no statistically significant difference between these
techniques in terms of applicability, understandability and ease of use, but a
significant difference in terms of effectiveness and efficiency is obtained.
Conclusion: We conclude that STPA seems to be an effective method to identify
software safety requirements at the system level. In particular, STPA addresses
more different software safety requirements than the traditional techniques FTA
and FMEA, but STPA needs more time to carry out by safety analysts with little
or no prior experience.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure in Proceedings of the 19th International
Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE '15).
ACM, 201
- …