Developing a Personal Leadership Theory: Exploring Feminist Pedagogical Theory and Social Justice Issues

Thirty years of my life had been devoted to teaching and administration in a suburban public school district. I retired and made plans to move on to a related career in higher education and complete my doctoral studies in educational leadership. When I began my career as a community college developmental reading instructor, I was prepared to experience change in my leadership actions and understandings as I followed the spiraling path of learning that typifies reflective practice, which was key to this study. However, I did not anticipate encountering so many forks in the road. My learning path was guided by my curiosities about unfamiliar theories and beliefs that I encountered during my studies. There were so many new fields of interest to explore. I had to be selective because I could not investigate, even in a lifetime, all the areas of inquiry that beckoned me. My choice of concepts for further study was guided by answering the question, “What concepts will help me to understand the needs of my students better and make me a more effective teacher?” Beyond the initial issues and topics that directly related to my teaching practice, I chose two other areas for more in-depth study: feminist theory and social justice

Surplus sharing with coherent utility functions

We use the theory of coherent measures to look at the problem of surplus sharing in an insurance business. The surplus share of an insured is calculated by the surplus premium in the contract. The theory of coherent risk measures and the resulting capital allocation gives a way to divide the surplus between the insured and the capital providers, i.e. the shareholders

Efficiency and surplus bounds in Cournot competition

We derive bounds on the ratios of deadweight loss and consumer surplus to producer surplus under Cournot competition. To do so, we introduce a parameterization of the degree of curvature of market demand using the parallel concepts of ?-concavity and ?-convexity. The ?more concave? is demand, the larger the share of producer surplus in overall surplus, the smaller is consumer surplus relative to producer surplus, and the lower the ratio of deadweight loss to producer surplus. Deadweight loss over total potential surplus is at Þrst increasing with demand concavity, then eventually decreasing. The analysis is extended to asymmetric Þrm costs.Cournot equilibrium, social surplus analysis, deadweight loss, market performance.

Effciency and surplus bounds in Cournot competition

We derive bounds on the ratios of deadweight loss and consumer surplus to producer surplus under Cournot competition. To do so, we introduce a parameterization of the degree of curvature of market demand using the parallel concepts of ½-concavity and ½-convexity. The ”more concave” is demand, the larger the share of producer surplus in overall surplus, the smaller is consumer surplus relative to producer surplus, and the lower the ratio of deadweight loss to producer surplus. Deadweight loss over total potential surplus is at …rst increasing with demand concavity, then eventually decreasing. The analysis is extended to asymmetric …rm costs.Cournot equilibrium, social surplus analysis, deadweight loss, market performance.

Ruin probability in a risk model with a variable premium intensity and risky investments

We consider a generalization of the classical risk model when the premium intensity depends on the current surplus of an insurance company. All surplus is invested in the risky asset, the price of which follows a geometric Brownian motion. We get an exponential bound for the infinite-horizon ruin probability. To this end, we allow the surplus process to explode and investigate the question concerning the probability of explosion of the surplus process between claim arrivals.Comment: 16 page

Effective medical surplus recovery

We analyze not-for-profit Medical Surplus Recovery Organizations (MSROs) that manage the recovery of surplus (unused or donated) medical products to fulfill the needs of underserved healthcare facilities in the developing world. Our work is inspired by an award-winning North American non-governmental organization (NGO) that matches the uncertain supply of medical surplus with the receiving parties’ needs. In particular, this NGO adopts a recipient-driven resource allocation model, which grants recipients access to an inventory database, and each recipient selects products of limited availability to fill a container based on its preferences. We first develop a game theoretic model to investigate the effectiveness of this approach. This analysis suggests that the recipient-driven model may induce competition among recipients and lead to a loss in value provision through premature orders. Further, contrary to the common wisdom from traditional supply chains, full inventory visibility in our setting may accelerate premature orders and lead to loss of effectiveness. Accordingly, we identify operational mechanisms to help MSROs deal with this problem. These are: (i) appropriately selecting container capacities while limiting the inventory availability visible to recipients and increasing the acquisition volumes of supplies, (ii) eliminating recipient competition through exclusive single-recipient access to MSRO inventory, and (iii) focusing on learning recipient needs as opposed to providing them with supply information, and switching to a provider-driven resource allocation model. We use real data from the NGO by which the study was inspired and show that the proposed improvements can substantially increase the value provided to recipients

Capital adequacy tests and limited liability of financial institutions

The theory of acceptance sets and their associated risk measures plays a key role in the design of capital adequacy tests. The objective of this paper is to investigate, in the context of bounded financial positions, the class of surplus-invariant acceptance sets. These are characterized by the fact that acceptability does not depend on the positive part, or surplus, of a capital position. We argue that surplus invariance is a reasonable requirement from a regulatory perspective, because it focuses on the interests of liability holders of a financial institution. We provide a dual characterization of surplus-invariant, convex acceptance sets, and show that the combination of surplus invariance and coherence leads to a narrow range of capital adequacy tests, essentially limited to scenario-based tests. Finally, we emphasize the advantages of dealing with surplus-invariant acceptance sets as the primary object rather than directly with risk measures, such as loss-based and excess-invariant risk measures, which have been recently studied by Cont, Deguest, and He (2013) and by Staum (2013), respectively