Turner Broadcasting illustrates how organizational mechanisms can be adapted to prevent a majority owner from imposing costs on minority shareholders through inept management or opportunistic behavior. These mechanisms involve issuing preferred stock with unusual features, concentrating its ownership among a small group of investors, allowing the new preferred shareholders to elect several directors, and requiring supramajority approval of major management decisions by a reconstituted board of directors. The alienability of the preferred stock is restricted to help insure that its ownership stays concentrated and in the hands of those with the specific knowledge and incentives to be effective monitors.

Consumer incentives often have a dual role: to expand the market and to redistribute the market so as to meet sales targets for a range of products. The proper allocation of incentives must recognize and deal with the competitive and “cannibalizing” effects operating among product classes. The presence of environmental factors, scale economies, and cost per unit for each of the candidate incentive types also must be accounted for. This paper develops and illustrates an analytical approach designed to improve the allocation of consumer incentives where sales targets are exogenously set. The model generates a system of simultaneous behavioral equations, a portion of which is included to reflect attempted cost minimizing behavior. The model is applied to FY81-FY86 data from the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, which allocated over $1 billion for special incentives to selected recruits. The incentives consist of enlistment bonuses and educational benefits offered to quality recruits who select critical occupational specialties. The sales targets are enlistment quotas for each of the occupational specialties that must be simultaneously satisfied. The Army's goal is to meet these quotas, in a postulated recruiting environment, at minimum total incentive expenditure. Results suggest that the Army could improve the cost-effectiveness of its recruiting effort through a reallocation of the incentives it offers to recruits. Misallocation during the FY81-FY86 period is estimated to have cost the Army approximately 3.5% of its total incentives expended in infantry recruiting recruiting.

This three-round delphi survey of senior IS executives is the third in a series designed to determine the most critical issues in IS management. Analysis focuses on respondents’ assessments of specific issues as well as emerging trends. Key findings include: (1) Continued concern for traditional issues such as strategic planning and organizational alignment; (2) only six of the top issues from 1936 remained in the top 10; (3) one new issue, technology infrastructure, made the top 10; (4) three issues from previous studies rejoined the top 10—IS human resources, software development, and telecommunication systems; and (5) data-related issues now occupy the top two slots. This study reveals two important trends as the field enters the 1990s. First is the rising importance of technology infrastructure issues. Technology infrastructure issues now occupy three of the top 10 slots including the highest position. Second, it appears that internal effectiveness issues have made a strong comeback after being virtually ignored in 1986. IS human resources, software development, and the applications portfolio—issues that make up the core of the IS function—all increased in importance.

The paper presents empirical tests of the (S, s) model of inventory behavior using aggregate retail trade data. Estimation and testing are based on the probability distributions of inventories derived by Caplin [1985]. The excess volatility of retailers' demand over their consumers' demand, and the "forgetfulness" of inventories under (S, s) are emphasized. Test results indicate that the time series properties of deliveries and sales are consistent with (S, s) and not a quadratic cost model. Finally, when autoregressions of inventories are given an (S, s) rather than a stock adjustment interpretation, traditional empirical problems such as low speeds of adjustment are explained.

In this paper I discuss economic processes that may give rise to spatial patterns in data, and explore the relative merits of alternative modeling approaches when data are spatially correlated. Specifically, I present an estimation scheme that allows for spatial random effects, and focus attention on cases in which such a framework may be preferred to the more general fixed effects framework that nests it. I use the models presented, together with information on the location of households in an Indonesian socio-economic survey, to test spatial relationships in Indonesian demand for rice.

This paper uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to study the intertemporal preferences of rich and poor households in the United States. Subjective rates of time preference, identified from estimation of consumption Euler equations, are three to five percentage points higher for households with low permanent incomes than for those with high permanent incomes. Controlling for race and education widens this difference. With age and family composition held constant, time preference rates vary from 12 percent for white, college-educated families in the top 5 percent of the labor income distribution to 19 percent for nonwhite families without a college education whose labor incomes are in the bottom fifth percentile. Such differences imply very different patterns of consumption over the life cycle and suggest one possible explanation for observed heterogeneity in savings behavior across socioeconomic classes.

This paper uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to study the intertemporal preferences of rich and poor households in the United States. Subjective rates of time preferences, identified from estimation of consumption Euler equations, are three to five percentage points higher for households with low permanent incomes than for those with high permanent incomes. Controlling for race and education widens this difference. With age and family composition held constant, time preference rates vary from 12 percent for white, college-educated families in the top 5 percent of the labor income distribution to 19 percent for nonwhite families without a college education whose labor incomes are in the bottom fifth percentile. Copyright 1991 by University of Chicago Press.

Lack of explicit markets and associated data have impeded measurement of nonpecuniary rewards in the workplace. Most of the published literature employs hedonic models that permit estimation of market-clearing prices, but do not allow for identification of demand schedules. In an alternative approach, used successfully by environmental economists, the author develops quasi-market data and uses it to estimate demand for the nonpecuniary rewards associated with leadership. In addition to price responsiveness, individuals exhibit tastes for the amenities of leadership that differ substantially, and in expected directions, with their personal and professional characteristics. Copyright 1991 by MIT Press.