Knowledge that Transforms

El presente trabajo investigativo se desarrolló en la IE Bojacá, en el municipio de Chía, con 27 estudiantes del grado 401 y surge de la necesidad de perfeccionar la forma de enseñanza de las matemáticas, ya que se indagó en el contexto y se identificó la problemática, la cual mostró que la enseñanza de las matemáticas consistía solo en la transmisión de una lección, pues muchos docentes sólo aplican los métodos tradicionales, sin tener en cuenta las dinámicas de aprendizaje; impactando a los estudiantes de forma negativa en su proceso de enseñanza – aprendizaje, pues no hay una verdadera apropiación de los temas vistos, lo cual conlleva a generar disgusto por la clase de matemáticas; además se evidenció la falta de apropiación de las operaciones básicas de matemáticas, por lo anterior, para este estudio se utilizó una herramienta didáctica denominada el Minicomputador de Papy, teniendo en cuenta los estilos de aprendizaje de cada uno de los estudiantes.

The entrepreneurial literature traditionally considers risk taking an important distinguishing element in entrepreneurship. This study examines risk taking propensity of founders or managers of new ventures. Upon examination of competing definitions of entrepreneur, this analysis defines an entrepreneur as major owner and manager of a business venture who is not employed elsewhere. Risk taking is considered the perceived probability of receiving rewards associated with success of a proposed situation required before embarking on a venture. Three levels of risk taking (low, intermediate or moderate, and high) could affect decision to start a business venture. Risk taking was measured using Wallach and Kogan choice dilemmas questionnaire (CDQ). Studied were entrepreneurs, promoted managers, and new (or transferred) managers of firms located in St. Louis in 1975; 31 questionnaires were used for each group. The results are not statistically different. Entrepreneurs and managers are found to have same risk taking propensity. Because previous studies of risk preferences examined limited samples, CDQ scores were also compared against a sample representing general population. Found that risk taking propensity of entrepreneurs is same as that for general population. Results also show that entrepreneurs, managers, and general population all have a propensity for moderate risk. Overall, general risk taking does not distinguish entrepreneurs from non-entrepreneurs. (TNM)

In this paper, we study the committee decision making process using game theory. By a committee, we mean any group of people who have to pick one option from a given set of alternatives. A well defined voting rule is specified by which the committee arrives at a decision. Each member has a preference relation on the set of all alternatives. A new solution concept called the one-core is introduced and studied. Intuitively, the one-core consists of all maximal (for the proposer) proposals which are undominated assuming that the player who makes the proposal does not cooperate in any effort to dominate the proposal. For games with non-emtpy cores, the one-core proposals are shown to be better than the core. For games with empty cores, the one-core proposals tend to be pessimistic, i.e., they indicate the security level of the players. This is because the stability requirements of the one-core are too strong for such games. A bargaining set modeled along the lines of the Aumann-Maschler bargaining set for characteristic function games is defined for committee games. Because of its relaxed stability requirements, the bargaining set indicates more reasonable proposals than the one-core. The existence of both the one-core and the bargaining set are studied and these concepts are compared with two other well known solution concepts—the core and the Condorcet solution.

This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the Zero-Base Budgeting (ZBB) process during the initial year of its implementation in the Federal Government. The evaluation includes ten Departments and six agencies of the Federal Government representing 74 percent of the total budget authority of 560 billion dollars. It is based on the information received in responses from federal agencies to the Office of Management and Budget Eleven major criteria were formulated for use in evaluating the applicability of the ZBB process and its performance in the individual agencies. A scoring model was used to determine the effectiveness of the ZBB process within each agency, as well as across agencies. ZBB was perceived by federal agencies as an effective tool for use in the allocation of limited resources. The following aspects of ZBB were ranked in the order in which they yield the greatest benefits in producing effective budgets: (a) priority ranking of agency programs, (b) participation of management in decisionmaking, and (c) conducting trade-offs within and across programs. In most cases, the increased participation (extent and quality) resulted in the establishment of a close link with top management and an enhanced understanding of organizational objectives, priorities, and resource allocations to various programs. The use of ZBB was not intended to and did not, in fact, produce significant tangible cost savings in federal agency 1979 budgets, but did result in reallocations of resources to activities with higher priority. Most federal agencies believed that the use of ZBB required excessive expenditures of time and effort. The agencies felt that ZBB was not particularly applicable to “uncontrollable” programs and hence the time and effort spent on using ZBB in these decision units was not beneficial. The agencies faced problems in developing “minimum level” packages which represent lowest level budgets for the organizational units. Most agencies used an arbitrary percentage reduction from the existing level to force uniformity across all decision units. Use of a predefined “minimum level” may have precluded a zero-base analysis of the decision units which is the major cornerstone of ZBB. Priority ranking of decision packages at the subordinate management level was usually carried out by managers using their own independent judgments. At the top agency level, most agencies used formal ranking procedures and collegial panels to produce the initial ranking of agency-wide decision packages. The difficulties agencies faced in determining priorities of the decision packages included ranking those functions/activities that were dissimilar and/or interrelated and considering those activities not having measurable outputs or distinct workload measures.

In this paper, a model of corporate leverage choice is formulated in which corporate and differential personal taxes exist and supply side adjustments by firms enter into the determination of equilibrium relative prices of debt and equity. The presence of corporate tax shield substitutes for debt such as accounting depreciation, depletion allowances, and investment tax credits is shown to imply a market equilibrium in which each firm has a unique interior optimum leverage decision (with or without leverage-related costs). The optimal leverage model yields a number of interesting predictions regarding cross-sectional and time-series properties of firms' capital structures. Extant evidence bearing on these predictions is examined.

Human information processing, Information choice, Decision making, Lens model

This study investigates whether associations consistent with LIFO-FIFO tax incentives exist between management choices to adopt or not adopt the LIFO inventory costing method and characteristics of firms' year-end inventories. Both pre- and postchoice characteristics are ex- amined. Because the LIFO-FIFO choice is voluntary, a postchoice association would be consistent with managers both anticipating future inventory characteristics when making a LIFO-FIFO choice and changing inventory management policies in response to that choice. Evidence consistent with the hypothesis that LIFO adoptions are associated with changes in inventory management policies would have important macroeconomic implications. Zarnowitz and Moore [1977] have argued that a failure to recognize the major shift in inventory costing methods which occurred in 1973 and 1974 (primarily FIFO to LIFO) resulted in an underestimation of inventory accumulations by the U.S. Department of Commerce. This underestimation resulted from the different procedures used under LIFO and FIFO to assign costs to inventory units. While this effect of LIFO-FIFO choices can bias macroeconomic measurements and forecasts, an associated change in inventory management policies by a large number of firms could directly affect underlying macroeconomic stocks and flows.

This paper discusses inferential procedures for the family of stable distributions, when the data are tabulated in the form of interval frequencies. The estimation criteria used are minimum chi-square and multinomial maximum likelihood. In evaluating the theoretical probabilities corresponding to the intervals, use is made of the inversion theorem for characteristic functions. Chi-square tail probabilities for independent samples are pooled by means of theKolmogorov statistic. As an illustration, the methods are applied to Dutch and Australian income data.