Search results for "Counterintuitive."
showing 10 items of 10 documents
Identifying the Luxury Sustainability Paradox: Three Steps Toward a Solution
2017
In this chapter, we argue about a paradox of sustainability in the context of luxury goods and brands: Intuitively, luxury brands should be more sustainable versus normal brands, since consumer’s willingness to pay is high which should allow for highest standards in quality, including sustainability. However, many of the most expensive luxury products appear to exhibit limited sustainability. Examples include sports cars that typically are gas guzzlers, yachts that often carry only a few people but require a high amount of resources to be operated, or fur products that require animals to give their lives for. For example, the Hermes Birkin bag recently received a lot of negative media due t…
Multiplicity, Overtaking and Convergence in the Lucas Two-Sector Growth Model
2002
This paper provides the complete closed-form solution to the Lucas two-sector model of endogenous growth. We study the issues of existence, unique-ness, multiplicity, positivity, transitional dynamics and long-run growth, re-lated to the competitive equilibrium paths. We identify the parameter range where the different results hold and deduce the entire trajectories for the original variables. We revise the results on convergence and overtaking which arise from this model, and prove that the parameterization currently used as the background for an explanation of economic miracles and disasters, is not satisfactory because of its counterintuitive implications.
Materialism and the Bright and Dark Sides of the Financial Dream in Spain: The Positive Role of Money Attitudes-The Matthew Effect
2012
Research suggests that materialism leads to the dark side of the financial dream. In this study, we treat love of money as a mediator and test a theoretical model's direct path (Materialism to Financial Satisfaction) and indirect path (Materialism to Love of Money to Financial Satisfaction) simultaneously using the whole sample and across several demographic variables based on 1,011 citizens in Spain. Results for the whole sample showed that the positive indirect effect suppressed the negative direct effect creating an overall small positive effect. Furthermore, we found a significant negative direct path for rural dwellers, the 30–44-year-old age group, and married people, but a positive i…
A Note on added information in the RAS Procedure: reexamination of some evidence
2006
International audience; An example in Miernyk (1977) presented a rather counterintuitive result, namely that introducing accurate exogenous information into an RAS matrix estimating procedure could lead to an estimate that was worse than one generated by RAS using no exogenous information at all. This became an oft-cited black mark against RAS. Miller and Blair (1985) included a different (and small) illustration of the same possibility. It was recently pointed out by one of us that the Miller/Blair numerical results are wrong. For that reason, we decided to reexamine all the empirical evidence we could find on the subject. While figures in both Miernyk and Miller/Blair appear to be wrong, …
A dynamic performance management approach to frame corruption in public procurement: a case study
2021
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to frame the causal relationships between corruption in public procurement and performance of local governments. Design/methodology/approach An outcome-based dynamic performance management approach is adopted to explore a representative case study of a small Italian municipality. The model is based on three sources: qualitative primary data generated by face-to-face convergent interviews; secondary data retrieved from documents describing legal cases linked to procurement and open-access repositories; and an extensive literature review. Findings Emphasizing the role of community civic morality systemically may help to understand some counterintuitive re…
How to standardize (if you must)
2017
In many situations we are interested in appraising the value of a certain characteristic for a given individual relative to the context in which this value is observed. In recent years this problem has become prominent in the evaluation of scientific productivity and impact. A popular approach to such relative valuations consists in using percentile ranks. This is a purely ordinal method that may sometimes lead to counterintuitive appraisals, in that it discards all information about the distance between the raw values within a given context. By contrast, this information is partly preserved by using standardization, i.e., by transforming the absolute values in such a way that, within the s…
El doble rechazo de la reflexión en Ser y tiempo
2021
The objective of this article is to clarify the Heideggerian rejection of the idea of reflection as the method of philosophy. The need for such explanation lies on the counterintuitive nature of this philosophical thesis and on the interpretive problems that this criticism presents in Being and Time. In order to solve them, a brief historical-conceptual examination of the reflection is realized, leading to two different meanings of the concept, a psychological and a transcendental one. Thanks to this distinction, it is possible to expose systematically the double criticism presented in Being and time and, therefore, clarify the ultimate reasons underling the Heideggerian rejection of the …
Sunny Island. An Interactive Learning Environment to Promote Systems Thinking Education for Primary School Students
2017
To make the process of learning easier for students, schoolteachers are increasingly using Interactive Learning Environments (ILEs) in classrooms. The paper presents a system dynamics-based ILE called Sunny Island. The ILE has been designed to promote Systems Thinking (ST) education for primary school students. Through a funny fantasy tale - described in detail in a book that accompanies the ILE - students have the opportunity to discover and become familiar with the basic principles of ST, such as feedback, positive and negative causal influences, limits to growth, short and long term effects, counterintuitive behaviors, causes of policy resistances and dynamic complexity. The proposed ILE…
Facebook as a Small World: a topological hypothesis
2011
Facebook is becoming a pervasive entity as its social, cultural and media ramifications grow deep and entrenched in our daily life. Its nature of a complex system of interactions, bearing a strong similarity to networks built through individual choices and systems shaped by evolu- tionary pressure, makes it an interesting target for research. Scale-free Small World networks, recently popularized by Barabasi, are a topological class pertaining to both these domains, whose members have resilience to disruption and short intermediate connections between nodes. In this paper we show that the topological structure of a specific subset of Facebook, gathered using data from a self-report online qu…
Why do Traditional Performance Management Systems in Healthcare not always lead to Improved Performance? Outlining the Unintended Consequences of the…
2021
Researchers all around the globe have not yet come to an end as regards the supposed positive impact of traditional performance management systems in healthcare, and some research has shown that, paradoxically, performance management policies do not always lead to improved hospital performance. Despite the extensive research identifying the “pitfalls” of the NPM reforms around Europe and the unintended consequences for hospital staff and patients, little is known about the mechanisms that caused those negative effects, which essentially creates a research gap worth investigating. This PhD study tries to address this gap and show why do traditional PM Systems in healthcare not always lead to…