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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Cem BASLEVENT |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ekd:003304:330400008&r=cdm |
| By: | P. Buonanno; G. Prarolo; P. Vanin |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the relationship between mafia and politics by focusing on the market for votes. It exploits the fact that in the early 1990s the Italian party system collapsed, new parties emerged and mafia families had to look for new political allies. It presents evidence, based on disaggregated data from the Italian region of Sicily, that between 1994 and 2008 Silvio Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia, obtained higher vote shares in municipalities plagued by mafia. The result is robust to the use of different measures of mafia presence, both contemporary and historical, to the inclusion of different sets of controls and to spatial analysis. Instrumenting mafia’s presence by determinants of its early diffusion in the late XIX century suggests that the correlation reflects a causal link, which would be coherent with mafia’s choice to back Forza Italia in exchange for favorable policies. |
| JEL: | D72 K42 |
| Date: | 2014–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp965&r=cdm |
| By: | Max Schaub (European University Institute, Italy) |
| Abstract: | This paper provides new insights into the link between the experience of violent conflict and local collective action. I use the temporal and geographical information from four rounds of survey data from Nigeria to relate measures of cooperation to past and future incidences of communal conflict. I show that local collective action, measured in terms of community meeting attendance and volunteering, is highest before the outbreak of vio-lence – higher than both post-conflict levels and the generally lower levels of cooperation in regions not affected by violence. I develop a ‘mobilisation mechanism’ to explain these findings, arguing that, rather than being an indicator of ‘social capital’, collective action ahead of communal violence is inherently ambiguous, and driven by a form of situational-ly adaptive (and potentially aggressive) ‘solidarity with an edge’. I further show that the positive link between previous exposure to civil war-type violence and cooperation holds for Nigeria, too, but that it holds for rural areas only. |
| Keywords: | violent conflict; collective action; Nigeria |
| Date: | 2014–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hic:wpaper:183&r=cdm |
| By: | Marianne Grunell (Amsterdams Instituut voor ArbeidsStudies/Arbeidsrecht, Universiteit van Amsterdam) |
| Abstract: | The Dutch textile and clothing sector is a small economic sector, in which companies are rationalising production and moving it abroad. New production processes have also been introduced. The sector is densely organised with regard to consultation and collective bargaining. The employer organisation Modint and the three unions FNV, CNV and MHP/De Unie conclude one single collective labour agreement, which is then extended to the whole sector. The social partners in the sector are affiliated to the three national union federations. The social partners at national, and at sectoral, level and the government cooperate to fight illegal work in illegal plants. The social partner organisations are selected here given their membership of the European social partner organisations and, in the case of MHP/De Unie, given their role in national collective bargaining. |
| Date: | 2014–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aia:indrnl:2014-11&r=cdm |
| By: | Wihbey, John P |
| Abstract: | The advent of social media and peer-to-peer technologies offers the possibility of driving the full democratization of news and information, undercutting the agenda-setting of large media outlets and their relative control of news and information flows. We are now about a decade into the era of the social Web. What do the data indicate about changing news flows and access/consumption patterns in the United States? Are we witnessing a paradigm shift yet, or are legacy patterns reasserting themselves? This paper brings together media industry data and perspective—from NPR, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal—with a growing body of social science and computational research produced by universities and firms such as Microsoft Research and the Facebook data science team, as well as survey findings from the Pew Research Center. The bulk of the evidence so far complicates any easy narrative, and it very much remains an open question if we can expect a more radically democratized media ecosystem, despite promising early trends and anecdotes. As I review the evidence, I aim to highlight lessons and insights that can help those thinking about and operating in the social media space. This paper also aims to serve as an accessible survey of news media-related topics within social science and social network analysis scholarship. |
| Date: | 2014 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hrv:hksfac:12872220&r=cdm |
| By: | Zheyin (Jane) Gu (University of Connecticut, School of Business, Marketing Department, 2100 Hillside Rd, Unit 1041, Storrs, CT, 06269.); Yunchuan Liu (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 415 Wohlers Hall, 1206 South Sixth Street, Champaign, IL, 61820, (217) 244-2749) |
| Abstract: | We model consumer social networks as information collection media and examine two major issues: first, how consumers construct product fit signals based on product feedbacks collected from their social connections to assist with their purchase decisions, and second, how a retailer can benefit from setting up a digital platform and helping consumers collect more product feedbacks on social networks. Our analysis identifies two important structure features of consumer social networks that affect the outcome of consumer social learning: social group inter-connectivity and overall social connectivity. In particular, when the consumer social network is not well-connected, characterized by low social group inter-connectivity and low overall social connectivity, with more product feedbacks collected on social networks consumers are more likely to form informative prior beliefs about which product has a good fit. In contrast, when the consumer social network is well-connected, characterized by either high social group inter-connectivity or high overall social connectivity, more product feedbacks collected on social networks are more likely to constitute uninformative product fit signals and leave consumers uncertain about which product has a good fit. Furthermore, our analysis shows that a retailer's incentive to set up a digital platform and help consumers collect more product feedbacks on social networks depends on the supplier market structure as well as the structure of consumer social networks. In particular, a big retailer that carries horizontally differentiated products offered by competing manufacturers has incentive to facilitate consumer social learning on well-connected social networks and when without retailer assistance consumers still collect product feedbacks from a good number of social connections. The big retailer's activity of facilitating consumer social learning can also enhance total channel surplus. In contrast, a small retailer that carries product(s) offered by a single manufacturer has incentive to facilitate consumer social learning only on social networks that are not well-connected and when without retailer assistance consumers only collect a small number of social feedbacks. And the total channel efficiency suffers when the small retailer withholds from facilitating consumer social learning. Our result highlights the unique motive of big retailers to embrace the digital era when internet, mobile networks, and social media have profoundly changed consumers' shopping habits as well as the unique contribution big retailers bring in channel efficiency through their efforts of facilitating consumer social learning. |
| Keywords: | Consumer Social Learning, Social Networks, Retailing, Game Theory |
| JEL: | M31 |
| Date: | 2014–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:net:wpaper:1402&r=cdm |
| By: | Anca-Cristina GRECEA („Mihai Viteazul” National Intelligence Academy) |
| Abstract: | The evolution of democratic state in Romania, dynamics and multitude of risks and threats to the security climate generated analysis and public debate topics relevant for political class and civil society, which determines, concomitant with the efficiency of the institutions’ activity in the security field, also an improvement of mechanisms of parliamentary control over them.Parliamentary control over the security sector is performed more or less effectively depending on the power of Parliament in relation to Government and the institutions from national security field. This power derives not only from Constitution and the legal framework of the organization and functioning of institutions from the national security field, but also from the rules of parliamentary procedure and from the practices established and improved over time, depending on the social-cultural characteristics of a nation, but especially on the security climate which these institutions are obliged to ensure it at optimum parameters |
| Keywords: | national security, parliamentary control, civil society, mass-media |
| Date: | 2013–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rom:km2013:10&r=cdm |
| By: | David McQueen (Bournemouth University, UK) |
| Abstract: | The paper presents an analysis of relations between the fossil fuel industry and its opponents. The paper will explore how different weapons in a ‘PR war’ contribute to particular policy and public opinion outcomes. The paper revisits the Deepwater Horizon crisis and looks at how campaigning groups such as Greenpeace effectively discredited BP, its crisis communications and the ‘Beyond Petroleum’ CSR strategy. It will also contrast campaigns in Ireland, Nigeria and the Arctic against the oil company Shell and look at the use of digital media and low and no budget documentary films in ‘activist PR’ campaigns. The paper will show how the public relations war has had uneven outcomes with charities sometimes winning the battle for public opinion, whilst energy corporations and interests have been more successful in setting the agenda for legislative and policy changes and winning elite opinion. This success has been in part due to corporation’s success in mobilising third party endorsement and working together through industry bodies, business networks, policy planning groups and front groups – a strategy that campaigning groups and activists would do well to learn from. |
| Date: | 2013–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aes:icsrog:wpaper:37&r=cdm |
| By: | Giovanni Vaia (Dept. of Management, Università Ca' Foscari Venice); Anna Moretti (Dept. of Management, Università Ca' Foscari Venice) |
| Abstract: | In an over-connected world where ICTs dominate firms' development and evolution, outsourcing is an increasingly adopted practice by IT firms facing a third-generation of inter-firm interactions: after the IT and business processes' outsourcing, and then the offshore outsourcing, now we face a sourcing ecosystem tagged as human cloud, where the online work and virtual workers are the center of the new system. Notwithstanding some relevant contributions to the literature about IT outsourcing, still few is known about how coordination between client and supplier can achieve superior outcomes through the development of collaborative practices. In particular, the use of IT tools devoted to sociality as a coordination mechanism has been under-investigated. This research provides insights about how a company can change attitudes and behaviors of client and supplier thanks to an IT tool deputed to collaboration: the social collaboration system. Through an explorative case study, our paper provides two main contributions to the literature about IT outsourcing: i) we show how the adoption of a social collaboration system improves ITO governance and performance, providing further empirical evidence on the role of social mechanisms in ITO relationships; ii) we show how the introduction of a social collaboration system in outsourcing management can influence and change the building blocks of its life-cycle. |
| Keywords: | IT outsourcing, governance, social collaboration, relational view, outsourcing lifecycle |
| JEL: | L24 M55 |
| Date: | 2014–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:vnm:wpdman:777&r=cdm |