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This paper examines the notion of intermediate inequality and its measurement. Specifically, we investigate whether the intermediateness of an intermediate measure can be preserved through repeated (affine) inequality-neutral income transformation. For all existent intermediate measures of inequality, we show that the intermediateness cannot be preserved through the transformation; each intermediate measure tends to either a relative measure or an absolute measure. This observation is then generalized to the class of unit-consistent inequality measures. An inequality measure is unit-consistent if inequality rankings by the measure are not affected by the measuring units in which incomes are expressed. We show that the unit-consistent class of intermediate measure of inequality consists of generalizations of an existent intermediate measure and, hence, the intermediateness also cannot be retained in the limit through transformations.

The purpose of this note is to expose accounting students and others to recent findings in management control, specifically to the relationship between the informativeness of a performance measure and its usefulness in performance evaluation.

Numerical examples illuminate key ideas and are easy to follow and replicate by students.

Seemingly in contradiction to the controllability principle, performance measures that are informative about actions taken by employees are not necessarily useful for performance evaluation. This occurs when the performance being measured is related to an intermediate task, such as prepping items prior to final assembly. If prepping is an important factor in the quality of not only the intermediate good but also the finished good, and the quality of the finished good can be reasonably measured, it may not be useful to measure the prepping performance. This result holds even if obtaining the intermediate measure is costless and the intermediate measure provides unique information on the effort given to the intermediate task.

Opportunities to measure employees’ intermediate outputs are ubiquitous; therefore, judicious decisions should be made regarding the use of limited monitoring resources. This note contains intuitive, easy-to-follow illustrations (based on recent findings) that will help students and others identify situations where such evaluations are more and less useful.

This chapter proposes a definition of pro-middle class growth derived from the approach of Lasso de la Vega, Urrutia, and Diez (2010) to intermediate polarization. The authors show that a sufficient condition for growth to be pro-middle class is for the growth rate of what we define as the “intermediate median income” of the whole population to be higher than that of the weighted average of the growth rates of the rich and smaller than the weighted average growth rate of the poor, the “rich” and the “poor” being respectively those with an income higher and lower than the median income. An empirical illustration based on Israeli data for the period 1995–2018 indicates that in absolute terms growth was not pro-middle class for any income type. In contrast, growth was pro-middle class in relative terms for all market incomes (individual income from salaried work, individual wage per hour worked, household economic income, total household income and total equivalized income). But growth was not pro-middle class for net income and net equivalized income, even in relative terms. These conclusions appear to be related to the combined effect of developments in labor force participation, welfare policy changes and major modifications in income tax rates. The intermediate polarization measures indicate that in general there was no pro-middle class growth except in the case of specific market income types.

When health is measured by a bounded variable, differences in health can be presented as levels of attainment or shortfall. Measurement of heath inequality then usually involves the choice of either the attainment or the shortfall distribution, and this choice may affect comparisons of inequality across populations. A number of indices have been introduced to overcome this problem. This chapter proposes a framework in which attainment and shortfall distributions can be jointly analyzed. Joint distributions of attainments and shortfalls are defined from points of view consistent with concerns for relative, absolute or intermediate inequality. Inequality measures invariant according to the corresponding ethical criterion are then applied. A dominance criterion that guarantees unanimous rankings of the joint distributions is also proposed.

This paper introduces a unit-consistent Lorenz dominance criterion that allows ranking income distributions according to centrist measures à la Seidl and Pfingsten (1997). In doing so, it defines α-Lorenz curves that generalize the absolute Lorenz curve. These curves allow implementing unanimous rankings for a broad set of centrist inequality notions, whereas they become closer and closer to the absolute curve when α approaches equity. In addition, this paper provides an empirical illustration of these tools using Australian income data. The results suggest that despite the reduction of relative inequality for Australian-born people between 1999 and 2003, their inequality increased for most centrist value judgments.

The purpose of the study is to empirically investigate the similarities and differences between dyads and four‐party groups in an integrative negotiation.

Data are collected in a between subjects experiment. A total of 182 participants completed a negotiation role play and questionnaire. Hypotheses are tested using t‐tests, MANOVAs and two multiple regression analyses.

Results demonstrate that dyads do outperform groups on both the economic and subjective measures of outcomes. Sharing of priority information and the fixed pie bias was higher in groups than in dyads. For dyads the procedure used (considering more than one issue at a time) led to higher economic outcomes, and both procedure and problem solving were important for subjective outcomes. For four‐party negotiations, problem solving was significantly related to higher outcomes, on both economic and subjective outcomes, and procedure was moderately related to economic outcomes. Problem solving was significantly more important for the groups than for dyads on economic outcomes.

The controlled experimental setting could limit the generalizabiltiy of the findings. Measures of the intermediate variables could be improved by including additional items and observations. Future research is required in field settings using multiple measures of the process.

In multiparty negotiation information sharing and the presence of cognitive biases may not be as important as focusing on a problem solving approach.

An empirical investigation that groups under‐perform dyads in an integrative negotiation has not been conducted before.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the common claim of “infinite variety” being demanded in the marketplace by measuring not just how much variety theoretically could be produced, but how much is actually demanded by the customer. To this effect, the authors propose and validate market‐based variety measures with empirical data and in a second step, extend their analysis by applying these measures and empirically testing the impact of variety mitigation strategies, such as postponement and options bundling.

The authors analyse production and sales data of 226,106 passenger cars, comprising of three models of one vehicle manufacturer sold across four global market regions. The theoretical variety is compared with actual variety for each model‐market combination, and these data are linked to actual production and sales records.

The authors propose and validate product variety measures based on actual customer orders, and empirically demonstrate how these measures can be used to assess the impact of late configuration and option bundling strategies, and find that these are generally valid, but that their applicability is contingent upon the respective variety distribution profile.

Analyses are developed within the context of a single firm and industry, although an attempt was made to counter this weakness by considering models from the volume, niche and premium market segments.

The paper highlights how actual variety differs from theoretical variety in practice, which in turn co‐determines the effectiveness of mitigation strategies applied by firms.

The paper's main contribution is to propose and empirically test a set of novel measures of product variety: the average repetition ratio and a specification Pareto curve, both of which complement and enhance one's understanding of product variety and its impact on manufacturing and distribution systems.

Two views of organizational change dominate the management literature. The incremental view holds that organizations experience large‐scale strategic changes quite slowly while the revolutionary view proposes that organizations experience long periods of relatively little strategic variation punctuated by short, intense periods of major change. Commonalties among the two change theories provide the basis for a study of 101 businesses over a six year period. The research examines two theoretical implications: change is bimodally and discretely distributed and skewed toward incremental strategic change, and firms undergoing revolutionary strategic change will be more likely to experience simultaneous changes on multiple organizational dimensions than firms undergoing incremental strategic change. Consistent with Proposition 1, it was found that change is skewed toward incremental, but also that change is unimodal and continuously distributed, contrary to Proposition 1. Contrary to Proposition 2, revolutionary change on multiple dimensions was found to be rare.

The main objective of this paper is to present a holistic approach for measuring overall bank efficiency and its decomposition in intermediation and profitability efficiencies.

Two-stage network data envelopment analysis (NDEA) model has been used for obtaining intermediation and profitability efficiencies along with overall bank efficiency. Additionally, bootstrap truncated regression has also been adopted to explore the influential predictors of two stages.

A comparative analysis between Indian private-sector and public-sector banks showed that the former is efficient than the latter in profitability efficiency stage. Another interesting finding is that none of the banks is efficient in overall study tenure. Finally, outcomes of bootstrap truncated regression show that differences in intermediation efficiency are explained by firm size, return on asset, market share and ownership while profitability stage is determined by diverse, gross domestic product and ownership.

This study will guide the Indian banking sector to act on which they are lagging, for the betterment of their overall performances. Finally, parameters like loan waives and disposal income of non-performing assets (NPAs) are not considered because of the unavailability of information in the output measures of NDEA model.

This paper not only provides a detailed performance assessment of Indian banks but also examines banks’ internal efficiency by deposits as an intermediary measure.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficiency of Algerian banks and examine the effects of explanatory factors on their performance.

In this paper, a methodology of two-stage network data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to explore the efficiency of a sample of 13 Algerian banks during the 2013–2017 period. In the first stage, the network DEA is used to assess the overall and stages efficiencies. In the second stage, the partial least squares (PLS) regression is conducted to determine the potential effects of explanatory factors on stages efficiency.

The main empirical results indicate that Algerian banks need an efficiency improvement in both stages. The overall efficiency of the Algerian banking system improves over the study period. The deposit producing efficiency is positively affected by bank size and bank age. The revenue earning efficiency is negatively associated with bank size and bank age. The domestic banks are more efficient than foreign banks in the deposit producing stage and the foreign banks are more efficient than domestic banks in the revenue earning stage.

The results might be used as guidelines for both managers and policymakers in order to improve banks and banking system performance.

To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first that uses the DEA in investigating the efficiency of Algerian banks by dividing the overall efficiency into deposit producing and revenue earning efficiencies. Unlike most studies that have usually used OLS regression, Tobit regression and bootstrapped truncated regression, this study is the first in the bank efficiency literature that uses PLS regression to investigate the potential effect of explanatory variables on deposit producing and revenue earning efficiencies.