Search results

This paper aims to carry out a comprehensive overview of the academic debate on utilities’ non-financial reporting by highlighting the main issues and the emerging gaps.

Using a structured literature review, this study identifies the state of the art, maps the evolution of non-financial reporting in utility companies and reveals unexplored issues and aspects.

A critical analysis of the existing academic debate shows the development of utilities’ non-financial reporting literature and the focus of this debate. It provides insight into how utilities pay attention to non-financial reporting, what role this plays in corporate actions and relationships with stakeholders and what research gaps need further investigation.

This study provides some useful recommendations to practitioners and regulators to be more conscious of the weaknesses and criticalities of utilities’ non-financial reporting and to address them when building such reporting. However, this study considered only articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals.

A comprehensive literature review in the utilities’ non-financial reporting area is timely, given the increase in this type of reporting. The study has an original focus and develops an analytical framework highlighting the peculiarities of utilities.

Suggests a new understanding of the category of economic value. According to this understanding, economic value is the unity of economic utility and economic costs. Interprets these categories of utility and costs as relative, and imminently implying one another. There exists a specific attitude of man towards the limited goods which are involved in his teleological activity. On the basis of this new understanding of economic value, attempts to give a new explanation of the law of increasing marginal costs, as the opposite form of manifestation of the law of diminishing marginal utility. Suggests an original interpretation of global and local criteria for optimum, and of an economic mechanism for comparison of costs and utility. Proposes many ideas which proceed from the teleological understanding of man’s activity and which are in harmony with the ideas and principles of econometrics.

This case study describes an application of utility analysis to guide decisions regarding retention and operation of various selection system components (i.e., tests and interviews). Selection processes for two “high throughput” selection systems (Meter Reader and Customer Service Representative) were examined to improve cost effectiveness and reduce cycle time (time to produce qualified candidates). Based on utility outcomes and client considerations, the interview was retained with modifications in one selection process, and deleted from the other. Insights gained from gathering data needed to conduct the utility analysis helped guide further refinements of the selection systems in which the tests and interviews were applied, drastically reducing the time needed to fill open positions.

Electric Utility Diversification and Efficient Capital Markets Over 60% of investor owned electric utilities have experimented with diversification into lines of business other than the traditional generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity. They diversify for a variety of reasons, but a primary goal is to improve their overall financial performance. Existing studies have found that diversified utilities outperform non‐diversified utilities. Measures of performance have included EPS growth, price‐earnings multiples, market‐book ratios and internal rates of return. However, many of these studies do not compare performance on a risk‐adjusted basis nor indicate whether differences are statistically significant. In contrast, this study compares performance using the efficient market hypothesis. Regression results indicate that there is no significant difference in risk between portfolios comprised of diversified utilities and non‐diversified utilities. Furthermore, no significant difference in return was observed. The performance of the two portfolios does not appear to differ in risk or return. These results tend to support the efficient market hypothesis concerning stockholders' inability to gain an advantage from publicly available information. Differences in company performance that are anticipated and already reflected in stock price do not result in differences in returns to stockholders.

An alternative method of utility analysis based on tenure, rather than dollar value performance, is presented. The standard deviation of employees' tenure with an organisation becomes the individual differences parameter, rather than SDy, and mean dollar value performance (Y) provides the scaling onto dollars. Results suggest that the new model produces utility estimates that are not significantly different from the classic Brogden‐Cronbach‐Gleser model.

This study compared per selectee utility estimates for the job of medical claims examiner based on applications of the Brogden‐Cronbach‐Gleser (BCG) and Raju‐Burke‐Normand (RBN) utility analysis models. The RBN model's per selectee utility estimate, based on a transformed observed performance rating standard deviation (σR), was closest to the per selectee utility estimate computed with an empirically‐derived σY value. The implications of these results for estimating human resource program utility are discussed.

To many observers, the area of utility analysis appears disjointed, unfocused, and they wonder where it is going. Despite the fact that there is almost 20 years of experience with utility analysis since researchers brought it into the modern era, this approach to cost/benefit analysis has not caught on widely and it is not a standard procedure in the assessment of HR interventions. I argue that utility analysis remains an appropriate area of inquiry, but currently it suffers from three broad sets of problems: (1)from an applied research perspective there is often a failure to focus on critical, value‐adding activities that managers regard as relevant and important to their own success; (2) inability to communicate the results of utility analyses in a persuasive, credible manner to operating executives; and (3) technical problems, both theoretical and operational. In my view, none of these is insurmountable, but we must address each one in a systematic manner if the potential of utility analysis to help guide organizational decision making is to be realized in practice.

Literature on psychology highlights four traits that shape an amoral and antisocial personality: Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy and sadism. Together, these personality traits form the Dark Tetrad. In this study, the standard intertemporal utility maximization model is reassessed from the point of view of a representative economic agent endowed with the Dark Tetrad personality traits.

The approach followed in this paper consists of identifying how each of the Dark Tetrad traits might be logically associated with the dynamic utility problem, as well as exploring, in the context of the model, the implications, for consumption and utility, of admitting the presence of such traits in individuals’ personalities.

It is found that, typically, dark personalities penalize consumption growth, even when such traits are interpreted directly and positively contributing to the utility of the agent. It is also found that in economies with two or more interacting agents, the dark traits might have a mutually destructive nature.

Economics is going through a smooth revolution in the direction of becoming an eminently behavioral science. Most of the traditional economic models, based on the idea of the hyper-rational agent, are being replaced or complemented by a different view of the homo-economicus, in which, among other things, personality matters. This paper offers a novel contribution in this direction.

The Multi-Stakeholder Recommendation System learns consumer and producer preferences to make fair and balanced recommendations. Exclusive consumer-focused studies have improved the recommendation accuracy but lack in addressing producers' priorities for promoting their diverse items to target consumers, resulting in minimal utility gain for producers. These techniques also neglect latent and implicit stakeholders' preferences across item categories. Hence, this study proposes a personalized diversity-based optimized multi-stakeholder recommendation system by developing the deep learning-based diversity personalization model and establishing the trade-off relationship among stakeholders.

The proposed methodology develops the deep autoencoder-based diversity personalization model to investigate the producers' latent interest in diversity. Next, this work builds the personalized diversity-based objective function by evaluating the diversity distribution of producers' preferences in different item categories. Next, this work builds the multi-stakeholder, multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to establish the accuracy-diversity trade-off among stakeholders.

The experimental and evaluation results over the Movie Lens 100K and 1M datasets demonstrate that the proposed models achieve the minimum average improvement of 40.81 and 32.67% over producers' utility and maximum improvement of 7.74 and 9.75% over the consumers' utility and successfully deliver the trade-off recommendations.

The proposed algorithm for measuring and personalizing producers' diversity-based preferences improves producers' exposure and reach to various users. Additionally, the trade-off recommendation solution generated by the proposed model ensures a balanced enhancement in both consumer and producer utilities.

For over 60 years, Lerner's (1944) probabilistic approach to the welfare evaluation of income distributions has aroused controversy. Lerner's famous theorem is that, under ignorance regarding who has which utility function, the optimal distribution of income is completely equal. However, Lerner's probabilistic approach can only be applied to compare distributions with equal means when the number of possible utility functions equals the number of individuals in the population. Lerner's most controversial assumption that each assignment of utility functions to individuals is equally likely. This paper generalizes Lerner's probabilistic approach to the welfare analysis of income distributions by weakening the restrictions of utilitarian welfare, equal means, equal numbers, and equal probabilities and a homogeneous population. We show there is a tradeoff between invariance (measurability and comparability) and the information about the assignment of utility functions to individuals required to evaluate expected social welfare.