Biological invasions are an economic problem. Invasions are typically the intended or unintended consequence of economic activity. They impose real costs on society, and the risk of invasion depends on human behaviour. Effective control of invasions depends on using the right economic instruments and developing the right institutions. The problem has two special features. The first is that the ...

The pragmatic utility, for the day-to-day practise of Psychotherapy, of having an evidence base demonstrating that as a discursive genre, it is as efficacious as medication in facilitating emotional, cognitive and behaviour change, is crucial. This comparative outcome data has been gathered using Randomised Controlled Clinical Trials (RCTs), a methodology that has established itself as ‘The Gol...

Farmer decisions with regard to production and land use are strongly influenced by socio-economic factors. In the developed world, the role of agricultural subsidies, quotas and guaranteed prices is especially important. In the past there have been many examples of economic signals which led to unfortunate and unforeseen environmental consequences (‘perverse subsidies’), including soil erosion....

This paper describes a model that explains the changes workers go through in formation and evolution of self-directed work teams (SDWT) over a six year period. The formation phase is characterized by major increases in worker commitment to the team concept. Upper management has to convince workers that the company will give them the freedom and resources to function as a SDWT. Once the team com...

This paper explores how the phenomenology of using selfdriving cars influences conditions for exercising and ascribing responsibility. First, a working account of responsibility is presented, which identifies two classic Aristotelian conditions for responsibility and adds a relational one, and which makes a distinction between responsibility for (what one does) and responsibility to (others). T...

Firms do not exist because of the cost of using the price mechanism, but because they enable actions to be carried out concurrently in conformity with a particular design. This concurrent coordination, which production requires, is distinct from the evolutionary coordination, which is the unintended consequence of market transactions. The two processes are alternatives only to a limited extent....

As one of the rapidly developing technologies, mobile technology brings employees not only the enhanced work effectiveness and efficiency but also some unexpected consequences such as the so called technostress which has been regarded as an increasingly serious issue in contemporary organizations. Despite prior studies have provided some interpretive and qualitative analysis on this issue, the ...

We test the predictions from Becker’s (1957) seminal work on employer prejudice and find that relative black wages (a) vary negatively with the prejudice of the “marginal” white in a state, (b) vary negatively with the prejudice in the lower tail of the prejudice distribution but are unaffected by the prejudice of the most prejudiced persons in a state, and (c) vary negatively with the fraction...

The fact that technologies have unintended consequences is self-evident. But risk management managing the adverse effects of technology is both uncertain and politically contentious, since it entails making decisions about socially important issues in the face of scientific uncertainty. Originating in European environmental policy in the 1970s, the precautionary principle (PP) is embodied in ad...

This paper argues that it is crucially important to differentiate between two very distinct sets of entrepreneurs: subsistence and transformational entrepreneurs. Recent evidence suggests that people engaging in these two types of entrepreneurship are not only very distinct in nature, but that only a negligible fraction of them transition from subsistence to transformational entrepreneurship. T...