Abstract: To boost employees’ performance, firms often offer monetary bonuses when production goals are reached. However, the evidence suggests that the particular level of a goal is critical to the effectiveness of this practice. Goals must be challenging yet achievable. Computing optimal...

This paper proves that it is wrong to require that regressing a model's outputs on the observed real outcomes gives a 45 degrees line through the origin (unit slope, zero intercept).Therefore this paper proposes an alternative requirement: the responses of the model and the real system should...

We formulate a general representation of points z 2 <n

Sensitivity analysis may serve validation, optimization, and risk analysis of simulation models.This review surveys classic and modern designs for experiments with simulation models.Classic designs were developed for real, non-simulated systems in agriculture, engineering, etc.These designs...

The classical theory of rank-based inference is entirely based either on ordinary ranks, which do not allow for considering location nor intercept parameters, or on signed ranks, which require an assumption of symmetry.If the median, in the absence of a symmetry assumption, is considered as a...

This paper analyzes wage structures in the public and the private sector for Germany. The data contains a rich set of variables on parents' characteristics that we use as instruments. We extend the empirical literature in this field by endogenizing education level and hours worked, and by using...

We consider the problem of estimating the first k coeffcients in a regression equation with k + 1 variables.For this problem with known variance of innovations, the neutral Laplace weighted-average least-squares estimator was introduced in Magnus (2002).We investigate properties of this...