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Making rational and undistorted corporate investment decisions is critically important to organisations. “Scientific” investment appraisal can play a central role, particularly setting the hurdle rate. Empirical research reveals that actual rates generally exceed organisations’ cost of capital – the so-called hurdle rate premium (HRP) puzzle. Allowing for bounded rationality of corporate decision-makers, the purpose of this paper is to mobilise the retrievability cognitive bias as one explanation of this paradox.

A systematic structuring and investigation of the legacy of eight scenarios, representing “correct” and “incorrect” decisions on “good” and “bad” proposals, is used to explain the inconsistency between normative capital investment theory and actual practice.

Decision makers’ cognitive processes based on informal perceptions, strengthened by the scope of formal post-audit routines, provide a plausible explanation why investment decision makers tend to systematically set hurdle rates too high.

The findings have still to be explored in more depth by fieldwork and experimental research.

The policy implications of this study are that corporate success could be enhanced by making executives aware of the HRP phenomenon and of its behavioural causes; also by including significant rejected investment proposals in the post-audit programme and communicating the opportunity cost of “false negative” decisions on proposals not adopted.

The paper provides a new explanation for a recognised phenomenon: Allowing for bounded rationality of corporate decision-makers, the paper applies research on a cognitive bias to the setting of the hurdle rate in investment appraisal.

There are different techniques in practice to disperse multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) in elastomers. In the present work, commercially available MWCNTs NANOCYL NC 7000™ are used as filler. A synthetic Nitrile Butadiene Rubber (NBR) and Hydrogenated Nitrile Butadiene Rubber (HNBR) were used as polymer matrix for the composites prepared by melt blending. The filler dispersion in HNBR was studied through Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM). The mechanical properties are investigated through strain sweep and tensile tests. Dielectric measurements are carried out to study electrical conductivity of the nanocomposites. Dynamic mechanical measurements showed an enhanced Payne effect and improvement in stiffness with increase in CNTs content into rubber matrix An improvement in electrical and mechanical properties in both NBR and HNBR system resulted by an increase in filler loading. The mechanical and electric percolation threshold of CNTs was found at very low filler volume fraction. Equilibrium swelling experiments were used to study polymer-filler interaction with the help of Kraus plot and diffusion coefficient. NBR showed higher polymer-filler interaction compared to HNBR. In NBR nanocomposites, CNTs showed higher interaction than carbon black. Good dispersion and effective interaction of the CNTs with the polymer led to significant mechanical reinforcing effects.

Passages, seasons, turning points—all of these popular terms refer to periods of transition in our lives. I am careful to say “our lives” because these stages are universal; for the most part, they are expected and accepted.

The purpose of this chapter is to advance the medical sociology literature on the relationship between social cohesion and SRHS on an individual level. There is little information about how neighborhood social characteristics affect seniors’ SRHS. Guided by tenets of the collective efficacy theory, this chapter hypothesized that older individuals who perceived that their neighborhood has high levels of social cohesion around elderly issues will have better SRHS. A secondary hypothesis investigates whether the relationship was attenuated once their neighbors’ actual, self-reported attitudes toward seniors were taken into account.

Data come from a telephone survey of Indianapolis, Indiana residents, court data, and census information.

Logistic regression analyses indicated that both social cohesion and low income are statistically significant predictors of poor self-rated health status. Although both are statistically significant, the protective association between cohesion and poor SRHS (−0.69 log odds) is of similar magnitude to the risky association between income and poor health (−0.64 log odds).

Consistent with the classic work of Durkheim who found that individuals who were more socially integrated with society had lower rates of suicide, our study found a significant association between social cohesion and SRHS.

Future research is needed to target other health status outcomes in other geographical locations. Even though the body of research exploring the predictors of SRHS among older individuals is quite robust, this chapter adds to a more recent growing body of research, which has articulated the importance of the social environment in which an individual lives, especially community-dwelling older adults, is associated with their health status.

Research suggests that the small‐ and medium‐sized Western European firms interested in direct investment in the United States are reluctant to co‐operate with state governments in formulating investment decisions. Research findings in the Upper Mid‐west indicate that the primary motivation of these firms to invest in the Upper Mid‐west is to shelter capital. The amount of importance the individual state governments place on reverse direct investment politicises the entire process of solicitation of potential direct investors. As a result, the small‐ and medium‐sized Western European firms tend to seek direct investment assistance from professional private sources.

The concept of meta‐markets has been around a long time, with numerous references to the European market, the South American market and so on. An examination of MNC consumer product transfers into four OECD‐recognized meta‐markets shows that in some cases regional cultures affect MNC product adaption strategies.

The course and development of capitalism is a central issue in socio‐logical analysis (Marx, 1936; Harrington, 1976; Bernstein, 1985; Badham, 1984; Baran and Sweezy, 1977; Dahrendorf, 1959; Mandel, 1976). Though there is little agreement on the destiny of capitalism, there is general recognition that capitalism has been altered by recent social change. These changes have been widely discussed around ideas pertaining to the regulation of economic actors, legal constraints on wages and the general increase of welfare programmes. Of these developments, welfare and social services have been the most carefully monitored in the sociological literature. Since welfare programmes provide goods and services without regard to social and economic status, welfare has been correctly interpreted as a significant modification of capitalism.

This paper argues that by shackling the future of work to a vision of full employment, alternative futures are closed off. At present, employment creation is seen as the sole route out of poverty. Here, however, we reveal that a complementary additional pathway is to help people to help themselves and each other. To show this, evidence from a survey of 400 households in deprived neighbourhoods of Southampton and Sheffield is reported. This reveals that besides creating job opportunities, measures that directly empower people to improve their circumstances could be a useful complementary initiative to combat social exclusion and open up new futures for work that are currently closed off.

The increasing interest in economic, social, and ecological sustainability has important implications for the traditional views on organization effectiveness, organization design, and organization development. Managers need to design organizations to achieve a “triple bottom line.” A review of the organization effectiveness literature suggests that no single model seems to provide the necessary guidance, and there is a clear need for creation, revision, and integration. Organization effectiveness criteria in the future require a clearer modeling of the multistakeholder demands so that organization designers can specify appropriate strategies, structures, systems, and processes as well as the changes necessary to develop them. We propose an integration called “responsible progress” and suggest that it represents an important new stream of organization development theory. The relationships between this new criterion of organization effectiveness and the design features necessary to pursue them must be tested.

The purpose of this research is to present a formulation of the System of Competitive Intelligence that is up‐to‐date and responsive to an area of study which enables the constant upgrading and improvement of business management practices, so that a competitive edge may be maintained and a market differentiation established.

This comprises a study of the existing literature and a review of articles of criticism related to the particularities of competitive strategy, systems of competitive intelligence, and the quality of service rendered by health insurance companies of health services, with a view to identifying the main elements needed to attain competitive advantage. From the results gathered, the construction of the model will be started and its strong and weak points commented upon.

It was observed that the Model of System of Competitive Intelligence can guarantee the survival of a company, through analyzing information quickly and in an integrated way, thus permitting well‐founded decisions to be made in real time.

The model was based on literary research and it was directed only to one sector of service industry. The suggestion is that this model should be applied to confirm its effectiveness.

This work will go towards making it possible for health insurers in the City of Recife – Brazil to obtain competitive advantage in the health service, through service provided with greater quality, that satisfactorily meets the needs of their clients, besides promoting technological advances in this sector. It will also assist other companies in the health area who wish to adopt the model proposed.