Cooperative Endeavor Research Articles

Framing in a threshold public goods experiment with heterogeneous endowments

In cooperative endeavors among economically heterogeneous parties, the contribution decisions can often be framed in different ways. But do such framing differences affect behavior? We report the results of a laboratory experiment on threshold public goods with heterogeneous endowments and different frames. Four treatments frame two variables, each in one of two ways: the contribution metric is expressed either in absolute terms or relative to endowments, and the contribution choice is framed as either keeping or contributing some of one’s endowment. Subjects can exchange proposals and counterproposals. Our results reveal a broad consensus that high endowed subjects contribute more in absolute terms than the low endowed, which we trace to subjects’ reported distributive preferences. Both high and low endowed subjects contribute about two-thirds of their endowments in all treatments – save when the metric is framed as “contributing” in “absolute” terms: then the low endowed contribute significantly more, around 80%. This last result suggests the possibility that the most frequently used frame in public good experiments induces higher contributions among the less affluent than economically equivalent alternate frames.

Positive Legal Education: Flourishing Law Students and Thriving Law Schools

There is a wellbeing crisis in the legal field and legal education may be the catalyst. Law students are the most dissatisfied, demoralized, and depressed of graduate student populations. The Socratic method is infamous for inducing anxiety in law students and law school grades are often determined by a single final exam at the end of a grueling semester. Law students cite competition, grades, and workload as major stressors, and if legal educators ignore their harmful impact, it will likely suppress learning and fuel illness. Law students start law school with strong mental health and high life satisfaction measures, and within the first year of law school experience a significant increase in anxiety and depression. The impairment in wellbeing continues beyond the first year of law school and into legal practice. A recent study surveyed 12,825 lawyers and discovered that 23% of licensed, employed attorneys identify as problem drinkers, 28% experience depression, and 19% suffer from anxiety. Lawyers rank 4th in suicides among professionals and many recent lawyer suicides are linked to depression. Something bad is happening to law students and the wellbeing crisis bleeds into legal practice. Lawyers are leaders in business, government, and the legal system, possessing the power to drive social progress, but they are not living up to that responsibility. Law school socializes students to extreme competition and punishing levels of stress which compromise both wellbeing and cognitive capacity. Lawyers shape policy, and when they are educated to believe that competitive enterprises are the most productive, they promote replicating them throughout society. Neuroscience and Positive Psychology research has established that when it comes to solving problems, cooperative endeavors outperform competitive initiatives. The American love affair with competition stifles creativity, hinders innovation, and thwarts social progress. Competition promotes antagonistic behavior, a combative mentality, and the eternal cycle of the never-ending feud, where all energies are spent on the battle with the opposition, and problems are rarely improved or solved. Progress toward a more equitable society will be enhanced when legal education entrepreneurs train lawyer leaders to be divergent thinkers whose focus is on problem-solving. This article proposes a new field of inquiry called Positive Legal Education that leverages research findings from Positive Psychology, neuroscience, and Positive Education to inspire innovation in legal education and curate a culture of wellbeing in the legal field. Section II of this Article describes the negative impact legal education has on law student wellbeing. Section III explains neuroscience research on habit learning, knowledge acquisition, and the impact of stress on cognition. Section IV details the five Positive Psychology elements required to achieve wellbeing. Section V demonstrates how wellbeing initiatives have improved academic performance and thriving in secondary and college education. Section VI illustrates how law student knowledge-base, legal skill acquisition, and professional identity development can be enhanced with discipline-specific growth mindset and self-efficacy training, and the shift from the grade curve to competency-based grading. Section VII depicts how lawyers can become transformational leaders. Section VIII covers four practices lawyers can undertake to deal with the harmful effects of stress. The article concludes with recommendations for scholars and legal education entrepreneurs who want to transform legal education.

Public Capitalism: The Political Authority of Corporate Executives

<i>Public Capitalism: The Political Authority of Corporate Executives</i>

Democracy for Export: Museums Connect Program as a Vehicle of American Cultural Diplomacy

AbstractSponsored by the U.S. Department of State and facilitated by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) through the Museums Connect program, Identities: Understanding Islam in a Cross‐cultural Context is an exercise of community development and public inclusion from the perspective of cultural diplomacy. The 2009–10 project was a cooperative endeavor between the Museum of History and Holocaust Education (MHHE) at Kennesaw State University, Georgia, USA and the Ben M'sik Community Museum, Hassan II University, Casablanca, Morocco. Drawing on interviews conducted with the AAM managers and project participants, as well as relevant literature, the discussion considers the more important mechanisms of American museum missions and practices as means of achieving American foreign‐policy objectives.

The development of a protocol for post-mortem management of Ebola virus disease in the setting of developed countries.

The management of the recent Ebola virus disease (EVD) epidemic continues to pose currently insuperable challenges to health care providers in the resource-deprived countries of West Africa. In an age where air travel facilitates rapid movement of people between countries and continents, there is an urgent requirement for health systems around the globe to develop management strategies and protocols in the event that EVD cases are suspected or confirmed. Departments of forensic pathology play an important, and underestimated, role in public health service delivery, particularly at times of novel infectious disease emergence. This role can include disease identification, characterization, and notification, as well as close engagement with agencies responsible for disease surveillance and treatment provision. A mass outbreak of EVD in the Western world is considered highly unlikely; however, there is clear responsibility on departments of forensic pathology to develop protocols for rapid assessment of sporadic or suspected cases while ensuring the health and safety of mortuary and pathology personnel. The Ontario Forensic Pathology Service and the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine have collaborated on the development of a protocol for management of EVD cases presenting at a scene or in the mortuary. It is hoped that this trans-national, inter-departmental exercise will serve as a model for future co-operative endeavors. The protocol has been distributed to forensic pathology departments around Australia and may be modified to accommodate local resource capabilities.

Historias del bienestar. Desde la historia de las emociones a las políticas de la experiencia

The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, we intend to produce a short review on the history of the emotions in Spain and Latin America. On the other hand, we will argue in favor of a methodological approach, focused on the history of subjective experiences and, specifically in this case, on the cultural history of wellbeing. We will conclude that the cooperative project developed by our group of Madrid and a Valencian team of doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists specialized in the study and treatment of fibromyalgia is a good example of how cooperative endeavor between the Humanities and the Health Sciences in the XXI century.

Logistics Service Providers and Value Creation Through Collaboration: A Case Study

Logistics service provider (LSP) strategy and value creation is a cooperative endeavor. The study focuses on how LSPs create value by taking advantage of being connected and exploring the presence of various forms of interdependence. Using a single case study and a framework addressing network externalities and the concept of value logic interaction, we identify three types of collaborative value creation; distributive, functional and systemic. Whereas the fundamental logic of the LSP is mediation in terms of performing a distributive service, it is also subject to externalities in its functional and systemic value creation initiatives. LSPs are thereby portrayed as strategic entities dealing with a set of interdependencies in order to facilitate value creation in their networks. These firms need a rather advanced understanding of different types of economies and forms of collaboration to succeed. The study also associates different types of LSPs with the identified types of collaborative value creation.

Using technology to revolutionize cooperative learning: an opinion.

OPINION article Front. Psychol., 13 October 2014Sec. Educational Psychology https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01156

A New “Golden Rule” for Peer Review?

Peer review is a cornerstone of scientific publishing. It relies on the altruistic efforts of voluntary referees and is thus an inherently cooperative endeavor (McPeek et al. 2009, Mulligan and Raphael 2010). An essential ingredient of any cooperative system is fairness (de Waal 2009, Anon. 2012); this applies to publishing as much as any other endeavor. However, anyone with more than a passing familiarity with the peer review process is likely to have experienced behaviors that are not fair. Some referees abuse their influence and anonymity to make criticisms that are undue or inaccurate (Lawrence 2003, Gray 2004, Hart 2004), and editors sometimes turn a blind eye to such behavior. This undermines the integrity of academic publication, lowers productivity, delays progress, and discourages talented researchers from pursuing academic careers.

Monitoring of Geomagnetic Field As An International Cooperative Endeavor

Monitoring of Geomagnetic Field As An International Cooperative Endeavor

From the Desk of the Program Director: Show Me the Rankings!

From the Desk of the Program Director: Show Me the Rankings!

Memories of Western Violence, Lost and Found

Memories of Western Violence, Lost and Found Andrew Denson (bio) Ari Kelman. A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. xiii + 384 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $35.00. On November 29, 1864, Colorado militia attacked a group of around 700 peaceful Cheyennes and Arapahos camped along Sand Creek, near the Kansas-Colorado border. Led by Colonel John Chivington, an abolitionist and former Methodist minister, the soldiers had orders to find and punish “hostile” Indians responsible for raids on Colorado settlements. Chivington, however, failed to locate militant Cheyennes and chose instead to assault the “friendly” bands at Sand Creek, claiming that hostiles were hidden among them. Firing into the camp with rifles and field artillery, the soldiers killed more than 150 Indian people, the majority of them women, children, and the elderly. After setting the survivors to flight, the militia returned to the site to scalp and mutilate the dead. The incident had far-reaching consequences. It sparked intensified warfare on the southern plains, as Cheyennes and Arapahos retaliated with attacks of their own. It also helped to inspire a reform movement in American Indian affairs. When reports of the atrocity circulated in the Eastern press, critics of federal Indian policy cited the massacre as evidence that the United States must reorient its approach to emphasize peaceful assimilation over military conquest. Congress investigated the episode, condemning Chivington’s actions, and the United States even promised reparations to the Indian survivors. The massacre quickly became a symbol of the violence of American westward expansion. By the twentieth century, it joined the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the Navajos’ Long Walk, and the massacre at Wounded Knee on the short list of tragic events that Americans invoked as emblems of the nation’s unjust treatment of Indian peoples. In A Misplaced Massacre, historian Ari Kelman examines the public memory of Sand Creek, focusing on the campaign by the National Park Service (NPS) to create a historic site interpreting the event. Launched in the late 1990s, the project enjoyed broad support among a variety of different interests. Local residents hoped that increased heritage tourism might help improve eastern [End Page 273] Colorado’s stagnant economy. Cheyennes and Arapahos recognized the commemoration as an opportunity to honor their ancestors and bear witness to their people’s past suffering. NPS officials, meanwhile, saw the site as an opportunity to demonstrate the agency’s commitment to cultural pluralism, while showcasing its ability to interpret the darker chapters of American history. They also hoped it might become a model for future cooperative endeavors between the agency and Indian nations. As Kelman demonstrates, however, the Sand Creek project quickly became the focus of a series of rancorous arguments that, at times, came close to ending work on the site. While almost everyone agreed that commemorating Sand Creek was a good idea, the process of commemoration revealed fundamental incongruities over the meaning of the massacre and the uses of its memory in the present-day West. Kelman’s book joins a small but significant recent literature on the public memory of Western violence. In the last decade, Michael Elliot has analyzed contemporary struggles over the Battle of the Little Bighorn, while Karl Jacoby has dissected memories of the Camp Grant Massacre in Arizona. As both a scholar and a participant, Waziyatawin Angela Wilson has written on the Dakota people’s commemorations of the Sioux War in Minnesota.1 A Misplaced Massacre also reflects the renewed emphasis among Native American historians on charting the violence unleashed by American settler colonialism, a turn exemplified by Ned Blackhawk’s prize-winning study of Great Basin communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 In examining Sand Creek, Kelman adopts what he terms a “nontraditional architecture” (p. x). His main subject is the creation of the Sand Creek National Historic Site, which opened to the public in 2007. While telling that story, however, he frequently flashes back to previous commemorations, arguments among Sand Creek participants over the massacre, and the mid-nineteenth century Indian wars themselves. Rather than proceed chronologically, the study moves around in time, while always eventually returning to the campaign to develop...

The Language and Educational Ideologies of Mixteco-Mexican Mothers

Mixtecos, members of an Indigenous group from Mexico, have settled in large numbers in New York. Their children are found in bilingual classrooms (Spanish–English), but little is known about parent–school interactions. This work describes the educational ideologies that 23 Mixteco mothers shared during 5 focus group interviews distributed across 9 months. The results are presented as structured anecdotes that underline (a) education as a cooperative endeavor between teachers and parents, (b) preference of Spanish over Mixteco as family language, and (c) mothers’ commitment to overcoming their own illiteracy. The educational ideologies of these Mixteco mothers reflect deep commitment to supporting their children's education.

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil (review)

Reviewed by: The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil Thomas W. Zeiler (bio) The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order. By Benn Steil. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Pp. 449. $29.95 cloth; $16.17 ebook) This book on the birth of the international monetary system during World War II does much very well. It especially provides a readable account of a very important period and highly significant negotiation between two figures who represented the fortunes, both rising and waning, of their respective nations. Benn Steil of the Council on Foreign Relations has a knack for the dramatic storyline, regardless of what readers might presume to be dry subjects of financial arcana, such as gold reserves, deflation, and drawing rights. In his adept hands, his weaving together personal backgrounds and relations, high and low politics, and bureaucratic maneuverings is actually the stuff of theater. The riveting show focuses on how the respected but relatively unknown Harry Dexter White of the United States Treasury managed to overwhelm the esteemed John Maynard Keynes of the [End Page 628] British government. It is a very important story, not least because White’s American system served as the postwar foundation for global capitalism. Even though it collapsed in the early 1970s, echoes of the Bretton Woods multilateral market regime remains in practice and was partly to blame for the 2008 world financial debacle. Steil’s contribution to the scholarship arises from the treatment of White, although even this is not a new story (claims in the book to the contrary). Unlike the patrician Keynes, whose economic theories had been institutionalized in Britain and in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, White was an obscure figure. Not for long, however. A child of Jewish immigrants, he scrabbled his way through the Treasury Department bureaucracy by stints as a researcher and government official in World War II, when he authored the Morgenthau Plan that, had it been instituted, would have imposed a harsh peace on Germany. White was a staunch internationalist, even a leftist with sympathies for the Soviet Union—not so much a problem during the war as afterward, when anticommunism reared up in America. In 1944, he confronted Keynes, though not necessarily Keynesianism. Keynes pursued the preservation of the British empire, and British economic dominance through a world currency and central bank that would have propped up large deficit countries (like Britain, which then could have financed the empire through the bank). The White plan, conservative and reflecting sheer American power, led to the creation of what were later known as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These mechanisms called on those suffering deficits to correct trade imbalances through austerity measures. This regime is with us today, of course, though the irony is that White was more liberal than Keynes. This story is well told. It is also well known. It was first investigated by Richard Gardner, in Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy (1956) decades ago, and then superbly reconstructed by Randall Woods’s A Changing of the Guard (1990) over twenty years ago. Steil cites Gardner, but not Woods, who digested the same archives, understood the drama of the tale, and, to boot, corrected the notion (that Steil [End Page 629] seems to think is his novel contribution) that the Anglo-American negotiation at Bretton Woods was a cooperative endeavor full of unity and good cheer. They were not, as Woods argued. Furthermore, the point that White beat the hell out of Keynes is also not new; Bradford Delong, Daniel Yergin, and others (including, again, Randall Woods) recognized the confrontation years ago. It is also not earth-shattering news that White was suspected of communist leanings; he paid the price by being forced to step down from the IMF and was expelled from U.S. government service. Steil is targeting a broader audience than scholars, however, and in that sense, this book is a success at recasting a surprisingly exciting story. Thomas W. Zeiler Thomas W. Zeiler teaches history and international affairs at the University of Colorado...

What Does 'Clean' Really Mean? The Implicit Framing of Decontextualized Experiments

It is standard in experimental economics to use decontextualized designs where payoff structures are presented using neutral language. Here we show that cooperation in such a neutrally framed Prisoner’s Dilemma is equivalent to a PD framed as contributing to a cooperative endeavor. Conversely, there is substantially less cooperation in a PD framed as a competition. We conclude that in a decontextualized context, our participants by default project a cooperative frame onto the payoff structure.

20 Years of the Korea-China Economic Relationship: Retrospect and Prospect

Korea-China trade passing through the initial growth period (1992-1997), adjustment period (1998-2001), and second growth period (2002-2005), is now passing through its fourth phase, the stabilization period (2006-present). Although the scale of trade has increased, there is limited accessibility of Korean exports into the Chinese domestic market while processing trade still takes large share. - In the case of Korea’s trade with China, there is a strong connection with investment in China as an investment dependent export structure. However, following from the recent strengthening of local procurement by Korean business subsidiaries in China, there has been a decrease in the export inducement effect through investments. - Despite Korean shares in the Chinese import market holding second place after Japan at 9.6% as of 2011, shares in the domestic market are lower at 6.3% following Japan (11.3%), the US (9.1%), and Germany (7.5% in 2010). Korea’s investment in China, passing through the exploratory period (1989-1991), entrance period (1992-1997), adjustment period (1998-2001), growth period (2002-2008), and transition period (2009-present), has been diversified both in industry and region. However, there has been a recent decline. - After China’s admission to the WTO, the goals of Korea’s investment in China has changed from low-wage toll processing to the domestic market. In regards to industries, there has been a gradual transition from early light industries to heavy chemical industries, as well as a recent increasing focus on service industries. - In order to energize recent inactive investment, there is a need for policies that work to (a) cooperate to expand pioneering investments into the domestic market and (b) move the existing bases of production to the inland mid-western regions that are still needed by toll processing businesses, (c) establish and utilize new Korean industrial complexes, or (d) support the small and medium-sized enterprises which have business items to invest in China. There is an emerging need by both Korea and China to create a paradigm of mutually beneficial cooperation by concluding the FTA and uncovering new cooperative fields. - The reduction of tariffs and overcoming of barriers to entrance into the service industry, through the Korea-China FTA, can provide significant momentum for advancement into China’s domestic market. - In the finance and monetary area, Korea-China cooperation has not yet reached a level of real economy, however, in the future, if there is an increase in the international use of the RMB and a lowering of the barriers to the Chinese financial market, there will be a great increase in the possibility of actual cooperative endeavors. - In Korea’s 17 future growth engine industries and China’s 7 strategic industries, because of the abundance of overlap, there is a need to make a specific cooperative strategy according to areas where the two countries have its own strength and where the two countries experience comparative disadvantage in the world market.

Playful Interactions for People with Intellectual Disabilities

For people with intellectual disabilities, there are significant barriers to inclusion in socially cooperative endeavors. This paper investigates the effectiveness of Stomp, a tangible user interface (TUI) designed to provide new participatory experiences for people with intellectual disability. Results from an observational study reveal the extent to which the Stomp system supports social and physical interaction. The tangible, spatial, and embodied qualities of Stomp result in an experience that does not rely on the acquisition of specific competencies before interaction and engagement can occur.

Collective-Goal Ascription Increases Cooperation in Humans

BackgroundCooperation is necessary in many types of human joint activity and relations. Evidence suggests that cooperation has direct and indirect benefits for the cooperators. Given how beneficial cooperation is overall, it seems relevant to investigate the various ways of enhancing individuals' willingness to invest in cooperative endeavors. We studied whether ascription of a transparent collective goal in a joint action promotes cooperation in a group.MethodsA total of 48 participants were assigned in teams of 4 individuals to either a “transparent goal-ascription” or an “opaque goal-ascription” condition. After the manipulation, the participants played an anonymous public goods game with another member of their team. We measured the willingness of participants to cooperate and their expectations about the other player's contribution.ResultsBetween subjects analyses showed that transparent goal ascription impacts participants' likelihood to cooperate with each other in the future, thereby greatly increasing the benefits from social interactions. Further analysis showed that this could be explained with a change in expectations about the partner's behavior and by an emotional alignment of the participants.ConclusionThe study found that a transparent goal ascription is associated with an increase of cooperation. We propose several high-level mechanisms that could explain the observed effect: general affect modulation, trust, expectation and perception of collective efficacy.

Cooperative modelling and design on the computing grid: data, flux and knowledge interoperability

The fast interconnections of the presently available distributed platforms allow scientists to target highly complex problems by chaining software developed and maintained by experts of the relevant fields. A pillar of such cooperative endeavor in molecular and materials science and technologies is the so-called grid empowered molecular simulator that combines the expertise of molecular science theorists (electronic structure and nuclei dynamics) and experimentalists in order to build and validate ab initio models. This line has prompted an unprecedented level of data format standardization procedures, the bridging of high throughput and high performance platforms, the assemblage of ad hoc designed virtual experiments. In addition this approach has prompted the design and development of tools allowing the evaluation of the quality of the cooperative effort produced by the members of a given research community as well as its rewards to such effort through a credit economy is reported.

The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity ed. by Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Sarah Coakley

BOOK REVIEWS 482 reading, in distinction to the apparent thrust of some historical-critical practitioners, of the scriptural letter. Each author has brought distinct expertise to this project. Marmion has published on Rahner and spirituality. Van Nieuwenhove is an expert in late medieval spirituality, including the spiritual theology of Ruusbroec. He is also the co-editor of a well-received collection of essays on Aquinas’s theology (in the interest of full disclosure, I am the other editor). Their collaboration on the Trinity has turned out well, and to the benefit of readers. Their hope is that this book will stimulate greater interest in the tradition and more fruitful reflection on the Trinity. To that end, each chapter concludes with a list of suggested readings, highlighting significant secondary works. This book would have been even more serviceable if it had a bibliography that listed the primary texts (in the original and in English translation, where available) and a more comprehensive guide to the secondary literature. Yet, this is without doubt a first-rate, suggestive study, one that should find its way into graduate seminars on the Trinity. JOSEPH WAWRYKOW University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity. Edited by PAUL L. GAVRILYUKandSARAH COAKLEY. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. 338. $103.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-521-76920-4. The editors of this collection of essays are well-known and respected theologians. In 2002 Sarah Coakley published a very helpful book on issues of spirituality and gender, Powers and Submission, and in 2004 Paul Gavrilyuk published an admirably documented book on an aspect of patristic thought, The Suffering of the Impassible God. It comes as no surprise that their introduction and respective input (one chapter each) to this volume are excellent. Moreover, the editors must be commended for their choice of contributors, which include a good number of established scholars. In fact, as the foreword explains, a series of informal meetings and consultations began in 2007, which amounted to a cooperative endeavor that prepared the way for this publication. Although the input that the editors have received from a good number of highly competent scholars is manifest in the twenty-page introduction, the editors themselves must be credited for its synthetic presentation. After a section on the vocabulary of spiritual perception and another on Rahner’s seminal article of 1932 about Origen’s innovative view on the topic, the editors propose an allimportant distinction between the vocabulary as including “ordinary mental acts such as imagination, reflection or understanding” (emphasis added) and the BOOK REVIEWS 483 vocabulary that designates “a special mode of perception,” which refers to the cases where God becomes the object of a vision, audition, olfaction, touch, or taste. Thereupon follows a presentation of the biblical loci regarding the spiritual senses, as interpreted by Philo and patristic authors. The introduction ends with a detailed overview of the book. The sixteen studies of the book appear in chronological order, from Origen to twentieth- and twenty-first-century analytic philosophers of religion. I will now offer a summary of each chapter, concentrating on the spiritual senses and, for lack of space, leave aside the other related themes that the authors sometimes dutifully detail. In chapter 1, Mark McInroy deals with the initiator of the tradition that this book explores. Having noted that Origen’s interest in the spiritual senses emerged at the beginning of his erudite career and that one cannot observe in his writings a shift from a metaphorical sense to an analogical sense, McInroy questions John Dillon’s assertion of precisely such a shift. He tells us that Rahner, in face of the enormous range of sensory terms he found in Origen’s works, adopted a highly differentiated approach that has the merit of respecting this range, but the demerit of straying too far from Origen’s literary practice. As McInroy points out, “Origen moves with remarkable fluidity from sensory language that could be deemed analogical to a use of such language that is clearly metaphorical or figurative” (25). He explains the metaphorical use as follows: “Origen clearly states that when he says ‘seeing’, he means ‘understanding’, and when he says...