Heterogeneous Skill Research Articles

Enriching organisational design for games: the case of badminton in physical education

ABSTRACT Purpose: Providing students with enjoyable experiences in Physical Education (PE) is considered a key variable in research on increasing Physical Activity (PA) levels. Designing game formats in PE is relevant to achieving this aim. Coupling principles of Motor Praxeology (MP) and the Constraints Led Approach (CLA) to design three games, the aim of this study was to examine how participants’ sex, age and skill levels (organismic constraints) interacted with varied manipulations of task and environmental constraints in the organisational design of badminton games to increase their enjoyment and PA. Method: Participants were students (n = 55, Mage = 14.0, SD = 2.41, 41.8% girls, aged 11–19) enrolled in a PE unit with three distinct badminton organisational designs for games: Individual Tournament (IT), Team Score (TS) and Personal Challenge (PC). IT challenges students in a group of a homogeneous skill level with a one-on-one competition. TS consists of a series of one-on-one games amongst a group of students with a heterogeneous skill level. PC is a competition between students in a heterogenous-level group, adopting a handicap score system. Enjoyment and level of PA was measured using a pleasure scale and accelerometers. Results: Results indicated little effect of organisational design on pupils’ enjoyment but showed a difference in their PA: younger and skilled boys moved less in the PC design compared to the TS organisational design. Discussion/conclusion: Our results suggest that potential interactions between the format of the organisational design and individual differences in students could be relevant for increasing PA in PE programmes. In exploring the effects of interactions of organisational designs for games, goal tasks and students’ characteristics, a combination of MP and CLA frameworks helps to address some of the prevailing beliefs about pleasure and the commitment made by students in common physical education play and activity formats. Our study showed that there is no ideal organisational design for engaging students, but that the most fruitful formats depend on the specific interests of the students. Practical implications: These theoretical frameworks invite PE teachers to develop organisational designs by providing interaction between goal-oriented tasks and social variables (e.g. relationships between players) to provoke richer experiences in all students from different skill levels.

Mismatch Cycles

This paper studies the cyclical dynamics of skill mismatch and quantifies its impact on labor productivity. We build a tractable directed search model, in which workers differ in skills along multiple dimensions and sort into jobs with heterogeneous skill requirements. Skill mismatch arises because of information frictions and is prolonged by search frictions. Estimated to the United States, the model replicates salient business cycle properties of mismatch. Job transitions in and out of bottom job rungs, combined with career mobility, are key to account for the empirical fit. The model provides a novel narrative for the scarring effect of unemployment.

The Effect of Labor Market Conditions at Entry on Workers' Long-Term Skills

Abstract Using data on adults' cognitive skills from nineteen countries, this paper shows that labor market conditions during the education-to-work transition affected workers' long-term skill development. Workers who faced higher unemployment rates at ages 18 to 25 have lower skills at ages 36 to 59. Unemployment rates at ages 26 to 35 do not have such an effect. Skill inequality is affected: those with less educated parents experience most of the negative effects. Using German panel data on skills, I document a mechanism related to heterogeneous skill development across firms: young workers at large firms experience higher skill growth than those at small firms.

Multi-project scheduling with multi-skilled workforce assignment considering uncertainty and learning effect for large-scale equipment manufacturer

This study addresses a resource-constrained multi-project scheduling and multi-skilled workforce assignment problem for the large-scale equipment manufacturing industry. The goal is to help the production manager perform effective planning and decrease the production cost under delivery constraints. The deterministic duration is used in most past investigations in resource-constrained multi-project scheduling problems. Uncertainty in project execution is neglected. Additional related factors are included in the current study to be close to practical circumstances. The required processing duration and material arrival time are modeled as stochastic variables. The heterogeneous skill efficiency of the internal workforce is considered with the learning effect. Skill efficiency grows with the accumulation of experience. Actual processing time is calculated on the basis of skill efficiency and stochastic process duration. The external workforce is hired when the internal workforce fails to satisfy processing demand. The objective is to minimize the expected integrated cost, which is the sum of tardiness penalty and external workforce cost. A genetic algorithm with a heuristic workforce assignment method is also developed, and a case study is illustrated to explain the scheduling result. The proposed approach with uniform crossover and local search mechanism outperforms other comparative methods by approximately 10.34% considering total costs. Furthermore, the Taguchi method of design of the experiment is conducted to find the optimal parameter setting efficiently. Afterward, the sensitivity analysis of production-related parameters is discussed.

Skill versus reliability in venture capital

We study competition for startups among VCs with heterogeneous skill. VCs with established skill face two impediments. First, less established VCs compete aggressively for new startups in order to establish a reputation. Second, startups also value reliability in their VCs, which imposes a higher cost on established VCs because they have better outside options. As a result, startups “over-experiment” by excessively partnering with less established VCs, which crowds out established skill and reduces social welfare. Established VCs are hurt because they need to pay more to attract startups, lose profitable opportunities, and face increased competition from newly established VCs.

Grouping Students by Skill Level in Mini-Volleyball: Effect on Game Performance and Knowledge in Sport Education.

The purpose of this study was to explore any differences in game performance variables and knowledge among a cohort of high school students who participated in either homogeneous or heterogeneous skill level groups (N = 126) across a 12-lesson mini-volleyball sport education unit of study. This study followed a mixed-methods approach using a quasi-experimental pre-test/post-test design. The quantitative variables analyzed were decision making, skill execution, game performance, game involvement, and game knowledge. We also evaluated students' performance qualitatively, employing two methods: (a) experts' analysis of students' game performance, and (b) students' and teachers' perceptions of students' performance. We analyzed quantitative data through a series of paired samples t-tests comparing pre- and post-test scores according to the grouping strategy. Students became more competent in their game play and more knowledgeable in their technique, the sport's rules, tactical awareness, and general game knowledge. However, grouping students by skill level had no impact on gains in game performance variables and knowledge. Although sport education literature shows a preference for heterogeneity in ability-based grouping, within our data both heterogeneous and homogenous groups of higher and lower skilled students achieved improvements in game performance and knowledge, leading us to suggest that teachers who are interested in grouping students to create a meaningful learning experience should consider criteria other than student ability.

Skill versus Reliability in Venture Capital

We study competition for startups among VCs with heterogeneous skill. VCs with established skill face two impediments. First, less established VCs compete aggressively for new startups in order to establish a reputation. Second, startups also value reliability in their VCs, which imposes a higher cost on established VCs because they have better outside options. As a result, startups “over-experiment” by excessively partnering with less established VCs, which crowds out established skill and reduces social welfare. Established VCs are hurt because they need to pay more to attract startups, lose profitable opportunities, and face increased competition from newly established VCs.

Multidimensional Skills, Sorting, and Human Capital Accumulation

We construct a structural model of on-the-job search in which workers differ in skills along several dimensions and sort themselves into jobs with heterogeneous skill requirements along those same dimensions. Skills are accumulated when used, and depreciate when not used. We estimate the model combining data from O*NET with the NLSY79. We use the model to shed light on the origins and costs of mismatch along heterogeneous skill dimensions. We highlight the deficiencies of relying on a unidimensional model of skill when decomposing the sources of variation in the value of lifetime output between initial conditions and career shocks. (JEL J24, J41, J64)

Preferences and Skill in Sustainable Investing

We document a positive ESG premium among stocks with a low degree of socially-motivated investor ownership. We show that a theory of sustainable investing with heterogeneous skill and sustainability sentiment can explain this finding. In support of this explanation, we find in the cross-section that a low degree of socially-motivated ownership leads to future ESG score increases. The premium amongst low degree of socially-motivated ownership is stronger during periods of high climate sentiment and risk aversion as in the crisis.

How Skilled are Security Analysts?

The majority of security analysts are identified as skilled when the cross-section of analyst performance is modeled as a mixture of multiple skill distributions. Analysts exhibit heterogeneous skill–some are high-type, and some are low-type. On average, the recommendationrevisions of both types exhibit positive abnormal returns. The heterogeneity stems from differential ability to produce new information; all analysts can profitably process news. Top analysts outperform because more of their recommendations are influential (i.e., associated with statistically significant returns) and both their influential and non-influential recommendations are more informative than other analysts'. A majority of research firms are also identified as skilled.

How Skilled Are Security Analysts?

ABSTRACTThe majority of security analysts are identified as skilled when the cross‐section of analyst performance is modeled as a mixture of multiple skill distributions. Analysts exhibit heterogeneous skill—some are high‐type, and some are low‐type. On average, the recommendation revisions of both types exhibit positive abnormal returns. The heterogeneity stems from differential ability to produce new information; all analysts can profitably process news. Top analysts outperform because more of their recommendations are influential (i.e., associated with statistically significant returns) and both their influential and noninfluential recommendations are more informative. A majority of research firms are also identified as skilled.

HEURISTICS FOR NOISE-SAFE JOB-ROTATION PROBLEMS CONSIDERING LEARNING-FORGETTING AND BOREDOM-INDUCED JOB DISSATISFACTION EFFECTS

In mitigating occupational hazards, there is often a need to use administrative controls such as job rotation over a prolonged period until the hazards can be eliminated or mitigated to safe levels. This research develops a noise-safe job-rotation optimization model that accounts for learning, forgetting, and boredom effects. Our analysis focuses on the case of human-paced and labor-intensive operations, considering the trade-off between safety and productivity. A case of multi-skilled workers that have heterogeneous skill levels with varying problem sizes is used to demonstrate the model s capabilities. A genetic algorithm and a randomized greedy algorithm are developed and shown to be effective in solving large-scale safe job rotation problems. Our results also show how the boredom and forgetting effects create productivity delays when job rotation is used.

Minimizing expected discounted cost in a queueing loss model with discriminating arrivals

We consider a queuing loss system with heterogeneous skill based servers and Poisson arrivals. We first assume that each arrival has a vector (X1,…,Xn) of independent binary random variables with Xi=1 if server i is eligible to serve that arrival. The service time at server i is exponential with rate μi. Arrivals finding no servers that are both idle and eligible to serve them are lost. Assuming the system incurs a cost of one unit for each lost customer, our goal is to find the optimal policy for assigning arrivals to idle and eligible servers so as to minimize the expected discounted cost of the system. Later, we generalize our model by considering k server pools where each pool i is eligible to serve arrivals with probability pi and all servers within this pool provide service at an exponential rate μi.

Immigration in Emerging Countries: A Macroeconomic Perspective

Roughly one third of migrants worldwide reside in developing countries, yet most papers on the macroeconomic effects of immigration focus on advanced economies. We investigate the medium- and long-term effects of immigration in an emerging country, considering a salient feature of this type of economies: the importance of labor informality. We build an overlapping generations model featuring 24 cohorts, an informal sector, and households with heterogeneous skill levels, among other features, that help us match key demographic and economic characteristics of Chile, an emerging country that has recently experienced an important immigration wave. An immigration wave increases the supply of labor, creating downward pressure on wages in the formal sector. Workers respond by reallocating labor effort to the informal sector, which allows them to mitigate the decline in consumption per worker triggered by lower formal-sector wages. Our model, thus, constitutes a framework for the quantitative analysis of immigration in emerging countries.

Heterogeneous skill distribution and college major: evidence from PIAAC

ABSTRACTA large literature documents the uneven distribution of labor market outcomes across majors. Students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) can earn more than their peers. This earnings gap can be attributed not only to the differential educational resources investment but also to heterogeneous distribution of initial cognitive skills across majors. I benefit from the rich data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies to examine this earnings gap in the United Stated and the United Kingdom. Based on my findings, this paper establishes new facts that add to the understanding of how college field premiums are generated. I show that a sizable portion of the return to majors is due to self-selection and up to two-fifths of the field premiums can be explained by basic cognitive skills. Despite the qualitatively similar impacts of numeracy and literacy skills on choosing college field of study, the pricing of numeracy is much higher than literacy in the labor market.

How does inequality aversion affect inequality and redistribution?

We investigate the effects of inequality aversion on equilibrium labor supply, tax revenue, income inequality, and median voter outcomes in a society where agents have heterogeneous skill levels. These outcomes are compared to those which result from the behavior of selfish agents. A variant of Fehr-Schmidt preferences is employed that allows the externality from agents who are “ahead” to differ in magnitude from the externality from those who are “behind” in the income distribution. We find first, that inequality-averse preferences yield distributional outcomes that are analogous to tax-transfer schemes with selfish agents, and may either increase or decrease average consumption. Second, in a society of inequality-averse agents, a linear income tax can be welfare-enhancing. Third, inequality-averse preferences can lead to less redistribution at any given tax, with low-wage agents receiving smaller net subsidies and/or high-wage individuals paying less in net taxes. Finally, an inequality-averse median voter may prefer higher redistribution even if it means less utility from own consumption and leisure.

Students’ verbal exchanges and dynamics during Sport Education

In physical education (PE), children frequently participate in teams and the exchanges that transpire shape their perspectives and subsequently, influence learning. While Sport Education is one pedagogical model designed to enhance social exchanges through team membership, we previously identified the need for additional research to monitor these exchanges more closely. This study examined the verbal exchanges of students in two fourth grade PE classes participating in a season of team handball. One mixed-skill team from Class 1 (a heterogeneous skill league) and one low-skill team from Class 2 (a homogeneous skill league) were selected for in-depth study. Data collection included videotaped lessons from each team. Data analysis produced descriptive results of the frequency and focus of students’ individual exchanges. Our results indicated middle-to-high status students had higher rates of exchanges at the commencement of the season segments. Students in the homogeneous league had higher frequencies of exchanges than those in the heterogeneous league, and the focus of exchanges predominantly included on-task exchanges for the skill, in both skill leagues. This study highlights the potential for varied rates of exchange, based on student characteristics and unit design. Careful consideration for these factors should be employed to determine optimal learning environments for students.

Minimizing average project team size given multi-skilled workers with heterogeneous skill levels

Many firms face the challenging task of staffing concurrent projects such that the skill requirements of each project can be satisfied by the respective team of workers. We consider a staffing problem where each worker can be assigned to several projects at a time. A high total number of assignments implies large project teams and scattering of workers across projects. Large teams come along with productivity losses due to increased coordination effort and social loafing while scattering incurs losses due to frequent switching between projects. To curb these inefficiencies, we formulate a mixed-integer linear program that minimizes average project team size and, thus, scattering. The program accounts for multi-skilled workers with heterogeneous skill levels who must also fulfill duties within their departments. We prove that the problem is NP-hard in the strong sense and outline valid inequalities that accelerate the solution by a commercial branch-and-cut solver. For large-scale instances, we devise three construction heuristics, each of which is embedded in a multi-pass procedure. Our performance analysis reveals that a heuristic based on the drop principle offers the best compromise between solution quality and computation time. Limitations of the proposed approach, managerial insights, and areas of application are discussed.

A Queueing Loss Model with Heterogeneous Skill Based Servers Under Idle Time Ordering Policies

We consider a queueing loss system with heterogeneous skill based servers with arbitrary service distributions. We assume Poisson arrivals, with each arrival having a vector indicating which of the servers are eligible to serve it. An arrival can only be assigned to a server that is both idle and eligible. Assuming exchangeable eligibility vectors and an idle time ordering assignment policy, the limiting distribution of the system is derived. It is shown that the limiting probabilities of the set of idle servers depend on the service time distributions only through their means. Moreover, conditional on the set of idle servers, the remaining service times of the busy servers are independent and have their respective equilibrium service distributions.

A Queueing Loss Model with Heterogeneous Skill Based Servers Under Idle Time Ordering Policies

We consider a queueing loss system with heterogeneous skill based servers with arbitrary service distributions. We assume Poisson arrivals, with each arrival having a vector indicating which of the servers are eligible to serve it. An arrival can only be assigned to a server that is both idle and eligible. Assuming exchangeable eligibility vectors and an idle time ordering assignment policy, the limiting distribution of the system is derived. It is shown that the limiting probabilities of the set of idle servers depend on the service time distributions only through their means. Moreover, conditional on the set of idle servers, the remaining service times of the busy servers are independent and have their respective equilibrium service distributions.