Distribution Of Rewards Research Articles

An Analysis of Glass Ceiling Perceptions in the Accounting Profession

Access to a deep pool of talent is essential to the success of every professional services firm. The supply of that talent is contingent upon the available rewards for the exercise of that talent, and both the existence of the potential rewards and the beliefs that individuals hold about the existence of the rewards affect the decision to remain in the field. One structural factor that may affect the judgment about whether to remain in a profession concerns promotions based on the gender of the employee (i.e., the “glass ceiling”). In this study, we examine the “glass ceiling” within the context of the accounting profession. While advances have been made within the accounting profession to address the glass ceiling, the continued existence—and perceptions about the continued existence—of the issue exert adverse effects upon the available talent pool and may create long-term problems for the profession. In this study, we investigate glass ceiling perceptions among a large sample of female accounting professionals employed in accounting; the sample includes both public accountants, and those employed in industry accounting. Our study yields the finding of beliefs in bias-driven effects (e.g., a bias against female promotions to the top level), structural effects (e.g., a lack of mentoring opportunities, networking opportunities, and high-profile job assignments), and cultural effects (e.g., a lack of social support from the male leaders within the organization) among these accounting professionals. Glass ceiling perceptions are also influenced by several demographic factors. Furthermore, accounting professionals employed by industry are more likely to report a glass ceiling within their firms than accounting professionals employed by public accounting firms. The findings are of interest to researchers who explore gender-related issues in professional service firms such as the field of accounting, and to senior members of practice who are tasked with ensuring the integrity and quality of the talent pool and the equitable distribution of rewards to employees.

Enhancing Service-Oriented Behaviors in an Asian Business Context: Lessons From a Pakistani Bank

This article examines how service organizations can enhance employees’ customer orientation, often exhibited through the display of service-oriented citizenship behaviors. The study, in this respect, quantitatively analyses the relationships between organizational distributive justice, leader-member exchange (LMX), and team-member exchange (TMX) on customer orientation. Data were gathered through a survey of 658 middle managers working in a Pakistani bank and were analyzed via full structural equation modelling. The findings reveal that organizational distributive justice, LMX, and TMX are key predictors of customer orientation. Specifically, the analysis suggests that the relationships between organizational distributive justice and LMX with customer orientation are mediated partially and fully, respectively, by TMX. Simultaneously, TMX partially mediates the relationship between organizational tenure and customer orientation. Our study contributes to both theory and practice of service organization functioning by signifying the importance of the organization’s fair distribution of rewards as well as it’s leader’s and co-worker’s behaviors in affecting organizationally desired employee behaviors and thereby, arguably, enabling positive organizational outcomes. Service organizations can, based on our findings, create a culture of service excellence by placing emphasis on specific elements at the organizational, leadership, and team level.

Effective truth discovery and fair reward distribution for mobile crowdsensing

By leveraging the sensing capabilities of consumer mobile devices, mobile crowdsensing (MCS) systems enable a number of new applications for Internet of Things (IoT), such as traffic management, environmental monitoring, and localisation. However, the sensing data collected from the crowd workers are of various qualities, making it difficult to discover the ground truth and maintain the fairness of incentivisation schemes. In this paper, we propose a truth discovery algorithm based on a two-stage Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE), which explicitly characterises the heterogeneous sensing capabilities of the crowd and is able to estimate ground truth accurately using only a small amount of data from IoT infrastructures. Moreover, based on the truth discovery algorithm, two reward distribution schemes, LRDS and MRDS, are proposed to ensure fairness of rewarding the crowd according to their effort levels. We evaluate the estimation accuracy of the truth discovery algorithm and the fairness of the reward distribution schemes using both simulations and real-world MCS campaigns. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed methods achieve superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods in terms of estimation accuracy and fairness of reward distribution.

A Case of Torn Loyalty? Industry Rewards and Payments to Gastroenterologists

Introduction: Payments from pharmaceutical and device manufacturers to physicians may influence the advice physicians give patients and peers. Choosing the medical specialty of gastroenterology, we examined the nature and amounts of monetary and other benefits that physicians received more than a decade after many institutions implemented conflict of interest policies. Methods: We analyzed information from the Open Payments database (https://www.cms.gov/openpayments/), including all reports about payments that pharmaceutical and device manufacturers or group purchasing organizations gave to adult or pediatric gastroenterologists in 2016. Using PubMed, we examined the professional affiliations and publication records of top payment recipients and identified panelists of clinical guidelines who also received personal financial rewards, listed in the Open Payments database. Results: A total of 432463 payments went to 13467 individuals and accounted for a total expenditure of $67,144,862. Nearly 90% of the submissions were related to food and beverages. Direct financial payments for consultations, talks, or other services were made to 2055 physicians (13.2%) and were responsible for 4•1% payments, but for 62•7% of the total expenditures. Ten products were linked to 63•8% of payments related to direct financial rewards and 59•1% of the total expenditures. Twenty-nine of 36 clinical practice guidelines included panelists who had received honoraria or consultation fees from industry sources, with amounts listed in the Open Payments database exceeding $10,000 in one third of them. Conclusion: Most gastroenterologists accept meals or gifts from industry, with one in seven receiving direct payments. Considering the known impact of such benefits on prescribing patterns and other professional behaviors, policy makers should consider revising regulations governing interactions with industry and disclosure formats alerting others to their potential biasing impact.1087_A Figure 1. Relative distribution of payments by nature of rewards1087_B Figure 2. Relative distribution of direct financial rewards paid by industry sources1087_C Figure 3. The ten most common drugs linked to payments, as reported in the Open Payments Database

Maximizing Service Reward for Queues With Deadlines

In this paper, we consider a real-time queuing system with rewards and deadlines. We assume that the packet processing time is known upon arrival, as is the case in communication networks. This assumption allows us to demonstrate that the well-known earliest-deadline-first policy performance can be improved. We then propose a scheduling policy that provides excellent results for packets with rewards and deadlines. We prove that the policy is optimal under deterministic service time and binomial reward distribution. In the more general case, we prove that the policy processes the maximal number of packets while collecting rewards higher than the expected reward. We present simulation results that show its high performance in more generic cases compared to the most commonly used scheduling policies.

Behavioral adjustment to asymmetric reward availability among children with and without ADHD: effects of past and current reinforcement contingencies

Altered reinforcement sensitivity is hypothesized to underlie symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Here we evaluate the behavioral sensitivity of Brazilian children with and without ADHD to a change in reward availability. Forty typically developing children and 32 diagnosed with DSM-IV ADHD completed a signal-detection task in which correct discriminations between two stimuli were associated with different frequencies of reinforcement. The response alternative associated with the higher rate of reinforcement switched, without warning, after 30 rewards were delivered. The task continued until another 30 rewards were delivered. Both groups of children developed a response bias toward the initially more frequently reinforced alternative. This effect was larger in the control group. The response allocation of the two groups changed following the shift in reward availability. Over time the ADHD group developed a significant response bias toward the now more frequently reinforced alternative. In contrast, the bias of the control group stayed near zero after an initial decline following the contingency change. The overall shift in bias was similar for the two groups. The behavior of both groups of children was sensitive to the asymmetric reward distribution and to the change in reward availability. Subtle group differences in response patterns emerged, possibly reflecting differences in the time frame of reward effects and sensitivity to reward exposure.

Analysis of Complexity of Unsafe Behavior in Construction Teams and a Multiagent Simulation

The processes in construction are more likely than others to breed unsafe behaviors, and the consequences of these actions can be serious. This paper first reviews the research status on unsafe behavior in construction teams. It then analyzes the complex mechanisms that lead to unsafe behavior and constructs a three-layer structural model based on agent-based modeling (ABM) technology. This modeling deals with complexity and elaborates on key points and potential research ideas in the study of unsafe behavior in construction teams. Using the ABM method, the effects of different incentive strategies on the safe behavior of construction teams under different management scenarios were studied. The results showed that when members have a fair perception of the situation, the effect of the excess performance reward distribution, according to the member’s safety awareness level, is better than the average distribution effect. This is the case whether the member’s safety behavior level is positively or negatively related to the member’s safety awareness level. This study proves the feasibility, validity, and universality of the three-layer structural model. It also reaches certain management conclusions and ideas for further development. The purpose of this paper is to provide a reference for research on the containment and prevention of unsafe behavior in construction teams.

조직공정성이 감정, 직무만족 그리고 이직의도에 미치는 영향

Purpose - Turnover Intention in the franchise industry is becoming a very important issue. This study examines the structural relationships between organizational justice, emotion, job satisfaction, and turnover intention in the franchise industry. In this model, emotion was classified into two sub-dimensions such as positive and negative emotion. Research design, data, methodology - The sample of this study collected from employees of a food-service franchise company is representative. Copies of the questionnaire along with a cover letter were delivered by a research assistant to the human resources manager or the general manager of the selected food-service franchise firms after they agreed to participate in the study. In order to increase the response rate of the respondents, a small gift was provided to the respondents who completed the questionnaire. A total of 300 questionnaires were distributed and 285 returned responses, 9 responses were not usable due to missing information. Thus, a total of 276 responses were used using structural equation modeling with Smartpls 3.0. Results - The results showed that organizational justice had positive significant effects on positive emotion and job satisfaction. Job satisfaction had negative a significant effect on turnover intention. And negative emotion had positive significant effect on turnover intention. Conclusions - The results of this study provide some implications. If employees feel that the franchise headquarters is fair about the methods and procedures of decision making, resource allocation, information sharing, etc., it means that employees feel better. If the franchise's decision-making processes and methods and results are transparently disclosed and processed in accordance with the internal rules of the company, the employees will be able to fully understand and accept them. The results of this study also show that positive and negative emotions of service-based franchise employees have different effects on job attitude and organizational behavior. In particular, when negative emotions of employees are passed on to others and the results are negative, employees may feel that they are disoriented or wrong. Therefore, the franchise headquarters should try to inspire employees' sense of organizational community, and should pay attention to how to relieve the job stress and the fair distribution of work and rewards.

ПОЛИТИКА «ЛАСКАНИЯ» В РОССИЙСКО-ДАГЕСТАНСКИХ ОТНОШЕНИЯХ XVII-XIX ВЕКОВ

On the basis of documents and special literature the article reveals the essence of the “soft soap” policy, which included the system of measures that were taken by the Russian authorities to win the support of Dagestan aristocracy in solving their foreign-policy problems. The author shows how and why the imperial authorities encouraged Dagestan feudal owners to take the oath of citizenship in the XVII-XIX centuries by concrete factual material. The paper describes such methods of influence as distribution of gifts and rewards, granting land allotments, appointing military ranks, etc.

Belief Reward Shaping in Reinforcement Learning

A key challenge in many reinforcement learning problems is delayed rewards, which can significantly slow down learning. Although reward shaping has previously been introduced to accelerate learning by bootstrapping an agent with additional information, this can lead to problems with convergence. We present a novel Bayesian reward shaping framework that augments the reward distribution with prior beliefs that decay with experience. Formally, we prove that under suitable conditions a Markov decision process augmented with our framework is consistent with the optimal policy of the original MDP when using the Q-learning algorithm. However, in general our method integrates seamlessly with any reinforcement learning algorithm that learns a value or action-value function through experience. Experiments are run on a gridworld and a more complex backgammon domain that show that we can learn tasks significantly faster when we specify intuitive priors on the reward distribution.

Budget-Constrained Multi-Armed Bandits With Multiple Plays

We study the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays and a budget constraint for both the stochastic and the adversarial setting. At each round, exactly K out of N possible arms have to be played (with 1 ≤ K <= N). In addition to observing the individual rewards for each arm played, the player also learns a vector of costs which has to be covered with an a-priori defined budget B. The game ends when the sum of current costs associated with the played arms exceeds the remaining budget. Firstly, we analyze this setting for the stochastic case, for which we assume each arm to have an underlying cost and reward distribution with support [cmin, 1] and [0, 1], respectively. We derive an Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm which achieves O(NK4 log B) regret. Secondly, for the adversarial case in which the entire sequence of rewards and costs is fixed in advance, we derive an upper bound on the regret of order O(√NB log(N/K)) utilizing an extension of the well-known Exp3 algorithm. We also provide upper bounds that hold with high probability and a lower bound of order Ω((1 – K/N) √NB/K).

Gatekeepers of Reward: a Pilot Study on the Ethics of Editing and Competing Evaluations of Value

The reward infrastructure in science centres on publication, in which journal editors play a key role. Reward distribution hinges on value assessments performed by editors, who draw from plural value systems to judge manuscripts. This conceptual paper examines the numerous biases and other factors that affect editorial decisions. Hybrid and often conflicting value systems contribute to an infrastructure in which editors manage reward through editorial review, commissioned commentaries and reviews and weighing of peer review judgments. Taken together, these systems and processes push the editor into a role resembling censorship. Editors and authors both experience this phenomenon as an unintended side-effect of the reward infrastructure in science. To work towards a more constructive editor-author relationship, we propose a conversation, an exchange between editor and author in which value is collectively assessed (or constructed) as obligatory passage points in the publishing process are traversed. This paper contributes to the discourse on editorial practices by problematising editorial paradigms in a new way and suggesting solutions to entrenched problems.

Do procedures really matter when rewards are more important? A Pakistani perspective on the effects of distributive and procedural justice on employee behaviors

IntroductionResearchers agree that procedural justice and distributive justice interact so that high procedural fairness reduces the negative consequences of distributive unfairness. ObjectivesOur objective was to test the hypothesis that employees in Pakistan (i.e., an underdeveloped economy) would be more focused on rewards than procedures. Therefore, procedural and distributive justice will not interact in predicting employee behaviors. MethodsUsing independent measures for organizational justice and job outcomes, we conducted two field surveys (n=372 and n=550 paired responses) in Pakistan to examine the direct and combined effects of procedural and distributive justice on job performance, citizenship behaviors, and creativity. ResultsIn both studies, the results suggest that distributive justice is a more consistent and relatively stronger predictor of job outcomes as compared to procedural justice. The results also showed that procedural justice did not moderate the relationship between distributive justice and employee behaviors. ConclusionThe findings suggest that workers in an underdeveloped economy like Pakistan may be more concerned with fairness in the distribution of rewards than procedural fairness. Therefore, in such context, procedures may be less likely to reduce negative consequences of unfair reward distribution.

Pareto Optimal Solutions for Network Defense Strategy Selection Simulator in Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

Using Pareto optimization in Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) leads to better learning results for network defense games. This is particularly useful for network security agents, who must often balance several goals when choosing what action to take in defense of a network. If the defender knows his preferred reward distribution, the advantages of Pareto optimization can be retained by using a scalarization algorithm prior to the implementation of the MORL. In this paper, we simulate a network defense scenario by creating a multi-objective zero-sum game and using Pareto optimization and MORL to determine optimal solutions and compare those solutions to different scalarization approaches. We build a Pareto Defense Strategy Selection Simulator (PDSSS) system for assisting network administrators on decision-making, specifically, on defense strategy selection, and the experiment results show that the Satisficing Trade-Off Method (STOM) scalarization approach performs better than linear scalarization or GUESS method. The results of this paper can aid network security agents attempting to find an optimal defense policy for network security games.

A survey: Reward distribution mechanisms and withholding attacks in Bitcoin pool mining

The past three years have seen the rapid increase of Bitcoin difficulty, which has led to a substantial variance in solo mining. As a result, miners tend to join a large open pool to get a more stable reward. Nowadays, mining pools take up over 98% of Bitcoins total computation power. In a sense, this is a manifestation of Bitcoin that tends to be centralized. Thus, researchers have shown an increased interest in pool mining payoff and security. The purpose of this paper is to review and summarize recent research in Bitcoin pool mining system. We first introduce several common reward distribution schemes, and analyze their advantages and disadvantages with some improvement mechanisms; In the second section, to address pool security problems, we examined the practical utility of some existing and potential attack strategies. To study those malicious attack in details, several defense methods are collected. Finally, we make an outlook on Bitcoin future.

Subject/Object/Body: Recent Perspectives on Beauty and Aesthetics in Gender Studies

Subject/Object/Body:Recent Perspectives on Beauty and Aesthetics in Gender Studies Freda Fair (bio) Uri McMillan's Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance, New York: NYU Press, 2015 Sherri Irvin's Body Aesthetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016 Meeta Rani Jha's The Global Beauty Industry: Colorism, Racism, and the National Body, New York: Routledge, 2016 Uri McMillan's Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance, New York: NYU Press, 2015 Sherri Irvin's Body Aesthetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016 Meeta Rani Jha's The Global Beauty Industry: Colorism, Racism, and the National Body, New York: Routledge, 2016 In their 1977 black feminist statement, the Combahee River Collective calls attention to beauty as a regime of regulation that disciplines belonging. The Collective offers the formulation "smart-ugly" to articulate recognition and marginality as deeply racialized, gendered, and sexualized (2000, 268). Taking the body as central to social interpretation from the standpoint of black lesbian positionality, smart-ugly serves as an instructive point from which to highlight the contributions of three recent books that advance theories of beauty and aesthetics with a primary focus on the body: Uri McMillan's Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance, Body Aesthetics edited by Sherri Irvin, and The Global Beauty Industry: Colorism, Racism, and the National Body by Meeta Rani Jha. Like the Combahee River Collective's statement, all three books interrogate the cultural capital attributed to beauty and aesthetics sutured to the body. Working through performance studies, visual cultural studies, affect studies, women of color feminism, transnational feminism, critiques of capitalism and neoliberalism, sports studies, and food studies among other approaches, the authors recast the body as pliable subject and object. Readers seeking nuanced interdisciplinary approaches to the study of embodiment will value the diverse perspectives each book offers. The body itself is elaborated as a primary site of economic, cultural, and political inquiry as the authors mobilize formulations such as "performing objecthood" to index the bodily risks taken by black women performers (McMillan, 7), "subject and object of the gaze" to refer to the aesthetic [End Page 215] assessment of the body (Irvin, 1), and "beauty capital" signaling the distribution of contradictory social rewards assigned to the body as it circulates within the exchange relations of transnational capitalism (Jha, 4). In this review, I trace the body as it takes shape in each book to examine how the relationship between subject and object is reworked toward varying ends. Feminist thought has distinguished subject and object positions in part to challenge biological determinism and sexual objectification. The positionality of the body with respect to the subject-object relation undergirds the theories of aesthetics and the critiques of beauty put forth by McMillan, Irvin and the other contributors in Body Aesthetics, and Jha.1 McMillan argues for the body as a site for black women to literally transform the body into object for the purpose of challenging social and political exclusion. Jha addresses object status by attending to individual and institutional practices of objectification that govern access to the contradictory rewards of neoliberal beauty markets. While Irvin's introduction accounts for object status less as a measure of performative capacity and more with respect to questions of bodily assessment. The authors labor in the vein of what Samantha Frost, referencing Anne Fausto-Sterling, describes as the challenge to the "unidirectional model of causation" that signals the living body's implication in its own construction (2011, 69–70). For example, Jha, drawing on Inderpal Grewal, points to the "white-savior narrative" as oppressive while highlighting that it primarily operates by assigning object status to women in the Global South. Jha attends to white-savior objectification as it disarms women of color while securing an agential subjectivity for white Western liberal feminists: "Feminine whiteness is valorized at the cost of objectifying women from developing nations as passive" (55). While Jha's critique demonstrates the politically fraught dynamics of objectified bodily passivity in the transnational beauty economies that condition subjective potentiality, McMillan ardently argues for objecthood as a liberatory pathway toward subjectivity for black women performers particularly Joice Heth, Ellen Craft, Adrian Piper, Howardena Pindell, and Nicki Minaj...

Influence of organisational justice on intention to stay of IT professionals

The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between distributive, procedural, interactional justice and IT professionals' intention to stay in the organisation. The outcomes propose that the perceived fairness in interpersonal treatment may impact employee's intention to stay more than the distribution of organisational rewards and fairness of organisational procedures. This information could be used by managers to manage the level of interactional justice to enhance employee's intention to stay and to improve other by-products of workforce shortage. This study supports the findings of previous researches but also identifies some of the contrary results. IT sector has peculiarly large percentage of employees below the age of 35 years and since the percentage of this population in the workforce is rising, so these results may be applicable to other organisational settings as well.

Influence of organisational justice on intention to stay of IT professionals

The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between distributive, procedural, interactional justice and IT professionals' intention to stay in the organisation. The outcomes propose that the perceived fairness in interpersonal treatment may impact employee's intention to stay more than the distribution of organisational rewards and fairness of organisational procedures. This information could be used by managers to manage the level of interactional justice to enhance employee's intention to stay and to improve other by-products of workforce shortage. This study supports the findings of previous researches but also identifies some of the contrary results. IT sector has peculiarly large percentage of employees below the age of 35 years and since the percentage of this population in the workforce is rising, so these results may be applicable to other organisational settings as well.

Fulfillment by Amazon Versus Fulfillment by Seller: A Risk-Adjusted Uplift Model

With dual-channel choices, E-retailers fulfill their demands by either the inventory stored in third-party distribution centers, or by in-house inventory. In this paper, using data from a wedding gown E-retailer in China, we analyze the differences between two fulfillment choices --- Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and Fulfillment by Seller (FBS). In particular, we want to understand the impact of FBA that will bring to sales and profit, compared to FBS, and how the impact is related to product features such as sizes and colors. We develop a risk-adjusted fulfillment model to address this problem, where the e-retailer's risk attitude to FBA is incorporated. We denote the profit gaps between FBA and FBS as the rewards for this E-retailer fulfilling products using FBA, our goal is to maximize the E-retailer's total rewards using predictive analytics. We adopt the Generalized Linear Model to predict the expected rewards, while controlling for the variability of the reward distribution. We apply our model on a set of real data, and develop an explicit decision rule that can be easily implemented in practice. The numerical experiments show that our interpretable decision rule can improve the E-retailer's total rewards by more than 35%.

Systems of Evaluation and the Matthew Effect

Existing research on the Matthew Effect establishes that this dynamic can alter information flow and the distribution of rewards in ways that lead to cumulating advantages for high status actors. We know little, however, about how systems of evaluation, and especially variations in systems of evaluations, influence the expression and strength of these outcomes. Drawing on analyses of the effects of rankings on organizations, I consider how different evaluation contexts can change both audience perceptions about which organizations are award worthy and the definition of merit on which reward distributions are based.