Top Dog Research Articles

Asynchronized multiperiod commitments and cycles

We consider a game where agents can synchronize or stagger their decisions. We compare the outcomes of both timing patterns, and show that spillovers and strategic interactions are crucial for such a comparison. A typology used in industrial organization, distinguishing four cases (‘Fat-Cat’, ‘Top Dog’, Lean and Hungry’, ‘Puppy Dog’), allows us to compare the actions taken in the staggered variant and in the synchronized one. The staggered variant exhibits cycles and players are both better-off when there are strategic complementarities between them. A timing game is then set-up so as to endogenize the choice between the two variants we study. Two examples are developed: (i) Bertrand competition and (ii) a wage setting game when there are two monopoly unions in two interrelated firms. We show that the staggering of price decisions generates counter-cyclical mark-ups in the first example, and the staggering of wage decisions generates cycling output in the industry in the second example.

Becoming a Pest: Prairie Dog Ecology and the Human Economy in the Euroamerican West

A small western Colorado town, Nucla, held its first annual Top World Championship Prairie Shoot during July weekend in 1990. Attracting hunters from as far away as Hawaii, the shoot was designed to kill as many inhabitants of large prairie dog colony as possible in the time allotted. Shooters paid fee to enter the contest, which was sponsored by both local gun club and the town council, and in 1990 managed to kill 2,956 prairie dogs in two days. Locals made money by selling souvenirs such as prairie dog coffins and prairie dog blush wine to tourists.' The Top Dog contest sparked nationwide controversy: was this necessary varmint cleanup and moneymaker for an impoverished western town or sickening destruction of helpless animals? Elated hunters held up freshly bagged prairie dog tails as handful of non-local animal rights protestors yelled It takes big man to kill little prairie dog!2 While letters to Colorado newspapers supported the right of residents to rid their land of varmints, some papers editorialized their concern with the replacement of Colorado's carefully nurtured image as tourist mecca by nationally publicized images of the state as a rather savage and frightening place where gun-toting sportsmen go to live out frontier fantasy.3 Although the effect of the Top Dog shoot on Colorado's tourist image was controversial, the local residents' attitude toward prairie dogs seemed clear. Genneve Joslin, Nucla grandmother, remembered killing the rodents as child and selling their tails for up to nickel apiece. Many Top Dog participants such as hunter Kevin Looper, were experienced prairie dog hunters: Everybody's got dogs, and they are more than happy to let you shoot them if you ask. This interest in killing prairie dogs reflected decades of local efforts to remove the animals from the landscape, story replicated elsewhere in the rodents' western habitat. Over the past century, prairie dogs have been widely represented as pest that needed to be exterminated. Although concern for endangered species and animal

When regulation was too successful--the sixth decade of deposit insurance: a history of the troubles of the U.S. banking industry in the 1980s and early 1990s

Preface Introduction Excess Capacity A Turbulent Time A Crisis and a Shakeout: An Overview Too Big to Fail: Sound Bite in Search of a Policy Texans Do It Bigger FIRREA and the FDIC as Top Dog The Troubles Peak FDICIA and Its Aftermath An Assessment Appendix A: The Texas Banking Crash: Fate of the Ten Largest Organizations Appendix B: The Thrift Industry in Crisis Appendix C: The Banking Industry in Trouble Appendix D: Interest Rates and Inflation Appendix E: Major Banking Laws (1980-1996) Selected Bibliography Index

The Sad Sweet Story of Sugar Lips Shinehot and the Portable Promised Land

The Sad Sweet Story Of Sugar Lips Shinehot And The Portable Promised Land Touré (bio) Trust me, if you’d asked any Negro in Harlem Who’s the coldest saxophone player around? durin them two months in the summer ah 1942, they’da looked at you like you was crazy. “Sugar Lips Shinehot,” they’da said. “You new in town?” Yeah, for a short while Sugar Lips Shinehot was the top saxophonist in Harlem and probably the best sax player livin. Now them history books won’t whisper a thing bout Sugar Lips cuz them jazz historians is out there tellin the stories they want to tell. But I’ll tell the story, cuz it ain’t half-bad, and it’s all true. If I’m lyin, I’m flyin. Back durin them two months Sugar Lips was top dog, even Charlie Parker was scared ah him cuz anytime Sugar Lips wrapped them thick, pillow-soft lips round a mouthpiece, he swung hard nuf to make rain, thunder, and lightnin stop and pay attention. Womenfolk paid, too. They say one night ol’ Satchmo threw a party and Lena Horne, Katherine Dunham, and Mahdaymoyzell Josephine Baker, all went by Satchmo’s hopin to have they lips caressed and massaged by Sugar Lips. Quiet as it’s kept, not a few men was there for that, too. As the night lost its pigment, word ah the widely-shared thought got round and by time that night had turned high-yaller they had the biggest catfight you could imagine up in there. Per some accounts, Katherine slugged Josephine. Others said Lena soaked Katherine wit a glass of vodka. All’s certain is everyone in Harlem laid claim to bein there, and Sugar Lips had set three of the finest Negro women alive to riotin. Now, Sugar Lips had always been pretty good wit a horn, though he never struck fear in no Yardbird Parker. But for nine months he was locked hisself up in his apartment on 166th and St. Nicholas blowin til the paint cracked from the heat from his horn. That’s when he knew he could smoke like West Hell. So, he looked out his window, saw the sun was in bed snorin hard, throwed on his jacket and porkpie hat, rolled on over to Minton’s, where Bird and them was inventin Bebop, and walked in the way you walk in when you a Negro and you know you bad. Minton’s was a do or die sorta joint for jazz cats where players that blew the crowd away could become the king ah Harlem, but mos cats got blown away by dudes like Bird, Dizzy, and Monk, and if ya got blown away it was likely some patron would snatch ya off the stage, take ya out back, and whip ya head til it’s red and flat like a dime. It was that sorta spot. But when Sugar Lips leapt up on the bandstand, he started to blowin some horn, blowin like no one else belonged in the blowin bizness. Drinks stop bein served, reefers stop bein sold, and a couple that had been in the batroom mergin pull up they draws and stepped out to hear that horn. [End Page 327] Bird hisself happened to be under the bandstand sleepin at that time, so he woke up, grabbed his horn, and started a cuttin contest. He went at Sugar Lips hard as he could, notes spittin from his horn fast and furious as Negroes runnin in a riot, but from the gitgo Sugar Lips was scorchin through solo after solo, gettin that crowd whoopin and hollerin, shoutin and stompin and when he blew into his last solo he was swingin so hard a few women fainted, a few men cried, and anyone anywhere near the joint thought the Holy Rollers was havin service wit the Holy Ghost hisself as guest preacher. Then Sugar Lips spat out a string ah notes no one had ever heard before and built them into a blazin cascade ah pitch and time, and, if you closed your eyes, you’d have sworn from the sound that he and you was...

Biochip-Makers Do Battle in Court

A donnybrook over patent rights is breaking out among firms marketing electronic “chips” that recognize DNA sequences. The company least bruised could emerge years from now as top dog in the potentially lucrative biochip business.

“Top Dog,” “Black Threat,” and “Japanese Cats”

“Top Dog,” “Black Threat,” and “Japanese Cats”

From top dog to bottom half: Social comparison strategies in response to poor performance.

From top dog to bottom half: Social comparison strategies in response to poor performance.

From top dog to bottom half: social comparison strategies in response to poor performance.

Although the hypothesis that people will alter comparison behavior in response to threat is consistent with the formulation of social comparison theory, the empirical evidence for the natural occurrence of such shifts is weak. Two studies were conducted to examine this hypothesis. In the first study, adolescents' perceptions were assessed before, during, and 6 months after their participation in an academic program for gifted students. Male students who performed poorly, and also worse than they had expected in the program, demonstrated self-protective "strategies" by lowering the amount and level of academic comparison they reported engaging in and by lowering their perception of the importance of academics. Female students, who generally performed as well as expected, reported relatively little change. By follow-up, most of the male students' perceptions had returned to baseline. A second study found that both male and female college students who thought they had performed poorly academically also demonstrated these shifts in comparison. Motivations behind the strategies are discussed.

To cap it all.

There's nothing like nurses' caps to stir up strong opinions. We've just heard about a surgeon who's been running a one man campaign against naughty nurses who allow straying strands of hair to escape from underneath their theatre caps. But their revenge was very sweet. At the departmental Christmas do, said surgeon donned his party hat before tucking into the turkey. The top dog consultant promptly reprimanded him - because his hair was sticking out .

Concentering: A Useful Preplanning Activity

spective on the deeply-personal contributors to conflict and collaboration among them. This buffered the tendency to interpret actions in terms of either organizational power or personal whim. See Golembiewski and Kiepper, 13. For details on designs to inhibit such build-up, see Golembiewski and Kiepper, MARTA, pp. 50-52. 14. William Bridges, Transitions (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1980). 15. John R. Kimberly, Robert H. Miles, and Associates, Life Cycle (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1980). 16. Perhaps the sharpest picture is implied by Charles H. Levine, Organizational Decline and Cut-back Management, Public Administration Review 38 (July/August 1978), pp. 316-325. 17. Illustratively, see the overview in Robert T. Golembiewski, Managerial Responses to Transitions in Adult Development, in Alice Sargent and Roger Ritvo (eds.), Readings in Management (Rosslyn, Va.: NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science, in press). 18. For an early demonstration of the interaction between phases and supervisory behavior, see Floyd C. Mann and L. Richard Hoffman, Automation and the Worker: A Study of Social Change in Power Plants (New York: Holt, 1960). 19. E.g., Stanley Davis and Paul Lawrence, Matrix (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1977). 20. neutral and inferior instrument concept of staff is perhaps the dominant model, and was more or less accepted in MARTA. Engineering/construction and transit operations were the top dog activities in MARTA. 21. E.g., Melvin Dalton, Men Who Manage (New York: Wiley, 1959); and Robert T. Golembiewski, Organizing Men and Power (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967), pp. 61-75. 22. E.g., James S. Bowman, Whistle-Blowing in the Public Sector, Review of Public Personnel Administration 1 (Fall 1980), pp. 15-27. 23. Robert T. Golembiewski, The MARTA Code of Ethics (Boston, Mass.: Intercollegiate Case Clearing House, 1980). 24. Golembiewski and Perkins, op. cit. 25. Robert T. Golembiewski, Designing the West Lake Station Area, 9-380-689 (Boston, Mass.: Intercollegiate Case Clearing House, April 1980). 26. See Charles R. Figley, Stress Disorders Among Vietnam Veterans (New York: Bruner/Mazel, 1978).

The Economic Effects of Federal Regulation of the Market for New Security Issues

The Economic Effects of Federal Regulation of the Market for New Security Issues

Coalition Formation and Players' Incentives

Summary Coalition formation in four-person groups (N = 160 male undergraduates) was studied by using two different power distributions, and two different monetary incentives. For the winner-take-all incentive there could be one and only one winner, whereas for the everyone-can-win incentive all players received money proportional to the number of points they had accumulated in the experiment. The incentive variable affected coalition formation patterns for one of the power distributions, but not for the other. The experiment provided some support for a recently introduced hypothesis, the Exclusion of the Top Dog Principle.

Strategies for a Publish or Perish World or Why Journals Are Unreadable

To understand the articles which appear in professional journals, one must first understand the game that academics play to gain tenure and promotion. There usually are three criteria for gaining tenure and promotion: (a) Publications—this criterion is met by publishing articles in reputable journals. A reputable journal can be recognized by its academic orientation and tendencies toward mathematical obscurities, (b) Good Teaching—this criterion is met if the students do not physically throw the instructor out of the classroom (except in Sociology where this behavior may be considered as the students freeing themselves from a repressive society and hence a valuable outcome), (c) Community Service—this criterion is met by attending the department meetings. In heavily political departments, this criteria is met by not attending these meetings and avoiding political entanglements. Thus, in the treacherous dog-eat-dog world of publishing, it is essential for the academician to understand how to be top dog if he wants to keep his job. Many academicians fail to publish just because they do not know and/or use the time-honored success strategies for publishing. This no-holds-barred paper reveals these strategies and evaluates their effectiveness. Although the paper is addressed to the needs of the academician, as the strategies unfold, it will become apparent why the most reputable journals are often unreadable.

A comparison of performances of danish and american students in a “threat game”

Two experiments comparing the strategy choice behavior of American and Danish male college students were conducted. In the first experiment bona fide pairs of American and Danish subjects played repeated trials of a variety of 2 × 2 nonzero sum threat games. The results of this first study indicated a number of differences between the two populations in terms of their use of and response to threats. The general pattern of results seemed to support the conjecture that, in the underdog role of the game, Danes are more submissive than Americans. In the top dog role of the game Americans are somewhat more fair than Danes. In the second experiment, 60 Americans and 60 Danish subjects played repeated trials of a variety of threat games against a programmed stooge opponent. Several different stooge strategies were employed so as to systematically vary the behavior of the other. A number of systematic differences between the American and Danish players emerged in terms of their responses to the different stooge strategies. These differences between Americans and Danes playing against the stooge player were consistent with those observed in the bona fide pairs.

Catholic Voters and the Democratic Party

M A UCH of recent political history of United States has been interpreted as a consequence of ethnic composition of major metropolitan areas. The base of Democratic Party outside South has been, according to Samuel Lubell, among immigrants and their children (particularly latter) in big urban centers. In his words, basis of New Deal was in the revolt of underdog, urban immigrant against top dog of 'old American' stock. Furthermore, Lubell believes, [the immigrant's] Catholicism was an essential element in that revolt.'I This thesis is similar to that of sociologists, who emphasize low social rank typical of Catholics and importance of differential association among Catholics as a conserving mechanism for original pro-Democratic orientation, but in essentials tend to agree with primitive theory as outlined by Lubell. Political scientists make similar assumptions, with more emphasis upon place of ethnic, working-class, Catholic urban population in functioning of old-style political machine. However, economic trends of last thirty years have tended to change radically social rank and style of life of urban secondgeneration ethnics, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. The changes in job distribution, in general levels of living, and in educational norms