Search

While it is recognised that volunteers can have a significant impact on the operations of sport organisations, previous research has not focused on the motivations and experiences of overseas volunteers in sport-for-development (SFD) settings. In addressing this issue, this chapter reflects on an empirical study around motivations and experiences of international SFD volunteers in post-war Sri Lanka.

This book reflects on the expectations and experiences of volunteers in international sport-for-development. It investigates a commercially run development organisation in Sri Lanka and its sport and non-sport volunteers.

Fitness industry registers may strategically attempt to enhance their field’s professional legitimacy via self-imposed regulation. Incorporating a conceptual framework of organisational legitimacy, this study identifies how 12 Auckland fitness centre managers perceive register affiliation. Representatives from the New Zealand Register of Exercise Professionals (REPs NZ) and Fitness New Zealand also contributed. Findings suggest participants are aware of the industry regulation concept, but opinions are mixed and member benefits are observed as minimal. Tensions exist between affiliates and non-affiliates regarding observed substantive/symbolic affiliate behaviours and the actual/perceived role of REPs NZ. Organisations act strategically and institutionally to acquire legitimacy through affiliation.

The allocation of resources within a system of autonomous agents, that not only have preferences over alternative allocations of resources but also actively participate in computing an allocation, is an exciting area of research at the interface of Computer Science and Economics. This paper is a survey of some of the most salient issues in Multiagent Resource Allocation. In particular, we review various languages to represent the preferences of agents over alternative allocations of resources as well as different measures of social welfare to assess the overall quality of an allocation. We also discuss pertinent issues regarding allocation procedures and present important complexity results. Our presentation of theoretical issues is complemented by a discussion of software packages for the simulation of agent-based market places. We also introduce four major application areas for Multiagent Resource Allocation, namely industrial procurement, sharing of satellite resources, manufacturing control, and grid computing., This survey has been written in the context of the activities of the AgentLink Technical Forum Group on Multiagent Resource Allocation (TFG-MARA)

This paper has been prepared for the Global Agenda Council of the World Economic Forum. It addresses the issue of the shift toward reduced entrepreneurial dynamism in Europe as well as in the United States. The paper starts from a few insights about “the decline of innovation” in Western Economies and argues for establishing new institutions for an economy of entrepreneurs and fast movers.

Allogrooming is a key aspect of chimpanzee sociality and many studies have investigated the role of reciprocity in a biological market. One theoretical form of reciprocity is time-matching, where payback consistsof an equal duration of effort (e.g. twenty seconds of grooming repaid withtwenty seconds of grooming). Here, we report a study of allogrooming in a group of twenty-six captive chimpanzees (Chester Zoo, UK), on more than 150hours worth of data. For analysis, we introduce a methodological innovation called the ``delta scale'', which unidimensionally measures the accuracy of time-matching according to the extent of delay after the cessation of grooming. Delta is positive when reciprocation occurs after any non-zero delay (e.g. A grooms B and then B grooms A after a five second break) and it is negative when reciprocation begins whilst the original grooming has not yet ceased. Using a generalised linear mixed-method with different time windows sampled, and a longitudinal regression analysis, we did find evidence for time-matched reciprocation. However, this was true only for immediate reciprocation (delta less than zero). If there was a temporal break in grooming between two members of a dyad, then there was no evidence at all that chimpanzees were using new bouts to retroactively correct for time-matching imbalances from previous bouts. We did not directly test for contingent reciprocity, but here we obtained a negative result consistent with the idea that reciprocation proceeds with a minimum of calculation. Our results have implications forsome of the cognitive constraints that differentiate real-life reciprocation from abstract theoretical models. Furthermore, we suggest that the apparent patterns of reciprocity that are widely observed may arise merely due to the law of large numbers.