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Previous chapters have demonstrated that low and declining citizen respect for government institutions and political leaders is characteristic of contemporary industrialized societies. Evidence since the early 1970s reveals a trend toward growing distrust of government institutions in a number of countries. While this trend is evident, the interpretation of this phenomenon has proved far more controversial. One explanation focuses upon public dissatisfaction with government performance. This chapter explores this question. First, it examines the direct link between government performance, as measured by objective indicators of inflation, unemployment, or government deficits, and institutional confidence in support for government. It then considers the dynamics of political trust and government performance, before moving on to examine the role that expectations play in translating evaluations of government performance into political distrust in three countries where long‐term time‐series data are available—the US, Norway, and Sweden. The study explores how ethical expectations about government standards influence trust in politicians and the conclusion draws some general lessons from the results. The survey data employed in the analysis include the 1990–1 World Values Survey, the Norwegian, Swedish, and US Election Studies, surveys in the US, Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania; data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and OECD are used to measure inflation, unemployment, and government deficits.

This chapter examines how a person's ideological values affect his institutional support. The first part of the chapter argues that the original formulation of the congruence postulate in Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture actually contains two versions and that these variants complicate the discussion between culturalists and institutionalists. The chapter then uses the ideological performance axiom to develop hypotheses that are tested in the second part of the chapter. The chapter addresses one controversial debate in the democratic transition literature: is congruence necessary between citizens' ideological values and existing institutions? Or is the performance of institutions the main source of political stability? The chapter suggests of a way to bridge separate strands of the democratic transition literature by focusing on the relationship between ideological values and performance evaluations. The chapter concludes that performance evaluations and ideological values jointly influence citizens' views about democracies, both in Germany and East-Central Europe.

Improving the investment performance of pension fund asset pools begins with a careful evaluation of the current performance of the plan, and then taking action to improve future performance. This chapter discusses how performance measurement techniques may be used to evaluate pension fund performance, and some important limitations of performance measurement. It reviews the evidence on money managers’ abilities to perform and looks at the issue of using historical performance to select managers.

Pension plan sponsors, administrators, managers, trustees, and others must periodically evaluate the investment performance of the fund’s asset pool. Performance evaluation has several components: the alternative computations used in measuring returns, the correct ways to measure and adjust for risk, how benchmarks should be chosen or constructed, and attribution analysis — decomposing investment performance into the exposure of the fund to various market segments, the quality of the selection of assets, and the timing of movements of capital among asset classes. This chapter describes how each of these issues should be handled and what each contributes to understanding performance and decision-making.

This chapter considers assessment and grading. It argues that assessment is not grading, and grading is not assessment—though the two are often conflated and sometimes confused. Instead of seeing these two forms of evaluation as the same, this chapter argues for the need to distinguish between them, related though they may be. When students' work is being graded, teachers evaluate their performance against a standard that can be clarified and explained with a rubric, or evaluative tool. When a student's work is being assessed, teachers evaluate its level of proficiency as a work in progress. Grades are final in a way that assessments are not.

This chapter discusses the institutional learning model. The chapter examines how restraint, self-reliance, and corresponding ideals are developed together, and why a country's institutional framework is important in providing the people with opportunities to develop these cititizenship-qualities. The chapter suggests two criteria for examining when the effect of institutional learning may be offset by the diffusion of values, across systemic boundaries, at the level of mass public and political elite. It also establishes the relationship between ideological values, citizens's performance evaluations of existing institutions, and their support for these institutions. The chapter concludes that the institutional learning perspective bridges the gaps in the democratic transition literature.

Just as queueing theory revolutionized the study of circuit switched telephony in the twentieth century, stochastic geometry is gradually becoming a necessary theoretical tool for modelling and analysis of modern telecommunications systems, in which spatial arrangement is typically a crucial consideration in their performance evaluation, optimization or future development. In this survey we aim to summarize the main stochastic geometry models and tools currently used in studying modern telecommunications. We outline specifics of wired, wireless fixed and ad hoc systems and show how stochastic geometry modelling helps in their analysis and optimization. Point and line processes, Palm theory, shot‐noise processes, random tessellations, Boolean models, percolation, random graphs and networks, spatial statistics and optimization: this is a far from exhaustive list of techniques used in studying contemporary telecommunications systems and which we shall briefly discuss.

This chapter develops an explanatory model of regime support applicable to both democracies and autocracies. The explanatory model includes both individual- and system-level determinants and explicates how these interact in shaping regime support. On the individual-level, it integrates culturalist and institutionalist explanations of support to arrive at five central sources of regime support: political value orientations, societal value orientations, incumbent support, democratic performance evaluations, and systemic performance evaluations. On the system level, it draws on social psychological theories of attitude formation and identifies four sources of regime support: macro-cultural context, macro-political context, actual systemic performance, and level of socioeconomic modernization. Recurring to the fundamental differences between democracies and autocracies, the explanatory model expects the individual-level processes forming regime support to be universal across regime types, but effects of system-level sources of regime support to vary between democracies and autocracies, due to indoctrination and propaganda distorting the attitude-formation process in autocracies.

This chapter presents a synthesis of the topics discussed in the preceding chapters. Sensible pension management begins with a clear understanding of the purpose of the plan. The second step is establishing policies that govern investment and management activities. The primary purpose of policy is to provide useful guidelines for decision making and to communicate unambiguously to all parties what the plan is trying to do and how it is going about it. The issues of prudent behavior, investment management, managing plan investment managers, performance monitoring and evaluation, risk management, and success factors in pension management are discussed.

Evaluation is the most direct tool that principals at all types of organizations use to manage the discretion they grant to their agents. Evaluations produce information about the outcomes of decisions and reduce uncertainty about cause-and-effect relationships. This chapter examines whether the results in project evaluations at the multilateral development banks have promoted selectivity in the allocation of environment-improving projects. Under pressure from donor countries to approve environment-improving activities, the multilateral development banks use information about success in evaluations to convince recipient countries to take on more environmental projects with clear local benefits. The same type of information is disregarded for projects that primarily have global benefits, since donor countries have pressured the multilateral development banks to rapidly scale up lending for these types of projects. These results suggest that much of the effort around project evaluation should be directed to meet the information needs of borrowing countries.

Value-based management (VBM) frameworks generally do not distinguish between changes in cash flows that reflect changes in a firm's competitive position, and cash flow changes that derive mainly from fluctuations in the macroeconomic environment. To the extent that changes in interest rates, exchange rates, and inflation rates affect corporate cash flows and value, such effects can weaken the link between managerial pay and performance. For this reason, filtering out macro effects on performance measures may strengthen managers' incentives to add value by allocating capital effectively and increasing operating efficiencies. This chapter uses exposure coefficients obtained by means of regression analysis to quantify the effect of unexpected and actual changes in macro price variables on corporate cash flows. The exposure coefficients are used in a VBM context to remove the effects of macro variables on a firm's cash flows (or value) during a specific time period, and so arrive at a measure of a company's “intrinsic” cash flows and value. The case of Electrolux is used to illustrate the decomposition procedure and the potential size of the macro influences. The effect of flexibility (real options) on the magnitude of macroeconomic effects and performance assessment is also discussed.

This chapter summarizes the main findings and outlines the implications of the study for German politics and society. It also discusses the study's theoretical lessons and highlights its practical implications for East-Central Europe. In order to highlight the degree to which ideological differences persist, the chapter presents a summary of the broad empirical patterns found in tabulated form. The research suggests the need for further studies in the link between ideological values and citizens' performance evaluations, and other sources of restraint and self-reliance. The study's most important finding is that the process of institutional learning fundamentally shapes citizens' ideological values in partly predictable ways. This process has already developed a democratic culture in western Germany. Finally, the chapter concludes that eastern Germany and other post-socialist countries must undergo this long process toward democratic citizenship.

This chapter describes the performance evaluation that can address (or exacerbate) the obstacles to farsightedness. The obvious challenge to addressing the issue of knowing whether performance is farsighted is that the consequences are not yet definitely known. In practice, performance evaluation tends to reward shortsighted actions, or, equally important, is believed to reward shortsighted actions by those who are being evaluated. For the performance of a government regime as a whole, the more useful considerations would focus on the soundness of human resource policies as well as the magnitudes of participation and investments. The pitfalls of performance evaluation are described. These pitfalls can be lessened by making the evaluation process fair and useful to all parties. The interactions between evaluators and those being evaluated can be of crucial importance, both for judging the farsightedness of performance to date and for signaling long-term values and goals.

This chapter, which deals with the performance evaluation, assessment, and causal significance of environmental and nonenvironmental institutions, shares the focus of the previous one: Institutions as the main independent variable of interest. It also discusses important dimensions, methodology, scales, and metrics in evaluating the performance of institutions, along with definitions and terminology. The author argues that behavior change should be considered as the litmus test for the performance of institutions rather than the next-best alternative to environment quality. The chapter also addresses issues such as how to evaluate institutional performance as well as important characteristics to consider for assessment. The goal is to classify how much an institution committed to whatever improvement was made toward a specified objective that influenced global environmental change.

Psychologists have a problem in understanding the underlying organization and mechanism of memory. After more than a century of empirical work, many of the phenomena of memory are now clear: the differences between recollection and recognition, between remembering and knowing, between unconscious influence of prior experience and performance that is accompanied by awareness of source. However, a synthesis of memory as a whole has proved elusive.

Arguments to support validity of most contributions in the field of human–computer interaction are based on detailed results of empirical studies involving cohorts of tested users confronted with a set of tasks performed on a prototype version of an interactive system. This chapter presents how the Interactive Cooperative Objects (ICO) formal models of the entire interactive system can support predictive and summative performance evaluation activities by exploiting the models. Predictive performance evaluation is supported by ICO formal models of interactive systems enriched with perceptive, cognitive, and motoric information about the users. Summative usability evaluation is addressed at the level of the software system, which is able to exhaustively log all the user actions performed on the interactive system The articulation of these two evaluation approaches is demonstrated on a case study from the avionics domain with a step-by-step tutorial on how to apply the approach.

This chapter provides an overview of portfolio theory and management. It discusses the three major steps in the portfolio management process—planning, execution, and feedback—and the key tasks involved in each step. Next the chapter examines modern portfolio theory including such topics as asset pricing models, traditional finance models, behavioral finance, alternative investments, performance evaluation and presentation, and the recent financial crisis. Next the chapter describes the purpose of the book, its distinguishing features, and intended audience. The chapter then discusses the structure of the remaining 29 chapters and provides an abstract of each chapter. The final section offers a summary and conclusions. While the theory and practice of portfolio management have been moving ahead at a dizzying pace, this book enables readers to gain a better understanding of the existing state of knowledge and the challenges remaining in this area.

Performance management (PM) is one of the few organizational processes that touches every single employee and requires their active participation. In spite of its ubiquitous position in organizations, there has been a groundswell of questions emerging about the usefulness, value, and effectiveness of PM. This introductory chapter addresses the current state of PM, including its history. It provides an overview of academic research highlighting the evolution from performance evaluation to performance management and the current status. Then, the practical realities and challenges people in organizations experience with performance management every day are discussed. This includes performance management being viewed as an administrative “human resources activity” with a lack of strategic alignment to business goals; lack of manager capability to manage employee performance effectively; and an overreliance on system automation. The chapter continues with an outline and overview of the book, including nine case studies written by in-house talent and human resources practitioners and six chapters (written by scholars in the performance management and feedback arena) describing next-generation research as well as future research trends.

Global and international mutual funds provide U.S. investors with an effective way to gain from international diversification. However, due to the complexity of international markets, performance evaluation of these funds is much more complex than that of U.S. domestic funds. This chapter reviews the appropriate measures for evaluating global portfolios’ performance and some of key properties and issues associated with each measure. It also examines the evidence these measures have produced on the stock selection and market-timing skills of global and international actively managed mutual funds. The chapter covers global and international equity funds, bond funds, and asset allocation funds. Additionally, it reviews the empirical evidence on whether global funds provide diversification benefits to U.S. investors as well as the evidence on the relationship between the performance of global mutual funds and their characteristics.