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ABSTRACTIn Namibia, as in many parts of Africa, households are highly dependent on forest resources for their livelihoods, including energy needs. Using data originally collected for Namibia's forest resource accounts and insights from a non-separable household model, this paper estimates household fuelwood demand. Specifically, the factors underlying the substitution between fuelwood collected from open access forest resources, cow dung, and fuelwood purchased from the market are analysed. Heckman two-step estimates show that households respond to economic scarcity, as measured by the opportunity costs of collecting fuelwood, by reducing energy consumption slightly more than by increasing labour input to collection. There is limited evidence for substitution from fuelwood to other energy sources, particularly with declining availability of forest stocks. Market participants may be more sensitive to price changes than non-participants. All estimated elasticities are low, similar to those observed in previous studies.

The optimal structuring of menu indexes in computerized information retrieval is examined. The number of alternatives per page that minimizes search time is determined as a function of the human and machine factors of search strategy, scanning time, key-press time, and computer response time. For a wide range of conditions, the optimal number of alternatives per page is in the range of from four to eight, with limiting integer values of three and four for exhaustive and self-terminating search, respectively.

The article presents results that indicate that trust and job design are complementary concepts in understanding outcomes like intention to quit and satisfaction. We conceptualized a worker's beliefs that a supervisor can be trusted as being composed of three main elements - beliefs in the supervisor's predictability, benevolence and fairness. This was motivated in part by a desire to conceptualize trust in a way that distinguished it from leader-member exchange (LMX) quality. The capacity of this measure of trust to predict self-reported outcomes was then compared with a job's motivational potential score, as a way of testing the trust measure's criterion validity. To do so, the results from two separate surveys were analysed. The first was based on the questionnaire responses of 535 employees in the telephone industry in the province of British Columbia; the second, of 230 service station employees from across Canada. In the studies reported here, supervisor relationships accounted for a significant amount of the variance on a variety of criterion measures. The results also suggested that perceptions of trust act independently of job design factors in affecting the outcome variables of absence, intention to quit, satisfaction and performance. In addition, the results indicated trust to be as important as job design factors in predicting outcomes.

The paper investigates the issue of the optimal number of alternatives that should be placed on database menu pages. A previous search-time model (Lee and MacGregor, 1985) is extended by proposing a criterion-based decision model, which makes predictions about how the number of alternatives affects the search process and the pattern of errors that will result. An experimental test of the model largely supported the predictions and indicated that with naive users the optimal number of alternatives per page is four to five. These values resulted in the shortest search times, the highest success rates, and the highest preference rankings.

This article reviews a research study on developing performance benchmarks to guide Chief Administrative Officer performance in Nova Scotia. The study collected examples of excellent and substandard performance from 22 individuals who were CAOs, members of Council, or provincial advisors. The information was content analysed, revealing 13 competency areas, illustrating four types of competencies. A practical aspect of this study is the suggestion that the competencies might be arranged in a semicausal logic model (or Competency Scorecard, similar to the Balanced Scorecard) and that performance measures might include outcome and activity measures. The framework might guide researchers in calibrating the linkage between competencies and organisational performance measures. Adapted from the source document.