This article analyses the impact of the Great Recession and radical labour market deregulation on employer associations’ (EAs) membership levels and composition in Southern Europe. It also reviews the literature and advances it in four relevant aspects. First, it verifies a general decrease in membership of EAs in Southern Europe, almost to the point of collapse in Greece. Secondly, it identifies the greater importance of large companies (more than Fordist economic sectors) in the composition of this membership. Thirdly, it confirms that sectoral bargaining (as a major determinant) and union representation (an element weakened by reforms) are strong company-level incentives for membership in EAs. Finally, it re-examines the reasons put forward in the scholarly literature to explain why EAs in Southern Europe have not been in favour of these significant institutional changes.

Oppenheimer and Monin (2009) recently found that subjectively rare events are taken to indicate a longer preceding sequence of unobserved trials than subjectively common events, an effect which they refer to as the retrospective gambler’s fallacy. The current paper extends this idea to the situation where participants judge the likelihood of streak continuation. Participants were told about a streak produced by a random process (coin flips) or human performance (basketball shots), and either predicted the next outcome or inferred the immediately preceding outcome. For the coin scenarios, participants tended to expect streak termination – the gambler’s fallacy — and this effect was the same for predictions and retrospective inferences. In the basketball scenarios, no overall bias was found in either prospective or retrospective judgments. The results support Oppenheimer and Monin’s suggestion that reconstruction of the past entails the same heuristics as prediction of the future; they also support the idea that the nature of the data-generating process is a key determinant of whether people fall into the gambler’s fallacy. It is suggested that the term retrospective gambler’s fallacy be used to describe situations where a streak is taken to indicate that the preceding unobserved outcome was of the opposite type, and that the phenomenon discovered by Oppenheimer and Monin be referred to as retrospective representativeness, or a retrospective belief in the law of small numbers.

We explore people’s preferences for numbers in large proprietary data sets from two different lottery games. We find that choice is far from uniform, and exhibits some familiar and some new tendencies and biases. Players favor personally meaningful and situationally available numbers, and are attracted towards numbers in the center of the choice form. Frequent players avoid winning numbers from recent draws, whereas infrequent players chase these. Combinations of numbers are formed with an eye for aesthetics, and players tend to spread their numbers relatively evenly across the possible range.

National protected areas (NPAs) often exhibit biodiversity representation bias, do not adequately protect priority conservation areas (PCAs), and fail to meet conservation goals. Protected area (PA) discourse assumes private PAs (PPAs) are more systematically established than NPAs. The Chilean conservation community has proposed an integrated national–private PA network (IPAN) so PPA benefits can remedy NPA shortcomings. However, there has been no recent assessment of Chilean PPA ecoregion representation or data to support the usefulness of spending valuable resources creating an IPAN. Using the most recent Chilean private and national PA data, this study conducted a terrestrial ecoregion gap analysis under two scenarios. Scenario 1 assessed NPAs and nature sanctuaries. Scenario 2 assessed the IPAN. Both scenarios showed representation bias and failure to adequately protect PCAs or meet conservation goals. The IPAN fell short of expectations because PPAs exhibited bias similar to NPAs. The findings refute PA discourse by upending traditional beliefs regarding PPA effectiveness, and they identify a need to more critically assess the benefits of PPAs and IPANs on a country-by-country basis.

Weighting techniques are employed to generalize results from survey experiments to populations of theoretical and substantive interest. Although weighting is often viewed as a second-order methodological issue, these adjustment methods invoke untestable assumptions about the nature of sample selection and potential heterogeneity in the treatment effect. Therefore, although weighting is a useful technique in estimating population quantities, it can introduce bias and also be used as a researcher degree of freedom. We review survey experiments published in three major journals from 2000–2015 and find that there are no standard operating procedures for weighting survey experiments. We argue that all survey experiments should report the sample average treatment effect (SATE). Researchers seeking to generalize to a broader population can weight to estimate the population average treatment effect (PATE), but should discuss the construction and application of weights in a detailed and transparent manner given the possibility that weighting can introduce bias.

Hedonic wellbeing and eudaimonic wellbeing are two prevailing approaches to wellbeing. However, remarkably little research has distinguished them from an activity perspective; the knowledge of behavioural paths for achieving these two wellbeings is poor. This study first clarified the behavioural contents of the two approaches through a bottom-up method and then analysed the representativeness of activities to indicate to what extent activities contributed to wellness. We found that the paths to hedonic wellbeing and eudaimonic wellbeing overlapped and differed from each other. Furthermore, this study explained why hedonic activity differed from eudaimonic activity by analysing activity characteristics. We found that people reported higher frequency, sensory experience, and affective experience in hedonic activity, whereas they reported higher intellectual experience, behavioural experience, and spiritual experience in eudaimonic activity. Finally, we explored the behavioural pattern of wellbeing pursuit in both an unthreatening situation and a threatening situation. We found that the overlap between the two approaches increased in the threatening situation. Moreover, people in the threatening situation tended to score lower on all characteristics except frequency relative to those in the unthreatening situation. It seemed that the behavioural pattern in the threatening situation was less effective than its equivalent in the unthreatening situation.

Protected areas (PAs) have long been the foundation of conservation strategies to halt biodiversity losses and ecosystem degradation. In the South Caucasus (SC), coverage of PAs increased after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, yet how well biodiversity is represented in them is unknown. We utilized the PA downgrading, downsizing and degazettement (PADDD) conceptual framework and the gap analysis approach to assess how changes in the PAs of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia between 1991 and 2014 have affected the representation of biodiversity. Throughout this period, vegetation formations associated with high mountain ecosystems changed (≥17% representation). Colchic lowland vegetation formations which are only present in Georgia, also changed from unrepresented (0%) to under-represented (from 0% to <17%). The effect of PADDD events on biodiversity representation varied among countries depending on the amount of area gazetted after 1991. There is an inherent bias in the expansion of PAs in the SC. Our findings could be a first step towards changing the status quo by helping conservationists to strategically allocate resources towards ecosystems that are below 17% representation. Yet this will require governments in the SC to shift their views about PAs from being only national efforts to being key pieces of a larger-scale conservation strategy.

Because protected areas are a major means of conservation, the extent to which ecosystems are represented under different protection regimes needs to be ascertained. A gap analysis approach was used to assess the representativeness of Chile's terrestrial ecosystems in differing kinds of protected areas. Terrestrial ecosystems were described in terms of potential vegetation, employing three protection scenarios. Scenario 1 was based exclusively on the Chilean National System of Protected Wild Areas (SNASPE). Scenario 2 included all types of public protected areas, namely SNASPE, nature sanctuaries and Ministry of National Heritage lands. Scenario 3 included all items in Scenario 2, but also included private protected areas and biodiversity priority sites. There is insufficient protection of terrestrial ecosystems under the Scenario 2. In addition to the low level of ecosystem protection provided by state protected areas (only 42 of the 127 terrestrial ecosystems had >10% of their area protected), 23 terrestrial ecosystems were identified as having no protection at the national level. Gaps in protection were concentrated in the North (both coastal and inland desertic scrub), Central (thorny scrub, thorny forests, sclerophyllous forests and deciduous coastal forests) and Austral (steppe ecosystems) regions of Chile. These gaps include ecosystems that are of global conservation importance.

Longitudinal studies are examined with special reference to the Ontario Longitudinal Study of Aging (LSA). The specific aspects discussed are the representativeness of the sample, attrition rates, end-points, and associations, particularly the associations with age. It is concluded that, in comparison with other longitudinal studies, both in Canada and the U.S., the LSA represents a good source of longitudinal data and therefore lends itself to analyses which may be used to investigate factors expected to be important in understanding various aspects of the aging process.