Book Reviews

A major role that two‐year colleges play is to provide graduates who are prepared to meet the labor demands of business and industry. Business is no longer content with employees who possess job specific knowledge only, but is seeking employees who possess other attributes as well, such as the ability to solve problems, relate to others, and adapt to changing situations. To meet these demands, a curriculum model has been developed at Spartanburg Technical College to combine job specific content with work‐related skills. Innovative teaching strategies are used to bridge content and skills in such a way so content is not sacrificed, while at the same time, student's work‐related skills are developed. Teaching methodologies are sequentially and strategically placed to allow students to build from a basic to an advanced level of competency for each work‐related skill. The six step process results in several benefits including faculty, student and college development and improved college‐business/industry relations.     

Temporal primacy overrides prior training in serial compound conditioning of the rabbit’s nictitating membrane response

Conditioning of the rabbit’s nictitating membrane response was conducted with a serial compound CSA-CSB-US. In the present experiments, prior training of CSB was pitted against the temporal primacy of CSA. Prior training of CSB was able to only weakly block CR acquisition to the added CSA, but CSA caused a pronounced decline in responding to the pretrained CSB. By the end of training, high levels of responding were sustained only in the final portion of the serial compound in which CSA or its traces coincided with CSB. These results provide support for real-time models as exemplified by Sutton and Barto (1981).     

Separating patent wheat from chaff: Would the US benefit from adopting patent post-grant review?

This article assesses the impact in the US of adopting a patent post-grant review (PGR) procedure similar to one provided in the America Invents Act (AIA) of 2011. We employ novel methods for matching US patents to their European counterparts to find that opposition rates are about three times higher among European Patent Office (EPO) equivalents of US litigated patents as against control-group (unlitigated) patents. Contingent on reaching a final judgment in EPO post-grant opposition, we find that about 70% of these equivalents have challenged claims that are either completely revoked or amended. Using our empirical findings to inform a series of welfare estimates, we calculate benefit-to-cost ratios that the US may expect from implementing PGR in the range of 4:1–10:1. We also discover that these large social benefits result primarily from eliminating unwarranted market power in the current stock of granted patents, and much less so from litigation cost savings per se. Our results provide evidence that the US may benefit substantially from adopting the AIA post-grant review, but only provided that costs are controlled and that administration and appeals are not allowed to become too costly.     

Manager Coaching Skills: What Makes a Good Coach?

The concept of “manager as coach” is increasingly popular in the management literature as a mechanism for improving employee involvement and performance. This paper summarizes a study we conducted to evaluate “coaching skills” among sales managers. The study used telephone interviews with managers' subordinates to collect data regarding managers' coaching effectiveness. During the interviews, subordinates rated their supervisors' coaching skills and provided a rationale for their rankings. This study analyzes the ratings and the comments, and outlines the behaviors associated with both high and low ratings of manager coaching skills.