Marcel Herbst

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I am a (retired) social scientist with a focus on higher education management, quantitative analyses (using R), writing (essays), and publication support (LaTeX based). I am also interested in (old analogue) photography and concrete art.

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Alessandro Camiz, Ph.D.

Università degli Studi "G. d'Annunzio" Chieti Pescara

Alexandra Chavarria Arnau

Università degli Studi di Padova

Alejandra B Osorio

Wellesley College

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Pelin Tan

Batman University

Asli Odman

Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University

Andrei Orlov

Marquette University

Ilia Rodov

Bar-Ilan University

Shalom Sabar

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Fabian Wendt

Virginia Tech

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Papers by Marcel Herbst

Mass Higher Education and Funding Bases

Higher education dynamics, Nov 1, 2008

Performance-Based Budgeting or Funding

Springer eBooks, May 15, 2007

... Budget Portion Affected small segment all public appropriations ... the state a direct influe... more

Alternative Governance and Management Modes

Higher education dynamics, Nov 1, 2008

... Michael C. Geoghegan and Russell L. Ackoff (Geoghegan &amp; Ackoff, 1989) ... In Section ... more

Performance-Based Funding, Higher Education in Europe

The institution of science and the science of institutions : the legacy of Joseph Ben-David

Springer eBooks, 2014

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein.

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The Costs of Crime and Punishment

The European Legacy, Oct 1, 2013

Diversity has become a value we cherish. Politically, societies like to have the whole spectrum o... more Diversity has become a value we cherish. Politically, societies like to have the whole spectrum of their respective populace mapped, their entire range of communities and cultures. However, not all diversity is appreciated. The intranational diversity of schooling accomplishments, as measured by PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) or TIMMS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) scores, is often seen to reflect unequal educational opportunities, disparate or partially inadequate educational facilities, or poverty and social misfortune. Analogous issues arise in the field of public health, where health and life expectancy is related to education and income; or in the field of public policy, where the diversity of income of families is growing to levels which threaten to rip apart nations and to endanger democratic structures; or, to mention another issue, in the field of crime, the topic of this review. Crime rates differ across nations, often by a factor of 1:100. In Mexico, robberies are estimated to exceed 500 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, while Japan is recorded to have a rate of no more than 4 cases. However, crime rates differ from crime to crime. Assaults in Mexico are estimated to have a rate of some 200 cases, while Japan has not a rate of 2 (as one might expect from the robbery example above) but of roughly 50 cases. Western developed nations normally have lower recorded crime rates than countries of emerging economies or of undeveloped countries, provided we stick to offenses that are illegal and included in crime statistics (such as those collated by the UNODC). But even here the differences are substantial. Some of these differences may have to do with definitional matters, some with the underlying causes of crime, some with crime cultures, and some with policing, apprehension and punishment. Crime is associated with costs. These costs, monetary or immaterial, are borne by the victims of crime, by the general public, and by the offenders themselves. We may distinguish between costs that are directly caused by crime (e.g., damage, harm, losses, income forgone, etc.), indirectly associated with crime (e.g., preventive measures of a technical kind, behavioral or psychological changes, or costs tied to insurance policies, all pertaining to potential victims), and direct and indirect costs associated with policing, apprehension and punishment (borne by the general public, the criminals themselves, or the community to which the criminals are perceived to belong). Because costs may be seen as income, one would have to look at them from various angles. For the victim, costs generally cannot be offset by the gains of the criminal (in a Robin Hood type fashion). Furthermore, we normally do not experience a mere “change of ownership,” so to speak, but frequently a destruction of values—of life, of health, of property—which cannot be replaced. Lastly, the costs of policing, apprehension and punishment are not simply income sources for people employed as police or correction

Financing Public Universities: The Case of Performance Funding

... Page 18. xviii Financing Public Universities tions on how to improve the argument. Needless t... more

Public Management Reform Debate

Springer eBooks, May 15, 2007

Alternative Governance and Management Modes

Springer eBooks, May 15, 2007

... Michael C. Geoghegan and Russell L. Ackoff (Geoghegan &amp; Ackoff, 1989) ... In Section ... more

Performance-Based Budgeting or Funding

Higher education dynamics, Nov 1, 2008

The Legacy of Joseph Ben-David

Boston studies in the philosophy of science, 2014

The chapter is an attempt to pay tribute to an exemplary scholar and to review Ben-David’s format... more

Change management: A classification

Tertiary Education and Management, 1999

Higher education systems, like others, experience a proliferation of management approaches includ... more Higher education systems, like others, experience a proliferation of management approaches including tools designed to induce and manage change: strategic planning and reporting, planning and budgeting systems, peer review and self-evaluation, total quality management, reengineering, the art and practice of learning organisations, etc. While these approaches may differ in their specific focus and the type of professionals they address, they also have much in common and can complement each other. The present paper addresses the spectrum of change processes and proposes taxonomies to guide their use.

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The Production–Morphology Nexus of Research Universities: The Atlantic Split

Higher Education Policy, Mar 1, 2004

Research universities and institutes assume a vital role in domestic economic development. Resear... more Research universities and institutes assume a vital role in domestic economic development. Research universities are assigned the responsibility to train doctoral and post-doctoral students and to form new generations of faculty. Despite their critical role, the effectiveness of institutions regarding research production is rarely studied, particularly in an international, comparative context. Vital information regarding the improvement potential of institutions is generally lacking, as are good criteria by which to judge the relative merit of various types of institutions. The paper presents findings on a performance gradient that separates US and European research universities and submits hypotheses that link productivity and organizational-or structural-aspects of research-oriented institutions.

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European Higher Education

The European Legacy, Feb 22, 2017

The Poverty of Economics

The European Legacy, Dec 1, 2012

The Bounds of Reason: Game Theory and the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences

The European Legacy, Dec 1, 2013

People are not logical. They are psychological. Anonymous People often make mistakes in their mat... more People are not logical. They are psychological. Anonymous People often make mistakes in their maths. This does not mean that we should abandon arithmetic. Jack Hirshleifer Decision theory is the analysis of the behavior of an individual facing nonstrategic uncertainty-that is, uncertainty that is due to what we term "Nature" (a stochastic natural event such as a coin flip, seasonal crop loss, personal illness, and the like) or, if other individuals are involved, their behavior is treated as a statistical distribution known to the decision maker. Decision theory depends on probability theory, which was developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by such notables as Blaise Pascal, Daniel Bernoulli, and Thomas Bayes. A rational actor is an individual with consistent preferences (§1.1). A rational actor need not be selfish. Indeed, if rationality implied selfishness, the only rational individuals would be sociopaths. Beliefs, called subjective priors in decision theory, logically stand between choices and payoffs. Beliefs are primitive data for the rational actor model. In fact, beliefs are the product of social processes and are shared among individuals. To stress the importance of beliefs in modeling choice, I often describe the rational actor model as the beliefs, preferences and constraints model, or the BPC model. The BPC terminology has the added attraction of avoiding the confusing and value-laden term "rational." The BPC model requires only preference consistency, which can be defended on basic evolutionary grounds. While there are eminent critics of preference consistency, their claims are valid in only a few narrow areas. Because preference consistency does not presuppose unlimited informationprocessing capacities and perfect knowledge, even bounded rationality (Simon 1982) is consistent with the BPC model. 1 Because one cannot do be-1 Indeed, it can be shown (Zambrano 2005) that every boundedly rational individual is a fully rational individual subject to an appropriate set of Bayesian priors concerning the state of nature. 1

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The Enigma of Knowledge

The European Legacy, May 22, 2015

Knowledge is a resource, a factor of production—like labor, capital, land or natural resources, a... more Knowledge is a resource, a factor of production—like labor, capital, land or natural resources, and so-called knowledge economies depend on it. Alfred Marshall referred to two—basic—factors of production, nature and man; man (as a factor) he subdivided into labor and capital; and capital was further grouped into classes like organization or knowledge: “Capital consists in a great part of knowledge and organization. ... Knowledge is our most powerful engine of production; it enables us to subdue Nature and force her to satisfy our wants. Organization aids knowledge.” Knowledge in its various forms has always been part of economies, of course, and it has been discussed in the literature of several disciplines (including economics), but the concept really gained weight only after 1985 when another notion, globalization, won ground. Globalization is a by-product of the Third Industrial Revolution and the associated transformation of economies. With the relative prominence of the tertiary sector in the Western World, knowledge gained the status of a key resource. Knowledge, and knowledge accumulation and transmission, is an object of investigation of disciplines like psychology, philosophy, education, sociology, political science, geography, history or information sciences, but it has actually played a relatively peripheral role within economics, in spite of the recent hype regarding knowledge economies. In fact, classical economics and equilibrium theory pretty much ignored knowledge in their concepts of homo œconomicus and the perfect market: knowledge was not to be included as a formal factor of production. Indeed, it had to be treated as an externality, as a spillover ( frequently referred to as the MAR-spillover, after Alfred Marshall, Kenneth Arrow and Paul Romer). Concepts like space (proximity) or agglomeration (central when analyzing knowledge production, research productivity, scientific development, technological innovation, economic growth, etc.) could not find a main role in classic economic analysis and were relegated to its fringes, to regional sciences or economic geography. Outside the framework of classical economics, knowledge is often difficult to spot because it is subsumed under concepts like educational attainment, research finding or patenting activities: indeed, the Journal of Economic Perspectives ( from 1996 to 2013) lists only eight articles that address the concept of a knowledge economy (but 500 articles on education, 8 documents on research funding, and 48 documents on patents). Knowledge needs to be inferred. In 1937 Friedrich Hayek delivered his presidential address on “Economics and Knowledge” before the London Economic Club. In this lecture, he essentially asked to what extent (1) economic analysis makes use of “assumptions and propositions about... knowledge possessed by the different members of society”; and (2) “to what extent formal economic analysis conveys any knowledge about what happens in the real world.” The first question addresses appropriate (or infeasible) levels of abstractions, and the second refers to economics as an empirical,

“Hallow the Everyday”

The European Legacy, Dec 9, 2019

Religion, Jewish religion, said Leora Batnitzky, is a modern concept that evolved in Western Euro... more

Performance-Based Funding, Higher Education in Europe

Springer eBooks, 2020

Scientific Misconduct and Fraud

The European Legacy, May 7, 2021

Science is said to seek the truth, at least within the bounds that societies or individuals see a... more

Mass Higher Education and Funding Bases

Higher education dynamics, Nov 1, 2008

Performance-Based Budgeting or Funding

Springer eBooks, May 15, 2007