It is very satisfying to teach in a classroom where students are actively participating in discussions, group projects and other activities. Learning spaces are complex – both teachers and students experience numerous pressures, wants and needs that accompany them into a classroom. For instance, both teachers and their students want to be heard, to learn, to be safe and to have positive relationships with their peers, just to name a few. However, the value and sources for satisfaction that you and they place on these needs and wants at any given time may be different from one another. You may want to get on with a brilliant geography lesson, while a sleep-deprived student may just want a bit of rest and believe the right place for it is the very same geography lesson. These possibilities remind us that your lesson is taking place in a social environment with multiple stakeholders actively reacting to each other. This is why it is very important to develop strategies that will help you manage both your and your students’ expectations in the classroom. This chapter focuses on how the use of rules and expectations lays the foundations for positive and engaging learning environments.

In 2014, Fabrice Brégier, then chief operating officer of Airbus, called for the European Central Bank to intervene as the strength of the euro was “crazy.” He wanted them to push it down against the dollar by 10% from an “excessive” $1.35 to between $1.20 and $1.25. We learned in Chapter 5 how a strong currency makes it harder for domestic manufacturers to export goods, so we can understand why a European executive trying to sell commercial airplanes might worry that a strong euro was making his job harder. And it is a fact that in 2014, Airbus was registering disappointing sales compared to its rival across the Atlantic, Boeing. But why would it be “crazy” for the euro to be worth $1.35, and yet normal and acceptable for the euro to be worth 10% less than that? And how did Fabrice Brégier expect the European Central Bank to adjust the euro’s value, when the euro is under a floating, rather than a fixed, exchange rate regime?

This chapter introduces robust optimization (RO), where we aim to solve a MILO in which some of the parameters/data can take multiple (possibly infinitely many) values and we want the optimal solution to perform “the best possible,” assuming that the unknown problem parameters can always turn out to be “the worst possible.”

Americans are big consumers of sugar, eating and drinking some 66 pounds each of it per year, on average. This is not just a dietary issue; it is also a big trade issue. The United States imports sugar from the tropical climes of the Caribbean, which has the natural conditions suited for growing sugar cane. But sugar imports are much less now than they once were – not because Americans have cut back on sugar consumption but because low-cost imports were hurting domestic cane producers in Florida and Louisiana. To help them out, the federal government began restricting imports decades ago. (Just ask any representative or senator from those states whether they believe free trade in sugar would be a good idea.)

Current societal expectations, theory and research conclude that effective teachers meet students’ needs by encouraging responsibility and having active control of their class, within a context that develops positive relationships. This chapter presents corrective strategies that have been curated to be consistent with this approach. They particularly draw from research that focuses on maintaining high expectations and structure, developing positive student–teacher relationships, treating disengagement and its associated behavioural challenges in students as opportunities to teach about self and others, and maximising student autonomy wherever possible. This approach is referred to as authoritative teaching.

In June of 2016, voters in the United Kingdom narrowly approved a referendum on leaving the European Union (EU), a common market wherein labor, capital, and goods and services are free to move between countries without impediment. The vote in favor of Britain’s exit – or “Brexit” – set in motion a process by which the country would leave the EU within two years.

Understanding Culture defines culture and identifies why culture is such an important element of the international management context. International management is about leading people and implementing tasks with people across cultural borders. The starting point for effective international management behavior must be a deep understanding of culture. We set the foundation for culture as one of the important contexts of global management. We define culture, examine its different facets, analyze its impact on people, and explore important questions about the intersection of cultures and individual characteristics. Culture serves two important functions for groups. Culture makes action simple and efficient because it creates context for meaning, and it also provides an important source of social identity for its members.

In late 2017, the US economy was nearing full employment. Unemployment was at a 40-year low of 4.2%, yet President Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress embarked upon a policy of tax cuts. The Federal Reserve, seeking to avoid overheating the economy, tightened monetary policy, raising interest rates. In other words, the two policies were working in opposite directions. The dollar rose in value, making US exports more expensive to foreigners, making imports cheaper to Americans, and thus worsening the trade deficit. How and why these events played out motivates the development of the model in this chapter.

Further focusing on the topics from the previous chapter, this section identifies the factors within a school that potentially impact student engagement. It starts by illustrating the way that affective and cognitive engagement may affect behaviour within a school environment and then illustrates this concept by exploring the potential role of teacher–student relationships, curriculum and instruction, classroom environment, peers, opportunities for choice in areas such as uniforms and student governance, and feeling safe, especially in periods of transition across and within schools. In each situation, the chapter will examine the research for effective practice and connect various approaches to their influence on engagement.

Mapping Cultural Dimensions for Effective Interaction positions personal interaction at the center of global management. It focuses on high-quality person-to-person interactions across cultural boundaries in everyday situations and in teams. The Map-Bridge-Integrate (MBI) framework, a tool for engaging in effective cross-cultural interaction, is presented and explained. The chapter identifies the role of cultural mapping tools and recognizes strengths and weaknesses in different tools. It summarizes the multiple social maps that have dominated international management research and practice over the years, such as Hall, Hofstede, and Globe. The Aperian GlobeSmart tool provides an excellent combination of validity and practical application for mapping cultural work-style interactions. GlobeSmart maps five dimensions: Task vs. Relationship, Independent vs. Interdependent, Egalitarian vs. Status, Direct vs. Indirect, and Risk vs. Certainty. Each dimension is validated with survey data from people in that country, updated on a regular basis. The five dimensions help compare cultures, and the survey gives individuals an easy way to compare themselves with each other and with different cultural profiles. Maps of 22 cultures are presented.

We consider theoretical models of social preferences such as the Fehr–Schmidt model of inequity aversion; the ERC model; type-based reciprocity models; and hybrid models such as the Charness–Rabin model. Empirical evidence is used to evaluate the relative success of the models. Applications are given from behavioral political economy and from social identity in ultimatum games. We also consider issues of moral hazard and asymmetric information in the presence of other-regarding preferences. A range of complete and incomplete contracts, both short- and long-term, are studied. The evidence on alternative contractual forms, and on extrinsic and intrinsic motivation is outlined. Behavioral factors, such as reciprocity, often lead to low-powered incentive schemes that have greater empirical support relative to the high-powered incentive schemes predicted in neoclassical theory. Some of the main findings are: Bonus contracts may often dominate incentive contracts; even flat wage schedules may elicit high effort levels; incentives may crowd-out intrinsic motivation; moral suasion may dominate direct punishments; and incentives that are too high may lead to choking under pressure.

Our aim so far has been to formulate a real-life decision problem as a (mixed integer) linear optimization problem. The reason was clear: Linear functions are simple, so problems formulated with them should also be simple. However, two questions arise. First, is the world of linear functions flexible enough to model all real-life problems? Second, are MILOs the only simple problems we can solve quickly?