A writing program for accounting courses

The author's premise is that communication skills, as well as technical knowledge, are critical elements for success in accounting. Accounting instructors can provide opportunities for students to hone their writing skills while teaching them technical subject matter. Assignments that require research in the profession's literature are particularly valuable for this purpose. Feed-forward and feed-back strategies can simplify the grading task and alert students to their writing deficiencies. Computer-assisted writing and analysis enhance the learning experience by using the technology students will encounter in the work place.     

The unique predictive ability of sex-role identity in explaining women's response to advertising

This study explores and compares the separate contributions of masculinity, femininity, and androgyny in explaining women's response to modern and traditional sex-role portrayals in print advertisements. It also considers whether sex-role identity captures unique predictive information above and beyond specific demographic variables. This study consisted of a field experiment among 200 adult women; each respondent was exposed to several carefully prepared print ads. The findings suggest that sex-role identity is a useful predictor of women's response to advertisements. Moreover, masculinity is the driving force in explaining women's response to the tested ads. Androgyny, however, adds no incremental predictive ability. The findings indicate that sex-role identity does capture new information, unexplained by specific demographic variables. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Self-enforcing collusion in large dynamic markets

The “folk theorem” in game theory implies that any outcome that is better for all players than some single period Nash outcome can be achieved through noncooperative equilibrium in repeated games with discounting. Whether the folk theorem holds for a repeated Cournot oligopoly as the number of firms, N, increases without bound, is investigated. It is shown that the folk theorem holds in the limit iff demand increases at the same rate as the number of firms and the Cournot price sequence is bounded strictly above by the supremum of marginal cost for large N.     

Forward and spot exchange rates

There is a general consensus that forward exchange rates have little if any power as forecasts of future spot exchange rates. There is less agreement on whether forward rates contain time varying premiums. Conditional on the hypothesis that the forward market is efficient or rational, this paper finds that both components of forward rates vary through time. Moreover, most of the variation in forward rates is variation in premium, and the premium and expected future spot rate components of forward rates are negatively correlated.     

Francesco Paolo Cantelli

Francesco Paolo Cantelli made fundamental contributions to the foundations of probability theory and to the clarification of different types of probabilistic convergence. He is remembered through the Borel–Cantelli Lemma, the Glivenko–Cantelli Theorem, and Cantelli's Inequality. He also made seminal contributions to actuarial science.     

The Emergence of Consolidated Service Centers in Health Care

Hospital supply chains can be conceptualized as complex systems with a large number of players and a high degree of interrelatedness among them, creating an environment that is difficult to optimize and manage. In recent years, a consolidated service center (CSC) strategy (sometimes also referred to as “self‐distribution” strategy), has emerged in some healthcare systems, showing a strong potential for reducing the complexity in a hospital's supply chain to achieve high levels of performance and innovation. We examine three CSCs using a qualitative case method to understand the unique characteristics of this supply chain strategy, and how CSCs move hospital supply chains toward a less complex state. We find that CSCs demonstrate characteristics that distinguish them from other supply chain strategies. These characteristics enable the CSC to orchestrate supply base rationalization and disintermediation initiatives in the hospital's supply chain to effectively reduce the number of components and interrelatedness in this complex system.