Performance effects of innovation in two-sided markets: The paradigmatic case of OTAs

Online Travel Agents (OTAs) play an important intermediary role in the two-sided travel distribution market. A critical factor that enhances a firm's competitive advantage is innovation. Yet, the analysis of innovation in the OTA context is scarce. The main objective of this article is to fill this gap and examine the effect of OTA innovations on firm performance. We analyze the effect of two-sided market specific innovations (same-side and cross-side) on performance and contribute to the literature by expanding the theoretical understanding of innovations. We find that producer-to-consumer innovations have a greater effect on OTA performance than producer-to-producer and consumer-to-consumer innovations. A fundamental managerial implication is that exchange management is an area to be enhanced when innovating in travel market distribution.     

The economic burden of depression among adults with rheumatoid arthritis in the United States

Aims: Depression is the most frequent comorbidity reported among patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Comorbid depression negatively impacts RA patients’ health-related quality-of-life, physical function, mental function, mortality, and experience of pain and symptom severity. The objective of this study was to assess healthcare utilization, expenditures, and work productivity among patients with RA with or without depression.

Materials and methods: Data from adult patients who had at least two visits each related to RA and depression over a 1-year period were extracted from the Truven Health MarketScan research databases. Outcomes comprised healthcare resource utilization, work productivity loss, and direct healthcare costs comparing patients with RA with depression (n?=?3,478) vs patients with RA without depression (n?=?43,222).

Results: Patients with RA and depression had a significantly greater relative risk of hospitalization and number of all-cause and RA-related hospitalizations, utilization of emergency services, days spent in the hospital, physician visits, and RA-related surgeries compared with RA patients without depression. Patients with RA and depression had a higher risk of and experienced more events and days of short-term disability compared with patients without depression. The incremental adjusted annual all-cause and RA-related direct costs were $8,488 (95% CI = $6,793–$10,223) and $578 (95% CI = –$98–$1,243), respectively, when comparing patients with RA and depression vs RA only.

Limitations: The current analysis is subject to the known limitations of retrospective studies based on administrative claims data.

Conclusions: This study suggested increased healthcare utilization, work productivity loss, and economic burden among RA patients due to comorbid depression. These findings emphasize the importance of managing depression and including depression as a factor when devising treatment algorithms for patients with RA.     

我国“一带一路”沿线地区风险投资时空分布及影响因素研究

深入分析我国“一带一路”沿线地区风险投资时空格局及影响因素，有助于促进创新创业与企业发展、提高区域科技创新水平。运用空间分析方法和空间计量模型，对2003-2018年我国“一带一路”沿线139个城市风险投资的时空分布特征及影响因素进行分析，结果表明：①沿线地区的风险投资发展具有不均衡性，呈现为沿海高、西部低的分异格局；②风险投资的全局自相关系数均为正，呈现出明显的空间集聚特征；③风险投资机构数、国家高新区数量、风险投资退出、政府引导基金发展、财政科技支出对区域风险投资具有显著促进作用，环境污染对风险投资有一定抑制作用。随着ESG投资理念逐渐获得认可，沿线地区可以通过提升绿色发展水平促进风险投资发展。     

M5 competition uncertainty: Overdispersion,distributional forecasting,GAMLSS, and beyond

The M5 competition uncertainty track aims for probabilistic forecasting of sales of thousands of Walmart retail goods. We show that the M5 competition data face strong overdispersion and sporadic demand, especially zero demand. We discuss modeling issues concerning adequate probabilistic forecasting of such count data processes. Unfortunately, the majority of popular prediction methods used in the M5 competition (e.g. lightgbm and xgboost GBMs) fail to address the data characteristics, due to the considered objective functions. Distributional forecasting provides a suitable modeling approach to overcome those problems. The GAMLSS framework allows for flexible probabilistic forecasting using low-dimensional distributions. We illustrate how the GAMLSS approach can be applied to M5 competition data by modeling the location and scale parameters of various distributions, e.g. the negative binomial distribution. Finally, we discuss software packages for distributional modeling and their drawbacks, like the R package gamlss with its package extensions, and (deep) distributional forecasting libraries such as TensorFlow Probability.     

Charity registration and reporting: a cross-jurisdictional and theoretical analysis of regulatory impact

Governments increasingly regulate charities to restrict the number of organizations claiming taxation exemptions, reduce charities’ ability to abuse state support, and detect and deter fraud. Public interest theory arguments suggest that regulation could increase philanthropy through enhancing public trust and confidence in charities. Nevertheless, public choice theory argues that regulators seek to maximize political returns, ‘manage’ charity-government relationships, and reduce potential regulatory capture.

We analyse charity regulatory regimes using these two regulatory theories and the relative costs and benefits of different regulatory regimes. Heeding these should reduce regulatory inefficiency and balance accountability and transparency demands against benefits charities receive from regulation.     

Influential factors on Chinese airlines’ profitability and forecasting methods

We establish profit models to predict the performance of airlines in the short term using the quarterly profit data collected on the three largest airlines in China together with additional recent historical data on external influencing factors. In particular, we propose the application of the LASSO estimation method to this problem and we compare its performance with a suite of other more modern state-of-the-art approaches including ridge regression, support vector regression, tree regression and neural networks. It is shown that LASSO generally outperforms the other approaches in this study. We concluded a number of findings on the oil price and other influential factors on Chinese airline profitability.     

The price of fear: Estimating the financial cost of bullying and harassment to the NHS in England

Using a spectrum of measures, this paper estimates some of the financial costs of bullying and harassment to the NHS in England. By means of specific impacts resulting from bullying and harassment to staff health, sickness absence costs to the employer, employee turnover, diminished productivity, sickness presenteeism, compensation, litigation and industrial relations costs, we conservatively estimate bullying and harassment to cost the taxpayer £2.281 billion per annum.     

电改环境下油气管道企业用电成本管控研究

电力体制改革为油气管道企业用电成本管控提供了政策支持。在梳理电力改革政策的基础上,简要介绍了适用于油气管道企业的新电力政策,详细分析了我国油气管道企业存在的基本电费偏高、力调电费偏高、用电类型不合理、用电管理有待完善等用电现状及其根本原因。在上述分析的基础上,提出了选取合适的用电类别、选择合理的电费计费方式降低基本电费、提高功率因数降低力调电费、积极利用直购电政策、健全用电成本管控激励和考核机制等对策建议,以期为油气管道企业用电成本管控提供参考借鉴。