Customer Satisfaction with E-Retailers: The Role of Product Type in the Relative Importance of Attributes

It is of strategic importance for e-retailers to allocate their resources to various service attributes according to their relative importance. How does one determine the relative importance of different service attributes? Does the relative importance of different service attributes remain the same across different product categories? These questions must be addressed by researchers and e-retailers. Since customer ratings for service attributes are highly correlated, modeling methods other than traditional regression models should be used to analyze the relative importance of service attributes to overall customer satisfaction. As such, this article utilizes neural networks in order to study the relative importance of e-retailer service attributes. Importantly, this article shows that the relative importance of e-retailer service attributes varies across different product categories (i.e., convenience, shopping, and specialty goods).     

Quantitative restrictions and Indian imports

Many governments in LDCs tend 3o rely heavily on import control for achieving adjustments in the balance of payments. The empirical analysis of imports of these countries has failed to address the issue of quantitative restrictions satisfactorily. In this paper, a set of disaggregated import demand equations are specified which attempt to capture the government's decision regarding quota restrictions. The model postulates that the overall level of imports is determined by expected foreign exchange availability while the composition of imports (once the level has been decided) is based on political and economic priorities and on relative prices.     

The Primitive Uncertainty Construct: Possibility,Potential Surprise,Probability and Belief; Some Experimental Evidence

This paper investigates the nature of the primitive uncertainty measure by means of a laboratory experiment that consists of four uncertain situations. It considers the related pair of possibility and potential surprise associated with George Shackle; and the supposedly related pair, belief and probability. The assessment of the relative merits of potential measures of uncertainty is based upon modal responses and χ² tests. It is found that the dominant uncertainty concept is potential surprise, and the subjects' explanations of their choice of an uncertainty concept gave substantial weight to possibility where it is felt that there is vagueness or doubt about the outcomes in a given situation     

Land, conflict, identity in India’s north-east: negotiating the future

Even a peripheral examination of major conflicts across the world reveals that these revolve around one critical natural resource: land. Whether in the Middle East, Ireland or closer home in Jammu and Kashmir, the battle is between those who believe in a boundary authorized by a particular political dispensation and those who believe that their ethnic and sub-nationalistic or nationalistic claims surpass such barriers. The North East of India, that little wedge of land protruding above Bangladesh, jutting into and flanked by Tibet/China, Myanmar and Bhutan, is a fascinating example of how mindsets and attitudes combined with intensely competitive and unbending views of history and geography make ethnic and demographic problems extremely difficult to resolve. Patronage by the Central Government, which is resented, and the physical and emotional distance from the mainland have combined to produce a strange psyche of dependence, bitterness and alienation in the region. Despite the seeming lack of answers for the future, it is evident that the region has to build on its natural advantage in terms of abundant natural resources. Greater degrees of autonomy with extensive powers to village “republics”, based on tradition, but with a definite change towards gender sensitivity and representation, can show the way forward.     

Global inequality and international trade

The paper analyses the effect of widespread trade liberalisationon global income inequality. The analysis of the trend in globalinequality during 1981–97, presented in the first partof the paper, shows that the apparent growth of income inequalityamong countries conceals a process of convergence. Some developingcountries achieved significantly faster economic growth thanthe advanced industrialised countries and, though small in number,they actually account for a majority of the population of thedeveloping world. Thus international inequality (i.e., the inequalityof distribution of per capita incomes among the world's population)in fact declined even though the inter-country income inequalityincreased. The analysis in the second part of the paper shows(i) that while improved trade performance did have a stimulatingeffect on growth performance of countries, trade liberalisationhad extremely varied effects on trade performance across countries,and (ii) that the distribution of benefits and costs of tradeliberalisation across countries has been such as to reduce internationalinequality without affecting inter-country inequality.     

The relationship between earnings' yield,market value and return for NYSE common stocks: Further evidence

The empirical relationship between earnings' yield, firm size and returns on the common stock of NYSE firms is examined in this paper. The results confirm that the common stock of high E/P firms earn, on average, higher risk-adjusted returns than the common stock of low E/P firms and that this effect is clearly significant even if experimental control is exercised over differences in firm size. On the other hand, while the common stock of small NYSE firms appear to have earned substantially higher returns than the common stock of large NYSE firms, the size effect virtually disappears when returns are controlled for differences in risk and E/P ratios. The evidence presented here indicates that the E/P effect, however, is not entirely independent of firm size and that the effect of both variables on expected returns is considerably more complicated than previously documented in the literature.     

Comparison of economic and clinical outcomes between patients undergoing laparoscopic bariatric surgery with powered versus manual endoscopic surgical staplers

Aims: To compare economic and clinical outcomes between patients undergoing laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (LRY) or laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy (LSG) with use of powered vs manual endoscopic surgical staplers.

Materials and methods: Patients (aged ≥21 years) who underwent LRY or LSG during a hospital admission (January 1, 2012–September 30, 2015) were identified from the Premier Perspective Hospital Database. Use of powered vs manual staplers was identified from hospital administrative billing records. Multivariable analyses were used to compare the following outcomes between the powered and manual stapler groups, adjusting for patient and hospital characteristics and hospital-level clustering: hospital length of stay (LOS), total hospital costs, medical/surgical supply costs, room and board costs, operating room costs, operating room time, discharge status, bleeding/transfusion during the hospital admission, and 30, 60, and 90-day all-cause readmissions.

Results: The powered and manual stapler groups comprised 9,851 patients (mean age?=?44.6 years; 79.3% female) and 21,558 patients (mean age?=?45.0 years; 78.0% female), respectively. In the multivariable analyses, adjusted mean hospital LOS was 2.1 days for both the powered and manual stapler groups (p?=?.981). Adjusted mean total hospital costs ($12,415 vs $13,547, p?=?.003), adjusted mean supply costs ($4,629 vs $5,217, p?=?.011), and adjusted mean operating room costs ($4,126 vs $4,413, p?=?.009) were significantly lower in the powered vs manual stapler group. The adjusted rate of bleeding and/or transfusion during the hospital admission (2.46% vs 3.22%, p?=?.025) was significantly lower in the powered vs manual stapler group. The adjusted rates of 30, 60, and 90-day all-cause readmissions were similar between the groups (all p?>?.05). Sub-analysis by manufacturer showed similar results.

Limitations: This observational study cannot establish causal linkages.

Conclusions: In this analysis of patients who underwent LRY or LSG, the use of powered staplers was associated with better economic outcomes, and a lower rate of bleeding/transfusion vs manual staplers in the real-world setting.     

Robust analysis of longitudinal data with nonignorable missing responses

We encounter missing data in many longitudinal studies. When the missing data are nonignorable, it is important to analyze the data by incorporating the missing data mechanism into the observed data likelihood function. The classical maximum likelihood (ML) method for analyzing longitudinal missing data has been extensively studied in the literature. However, it is well-known that the ordinary ML estimators are sensitive to extreme observations or outliers in the data. In this paper, we propose and explore a robust method, which is developed in the framework of the ML method, and is useful for downweighting any influential observations in the data when estimating the model parameters. We study the empirical properties of the robust estimators in small simulations. We also illustrate the robust method using incomplete longitudinal data on CD4 counts from clinical trials of HIV-infected patients.