Nursing and technology: a love/hate relationship

The fundamental value of information technology in clinical settings is no longer in question, as clinicians enter and retrieve information in order to deliver care and the benefit of ubiquitous availability to clinical data using computers cannot be overplayed. The question now is how to increase adoption, improve productivity, and support transformational changes in health care delivery. It is important to get the interplay between people, process, and technology right for successful implementations which support care transformation. We must lead projects with the clinical practice changes being enabled by the technology, and then ensure the technology supports the practice change. Nurse leaders must consider letting the quality improvement process drive and define when and how technology is used, running our projects as practice changes and not IT implementations, with nursing sponsors owning the projects and leading the charge.     

Commitment,first-mover-, and second-mover advantage

We identify circumstances under which a firm with a first-mover advantage may get leapfrogged by a follower. At the market stage we assume a Stackelberg structure, i.e. the leader commits to a quantity and the follower reacts to it. We allow the owners of both firms to select the internal organization and the production technology before quantities are set. That is, leader and follower can additionally use two commitment strategies alternatively or in combination: investing in R&D and delegating quantity decisions to managers. Despite the symmetry of options for the two firms, we find that there is a unique equilibrium in which both firms invest in process R&D, only the follower delegates, and the follower can overcome the first-mover advantage of the quantity leader and obtain a higher profit than the leader. Our analysis reveals that there are some important differences between the two commitment devices “cost-reducing R&Dt” and “delegation to managers”.      

Uncertainty, Commitment, and Optimal Taxation

This paper examines the optimal tax design problem in the presence of wage uncertainty. The wage has a continuous distribution, individuals are ex ante identical, preferences are separable in labor supply and goods, public policy aims at providing the population with social insurance, and the only restriction on the tax instruments is that emanating from lack of public observability of realized wages and labor supplies. We show that optimal tax structures depend crucially on whether it is labor supply or goods that consumers have to commit to before the resolution of uncertainty. Specifically, we prove that, in the absence of commitment, the social insurance problem collapses to the traditional optimal tax problem. Second, if labor supply is precommitted, it would be possible to effect a first-best outcome. Third, commitment to goods would make indirect taxation a useful instrument of tax policy even in the presence of a general income tax; it requires differential tax treatment of committed and noncommitted goods. Finally, if preferences are separable between the two types of goods, precommitted goods must be taxed at a uniform rate lower than that on the noncommitted goods.     

Regulations,Institutions, and Commitment: Comparative Studies of Telecommunications

Journal of Regulatory Economics -     

UK Utility Regulation: Licences, Commitment and Judicial Review

Abstract ** :  This paper analyses critically the claim made by Levy and Spiller that, in the context of UK utility regulation, licences operate as a 'technology of commitment'. The functional logic of delegation which underpins much principal–agent analyses is discussed, together with the credibility problem emerging from a divergence between a principal's long‐term and short‐term policies. Levy and Spiller contend that the UK has a successful model of utility regulation in part because of the use of licences which restrict the regulator from deviating from the broad substantive principles settled at the time of vesting. This contention is examined through the detailed consideration of five judicial review cases which have cast light on how, and to what extent, the licences restrict regulatory discretion .     

Managing Foreign Direct Investment: Commitment, Deterrence, And Diversion

The paper models the multinational choice between foreign direct investment in and exporting to a domestic market as an equilibrium outcome of strategic play between domestic and foreign firms. Two cases are considered, one in which the domestic firm can precommit to output levels (as, for example, through investment in a distribution network), and one in which such precommitment is not possible. The domestic firm's strategy in the case of precommitment includes aggressive efforts to deter or divert foreign investment and results in fewer observed equilibria with foreign investment than would otherwise occur. Tariffs designed to switch the foreign decision from exporting to direct investment may lead instead to monopolization of the market by the domestic firm.     

Asymmetric Information,Auditing Commitment,and Economic Growth

We analyze in this paper the growth and welfare consequences stemming from the lack of auditing commitment in a credit market with costly state verification. By studying two endogenous growth models, one of which allows lenders to commit to costly auditing strategies, whereas the other does not, we show that the inability to commit serves as a source of informational friction that results in more stringent contractual terms, which, in turn, result in lower capital accumulation, growth, and welfare. From the policy perspective, our analysis suggests a new micro‐economic channel through which institutional failings hinder economic growth and social welfare.     

预期、不可置信的承诺与政策失效——来自房地产行业的实证检验

本文结合中国房地产市场的典型事实,通过建立一个完全信息动态博弈模型与实证研究,分析了公众预期对经济政策效果的影响。文章的结论表明,由于政策效果的事前不可观测与事后执行当中的逆转,房地产调控政策成为不可置信的承诺;在社会公众理性预期的基础上,政策承诺的不可信导致调控政策失效;预期与政策承诺的不可信是房价的G ranger因,且三者之间存在长期的均衡关系,预期与政策承诺的不可置信性对房地产价格有着长期的正向动态影响,且随着时间的推移其影响逐渐增加。     

Commitment in sequential auctioning: advance listings and threshold prices

This paper models sequential auctioning of two perfect substitutes by a strategic seller, who learns about demand from the first-auction price. The seller holds the second auction only when the remaining demand is strong enough to cover her opportunity cost. Bidding in anticipation of such a contingent future auction is characterized, including a sufficient condition for existence of an invertible (increasing symmetric pure-strategy) bidding equilibrium that facilitates the seller’s learning. A unique invertible bidding equilibrium exists for the Dutch auction format, but only when the second auction is sufficiently discounted by the bidders. In the equilibrium, high-valuation bidders shade their bids down as if the second auction were guaranteed. To counter such strategic bidding, the seller would value ex-ante commitment to hold the second auction less often. Three forms of such commitment are analyzed: commitment to list future auctions in advance, commitment to not hold the second auction unless the first price exceeds a publicly announced threshold, and commitment to a reserve-price in the second auction. I would like to thank Georgios Katsenos, Thomas Jeitschko, Miguel Villas-Boas, George Deltas, and an anonymous referee for thorough and insightful feedback.     

Commitment in regulation: Defense contracting and extensions to price caps

Department of Defense regulation of weapons contracting uses incentive devices common to public utility regulation. This paper examines parallels between fixed-price contracts in weapons acquisition and the use of price caps to motivate public utilities. It uses defense contracting experience to identify limits to the efficiency and administrability benefits one can expect adoption of a price caps regime to produce in practice.     

Severance Payments and Unemployment Insurance: A Commitment Issue

In the event of a job termination, many workers receive severance payments from their employer, in addition to publicly provided unemployment insurance (UI). In the absence of a third party enforcer, contracts featuring severance payments must be supported by an implicit self‐enforcing contract. Workers believe employers will make severance payments only if it is in their best interest ex post. If firms discount the future deeply, they will reduce the severance payment they offer, in order to relax their incentive constraint. Workers are forced to bear risk, and too many workers are laid off. We show that a well‐designed public UI system can correct these distortions.     

Love, war and cultures: an institutional approach to human evolution

Love, war and culture have all played an important role in the evolution of human institutions and they have been characterized by complex relationships. War can select unselfish groups ready to sacrifice themselves for the love of their communities that they recognize to be culturally different from the others. At the same time, horizontal cultural differentiation cannot be taken for granted. Culture is the outcome of long evolutionary processes. It requires some human specific characteristics, including a large brain, that are likely to have been influenced by sexual selection and by the peculiar structure of human love affairs. Thus, if war may have generated love, also the reverse may be true: by favoring the development of human culture, love may have produced the conditions for war among culturally differentiated groups. In turn, war may have co-evolved with group solidarity only under the prevailing social arrangements of hunting and gathering economies. In general, human relations have been influenced by the prevailing features of the goods (private, public and positional) that have characterized production in different stages of history. They have been embedded in institutions involving very different levels of inequality, ranging from mostly egalitarian hunting and gathering societies to typically hierarchical agrarian societies and to wealth-differentiated industrial societies. The perspectives of the present-day knowledge-intensive economy can also be seen through the same institutional approach to human evolution. The different nature of contemporary production processes involves a new set of alternative possible arrangements that have different implications for social (in)equality and different capabilities to satisfy basic human needs.     

Commitment, Exchange Autonomy, and the Boundary of the Hierarchical Firm

In this article, I present a theory of the boundary of the firmthat accounts for some important characteristics of real-worldmultidivisional firms: operative decisions are in the handsof middle managers who are rewarded based on the performanceof their units, managers' decisions are subject to approvaland intervention by the top management of the firm, and managersare better informed regarding the affairs of their divisions.In this setup, the integration of an intermediate input supplierand its buyer as separate divisions within a single firm isdesirable, as long as the choice of trading partners can becredibly delegated to the divisions' managers. I show that thisis satisfied not only under the assumption of full commitmentby the general office of the firm but also, remarkably, if ithas no commitment power whatsoever. An explanation of the boundaryof the firm emerges only if the general office retains somelimited commitment power. I show that the general office mandatesinternal trades in more instances than would have been optimalwith full commitment, adversely affecting the levels of investmentundertaken by the divisions' managers. In such cases, it canbe optimal to have the trade conducted between nonintegratedparties.     

Adaptation to Climate Change: Commitment and Timing Issues

We study the impact of timing and commitment on adaptation and mitigation policies in the context of international environmental problems. Adaptation policies present the characteristics of a private good and may require a prior investment, while mitigation policies produce a public good. In a stylized model, we evaluate the impact of strategic commitment and leadership considerations when countries with different attitudes towards environmental cooperation coexist. We obtain equilibrium abatement and adaptation levels and environmental costs under partial cooperation for various timing and leadership scenarios. Crucially, global environmental costs suffered by countries are found to be greater when adaptation measures can be used strategically.     

Commitment and observability in a contracting environment

This paper examines leader-follower games where a leader must purchase an essential input from a price-setting supplier in order to take an action. We show that equilibrium outcomes when the followers perfectly observe the leaders' actions cannot be approximated by mixed equilibrium outcomes of the game where followers imperfectly observe the leaders' actions, i.e. they are not accessible. Accessibility fails since in a pure strategy equilibrium, a supplier makes positive profits; however in an equilibrium where a leader randomizes, supplier profits must be zero. Our result follows from a generalized indifference principle that mixed strategies must satisfy in economic environments. While supplier profits cannot be approximated, player action profiles are accessible. Our results also apply to games with costly observation.     

人性、爱情及共感受的悖论——解读昆德拉

他与先哲们或尚存的大师们的共通之处告诉我们,抓住当今人类精神真实的存在,一是要避开昔日辉煌的金字塔,从一个个毫不起眼的蜂窝中见人所不见,发掘所谓现代和后现代社会多元的真理;二是应不辞艰辛地走进人的精神世界,包括内心最隐秘的角落,不仅要认识人类共同的精神体验,尤其要深入自己往往无法走进的自己的精神世界,从那里寻求真正的非物质的“生命之轻”。