Health reform: let's do it right

Look inside Clinton's plan, and you can find the elements of a sleek, market-based system--but his proposed price controls could crush it.     

Identifying the right solution customers: A managerial methodology

The purpose of this paper is to develop and apply a methodology for identifying, assessing and segmenting customers for business solutions. Firstly, criteria for evaluating solution customers are identified from the literature. These criteria are then refined and differentiated through interviews with 23 solution project managers. Secondly, a longitudinal case study with three solution suppliers and five of their customers is conducted to transfer the selection criteria into a managerial methodology which is validated by both solution suppliers and customers. The developed methodology comprises 21 criteria which are structured into two dimensions: the quality of the relationship to date and the customer's potential for future solution partnership. By combining these two dimensions into a portfolio analysis, four customer segments are identified to help suppliers determine customer attractiveness. The study's contribution lies in bridging academic knowledge and managerial practice to develop a new methodology for helping solution providers to make better informed decisions and reduce the risk of solution failure.     

第四讲股权结构与股票的种类

股本是企业按照公司章程和投资协议的规定向股东募集的资本,它代表股东对公司净资产的所有权.股份有限公司的股本是在核定的资本总额及核定的股份总额的范围内通过向股东发行股票的方式筹集的.每个股东股本的多少标志股东股权的大小.     

Search engines: Left side quality versus right side profits

Search engines face an interesting tradeoff in choosing the way to display their results. While providing high quality unpaid, or “left side” results attracts users, doing so can also cannibalize the revenue that comes from paid ads on the “right side”. This paper examines this tradeoff, focusing, in particular, on the role of users' post-search interaction with the websites whose links are displayed. In the model, high quality left side results boost demand from users, causing them to tolerate a search engine on which advertisers do not offer the lowest possible prices for the goods that they sell. However, because websites appearing on the left side still have an incentive to compete in the same market as advertisers, an increase in quality on the left side may reduce advertisers' equilibrium prices. I analyze the circumstances under which this will occur and discuss the model's potential implications for antitrust policy.     

Sales team formation: The right team member helps performance

This research uses quasi-experimental, control group design to examine the performance and behavioral impact of team design on sales performance. We assess team versus individual performance and team composition. Drawing on motivation gain literature, we evaluate the impact of team composition based on the relative ability of the team members. The research is in a field sales setting in collaboration with a major insurance provider, providing the first example of assessing Group Motivation Gain (GMG) in a sales setting through a field experiment. Our paper extends previous research in this domain by considering outcome interdependence, not merely task interdependence, evaluating the performance of both team members, assessing motivation gain in the context of a task over a longer duration, and building the related nomological network. The findings demonstrate improved overall performance for the team and the individual members of the team, the gains were particularly pronounced when members have moderate levels of difference in ability, rather than small or large differences in ability. We discuss managerial implications of our findings and suggest further research directions.     

Mobile targeting in industrial marketing: Connecting with the right businesses

Although the existing literature has acknowledged the importance of mobile marketing, few scholars have examined the efficacy of mobile targeting. This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on mobile targeting by investigating the effects of customer mobile habits and social capital on firm sales. Leveraging unique customer mobile browsing data from a major telecom service provider in China, we use a Bayesian SEM (structural equation modeling) approach to show that customer mobile habits and social capital exert significant influences on customers' purchase intentions. Specifically, customers who engage in more hedonic mobile behaviors, such as social networking, video browsing, and gaming are associated with a higher probability of purchasing, controlling for the usage of communications apps including messaging and emailing apps, and the usage of functional apps, such as maps, living services, and app market apps. Additionally, our research results reveal a significant positive effect of social capital on firms' sales performance. These findings offer important insights that are often missing from organizational targeting campaign designs in terms of targeting both the right customers and the right business alliance partners and enable a better understanding of managerial and decision-making implications in the context of the B2B market in general.     

The EEC green paper : A faltering step in the right direction

This paper comments on the EEC Green Paper on the Development of the Common Market for Telecommunications Services and Equipment. Jonathan Solomon argues that only a radical change in European political thinking about telecommunications can prevent Europe from being left behind in the information race. The Green Paper represents a step in a long process of readjustment, though perhaps somewhat lacking in potency.     

Effective technology and design teaching: getting it right in the classroom

Technology and design was added to the Northern Ireland curriculum in September 1992 and through it, teachers seek to address the need for pupils to understand the ever-changing man-made world by developing skills and understanding in its four elements of designing, communicating, manufacturing and the use of energy and control. To be effective in attaining these goals, it is important that teachers allow pupils to have a voice in their learning. They should do this by taking account of pupil responses to the tasks they issue and using those responses as a basis for making choices about instruction and support strategies. This is particularly important in technology and design as pupils need to interpret instructions in light of their design ideas. This paper outlines how three case studies of technology and design teaching were used to identify a range of teaching and learning strategies and evaluate them for their potential to create a learning dialogue with pupils. Drawing on aspects of the effective teaching debate, this learning dialogue was then applied to how teachers exploited pupil histories, managed a range of collaboration strategies and provided effective task orientation. The case studies were based on observations, interviews and content analysis of work over a complete design-and-make project in each school. The paper outlines three continua for effectiveness in each of the three areas observed. The first continuum shows that teachers need a more individualised view of building on pupil histories, the second outlines a range of strategies for the management of pupil collaboration in learning and the third suggests that pupils need to be orientated into complex tasks in ways that support a progressively increasing level of independence in their thinking.     

Successful and sustainable business partnerships: How to select the right partners

In more and more industries it becomes true that value creating networks compete against each other with relatively stable relations between suppliers inside the network. Managers all over the world are searching for the most efficient and effective coordinative forms for their relations with OEM's or suppliers within such a value-creating networks. This paper gives a normative guideline to decide if or if not a partnership is the right coordinative form for OEM-supplier relations within a value-creating network. Based on the existing mainly positivistic research in this field, two aspects are highlighted as the main drivers for the suitability of a partnership as a well working governance mechanism for value-creating networks: (i) individualization vs. standardization of the delivered components combined with the potential of the end customers to identify quality differences or not and (ii) the possibilities to allocate the revenues made by the value-creating network on the several ‘partners’ within the network. All aspects were integrated in a decision model for managers to find out if partnership as the coordinative form is really the best choice in a given situation.     

Coherent的RoHS之路

对于自己完成大部分制造工作的OEM来说,欧洲“有害物质限制(RoHS)”法令使原本繁重不堪的制造过程更加复杂了。对Coherent这样在全球有16个工厂、自己完成大量制造工作的OEM来说,满足法规要求意味着,进入工厂、在工厂中处理并从工厂交付出去的每一样东西都要绝对无铅、无汞、无镉且阻燃。这家激光系统制造商甚至连公司标识用的都是对环境无害的颜料。     

The right speed and its value

Slow investments cause substantial revenue losses, yet acceleration increases costs. This tradeoff implies that an optimal investment speed usually exists; it is faster the higher a firm's intrinsic speed capability. We hypothesize that it is a firm's intrinsic speed capability, rather than its speed relative to industry competitors per se, that boosts firm value. Using data on oil and gas facilities (1996–2005), we find that intrinsic speed capabilities augment firm value in a varied way: their value is larger with better corporate governance, lower cost of capital, and higher ability to draw value from R&D investment. Our work elevates the discussion of speed from a project‐level consideration to a firm‐level competitive advantage issue and raises the need to further explore its strategic value. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The right cure for health care

An aging population with nearly unlimited access to high-priced doctors and technology is pushing medical costs skyward. Managed care is the best way to bring them down.     

Così fan tutte: A better approach than the right to be forgotten

In this article, we argue in favor of a macro-societal approach to protect people from the potential harms of personal information online. In the tension between information and privacy, “the right to be forgotten” is not an appropriate solution. Such a micro, individual-based answer puts the burden of protection on each person instead of on external entities that can abuse such knowledge. The personal responsibility to delete personal data is challenging because of the leakage of data that happens through the connections we have with others, many of whom do not share the same privacy preferences. We show that effective deletion is almost impossible (the eternity effect), and is unfair due to the resource burden it entails when users try to achieve it, while at the same time ensuring the potential benefits we can derive in the future from having personal information online. In addition, deletion requests can negatively affect other people who are in the same location and time frame and may not want to have their information deleted. Collectively, we argue also that society is worse off because these circumstances lead people to construct sanitized personas while perpetuating a culture of distrust. Given that the harm is real, we describe technology, societal norms, and the implementation of an anti-discrimination directive for the right to a personal life, and we provide evidence on how anti-discrimination efforts in the past have succeeded when legislation leads to the development of infrastructures that help to enforce them. The dissemination of personal information through public sites and social media is, as Mozart suggested in Cosi fan tutte, gradually educating humanity about human weaknesses.     

The right to food in historical perspective

The right to food is the most fundamental of economic rights. The author disagrees with pessimists who claim that economic rights will never be ensured due to opposition from those who take advantage of the status quo, and believes that social transformations can occur, as history has shown. After outlining the historical background to the right to food, he identifies processes of deprivation in the 1980s, such as the impact of pricing policies, and food insecurity among the urban poor. Finally he outlines some recommendations to Third World governments seeking to ensure the right of food to its peoples.     

略论劳动者的劳动合同单方解除权

我国《劳动法》规定了劳动者单方解除劳动合同的一般情形,《劳动合同法》在此基础上进一步明确和细化了这一权利。本文从概念、特征、形态、法律效果以及立法意义等方面对劳动者单方解除权进行了理论梳理和总结,明确肯定了法律赋予劳动者单方解除权的现实和法律意义。