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.     

Paradisal discourse: A critical analysis of marketing and consuming Hawaii

The marketing of certain tourist destinations can be analyzed as discourse that conveys meaning to the consumer and to the consumed. This discourse, which I refer to hereafter as paradisal discourse, is a combination of Orientalism, travel writing, discourse of the Primitive, and diverse forms of Otherness. This paper begins with an exploration of discourse as a tool of knowledge and of power, illustrated through a detailed assessment of Said's Orientalism and other relevant works and concepts. The discourses of “Orientalism,” “primitivism” and travel writing are likened to the paradisal discourse found in the marketing of certain types of tourist destinations. The second section of the paper presents an historical and cultural analysis of the concept of paradise in Western society, summarizing the elements which, over time, have come to form this distinctive discourse. The third section of the paper assesses the way in which this discourse forms the framework by which a specific tropical paradise, Hawaii, is marketed and consumed today.     

Maintaining a Flexible Payout Policy in a Mature Industry: The Case of Crown Cork and Seal in the Connelly Era

This case study suggests that the payment of cash dividends may not be essential to the long-run success of even mature companies. A mature company in a mature industry, the Crown Cork and Seal Company did not pay any common dividends during John Connelly's 33-year tenure as chairman and CEO. During that period (from 1957 to 1990), the company used stock repurchases along with a compensation policy featuring low executive salaries and generous executive stock options to motivate and execute a focused business strategy. Under the leadership of Connelly, Crown was rescued from what appeared to be certain bankruptcy to become one of the most profitable firms in its industry. Debt was immediately paid down, preferred stock was retired, and the firm's operations were revamped and streamlined. Instead of following the diversification strategies of larger industry peers, Crown's strategy was focused and driven by profit margin and customer service. This strategy eventually led Crown to invest internationally and acquire one of its major rivals. In addition to significant equity ownership by Crown's management and board members, the company's board had a remarkable number of “outsiders” and representatives from international operations, creating a culture that was outward-looking as well as cohesive. And without paying a dollar of dividends—a practice that many finance scholars believe imposes a necessary discipline on mature companies—Crown both preserved its financing flexibility and produced a remarkable record of increases in both profits and market value.     

Financial reporting in the context of crisis: reconsidering the impact of the 'mania' on early railway accounting

The patterns of change in the financial reporting practices of the early railway companies, and their causes, are important aspects of the evolution of accounting practice more generally. They have accordingly been widely discussed in the literature, although the views expressed have rarely been supported by reference to any very substantial or systematically derived bodies of empirical evidence. One of the most interesting and important suggestions in this literature is the claim that the early UK railway companies voluntarily made both quantitative and qualitative changes to their published accounting statements, in response to a crisis in shareholder confidence in the second half of the 1840s, consequent upon the collapse of the railway mania of 1845–47. The quantitative response involved the disclosure of far more information and the qualitative led to changes in the conceptual basis of reporting, from a cash to an accruals basis, changes that met with the satisfaction of the shareholders concerned and were important parts of the gradual evolution of financial reporting. The paper undertakes a systematic analysis of the financial accounting practices of the major early railway companies from 1840 until 1855. The mapping of the variety of such practices, and their changes over time, enable a re-examination of these important claims concerning the nature of the financial reporting response to one of its earliest crises.     

Conditional Universal Consistency

Players choose an action before learning an outcome chosen according to an unknown and history-dependent stochastic rule. Procedures that categorize outcomes, and use a randomized variation on fictitious play within each category are studied. These procedures are “conditionally consistent:” they yield almost as high a time-average payoff as if the player knew the conditional distributions of actions given categories. Moreover, given any alternative procedure, there is a conditionally consistent procedure whose performance is no more than epsilon worse regardless of the discount factor. We also discuss cycles, and argue that the time-average of play should resemble a correlated equilibrium. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, C73, C63, D83.