Kynecting the Dots: How Kentucky’s Willingness to Loosen the Reins Sparked a Health Insurance Enrollment Race in the Bluegrass State

The development of health insurance exchanges within the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) legislation is one of the hottest health policy issues of this decade. With the surprise enrollment success of Kentucky’s exchange called “Kynect,” the influence of how marketing and branding have contributed to the embrace of the policy has garnered interest from scholars and practitioners alike. Driven by the utilization of in-depth interviews, this study found that Kynect’s success was aided by three emergent themes: frequent communication between the outsourced marketing firm, Doe-Anderson, and relevant stakeholders; the willingness to delegate all marketing and branding control to Doe-Anderson; and a multiparty commitment to developing and executing a campaign that would simultaneously adhere to public values and accentuate a feeling of localness to constituents across the state. The paper contributes to existing literature by providing an inside look at how a government can find marketing success against historical odds.     

Communication costs in the performance of unrelated tasks: Continuum models and finite models

We consider two two‐person organizations, called A and B. Each organization faces a changing environment; an environment has two components and each of them is privately observed by one of the organization's two members. Each organization's task is to respond to the current environment by taking a correct action; the correct action is a known function of the environment. However, the task of A is totally unrelated to the task of B: if A knew B's current environment and B's current correct action, that would tell A nothing at all about its own current correct action (and vice versa). Now suppose that each organization performs its task by a sequence of message announcements that stop when an “action‐taker”; has just enough information about the two members’ private observations so that he can take the correct action. Suppose we measure the effort this requires by the size of the set of possible message announcements. Then a compelling conjecture says that there can be no saving in total effort if we merge the two organizations into a single four‐person organization in which a single action‐taker takes both actions.

The conjecture turns out to be true when the possible messages form a continuum whose size is measured by its dimension, provided the message‐announcing procedure obeys suitable regularity conditions. When we turn to a model in which the number of possible messages is finite, the situation is different. While a certain general proposition about coverings and projections is the main tool in proving the “continuum”; conjecture, the finite analog of that proposition is (surprisingly) false. The finite version of the conjecture holds, on the other hand, when one adds a certain regularity requirement ("contiguity") to the message‐announcement procedure. The truth of the finite conjecture without such a requirement remains open.     

Non‐Recognition of Print Advertising: Emotion Arousal and Gender Effects

Research in the behavioral sciences has found that memory tends to be enhanced by exposure to emotion‐arousing stimuli. While this relationship is not fully understood, the linkage appears to be more pronounced for females than for males. While the majority of prior studies dealing with memory have relied on the use of visual stimuli in a clinical experimental setting, this research examined the impact on memory resulting from exposure to actual print advertisements of varying degrees of arousal‐producing content. Differences in the relationship between arousal and memory were explored for male and female participants. In general, females were found to exhibit higher memory levels than males. As a single combined group, subjects exposed to emotion arousing versus emotion neutral ad. stimuli exhibited no significant difference in memory. For the set of emotion neutral ad. stimuli, no difference in memory was found between sexes. However, retention was significantly higher for females than males for the set of emotion‐arousing stimuli. The study identifies opportunities for further applied memory research.     

Techno-economic modeling of value network configurations for public wireless local area access

The growing amount of mobile data traffic increases the demand for local area network deployments, and therefore is likely to have an effect on the mobile communications ecosystem. Several alternative value network configurations exist giving new business opportunities to different actors, but the attractiveness and success of local area access provisioning remains uncertain. This article analyzes the business of public local area access from the point of view of two potential providers: service application providers, i.e. companies whose core business is to provide information and content services in the Internet, and mobile operators. A quantitative techno-economic model is constructed to quantify the costs and required revenues of operating viable public local area access networks. The results show that the revenue requirements vary between public venue types and value network configurations.     

Managing the Dilemma of Discretion: The European Commission and the Development of EU State Aid Policy

This article examines the role played by the European Commission in the development of the European Union’s (EU) state aid policy. It does so through the prism of a “dilemma” that exists at the nexus of the Commission’s delegated authority to administer EU treaty state aid provisions, the discretion conferred on Commission authorities by the imprecise language in which those provisions are written, and the political and institutional control mechanisms EU member governments use to influence the exercise of that discretion. Examining Commission efforts to manage this dilemma over the history of the EU, we provide evidence to illustrate how the Commission’s approach adapted to shifting economic and political conditions.     

Dynamic Financial System: Complexity,Fragility and Regulatory Principles

A financial system improves the allocation of real resources and enhances the performance of the production economy, but these benefits are offset in part by the risk of financial distress and the associated deadweight loss resulting from bankruptcy costs. We argue that “tiers” of financial claims increase complexity and fragility of the financial network. In equilibrium, the financial system grows relative to the real economy as the allocation of funds and risks becomes more sophisticated and as more financial claims are tiered. Growth is limited by the risk of a tiered, complex financial network and by the need to set aside additional capital as the financial sector grows. We discuss several sources of fragility in the financial system. We propose that regulators should limit the breaks in the system and do more to improve the resiliency of the network and less on individual issues that are only symptoms of fundamental problems of a network. We advocate a market based system of regulation in which market participants regulate each other, to a degree. In order for this to be feasible, the financial network must be organized according to three principles: trading transparency, competitive markets and competitive regulators, and incentive alignment of participants. Insofar as these regulatory approaches are successful in limiting network fragility, capital requirements can be reduced. Regulators should keep in mind this tradeoff between capital and regulation. With regard to regulatory policy, regulators should let the three principles be their guide in adapting to the evolving financial system rather than implementing narrowly conceived regulations that are quickly outmoded.     

A comparison of Norwegian and United States accounting students' learning style preferences

Individual differences among humans are apparent in many environments and situations. Educators should be concerned about whether such differences are systematic to such an extent that they significantly affect the effectiveness of various pedagogical methods and training approaches. This paper investigates one type of individual difference-learning style-which may vary across cultures and which may be relevant for both accounting education and audit practice. Learning style is defined as an individual orientation to learning, utilizing four basic modes of learning to various degrees.

Learning style measures were obtained from Norwegian and United States accounting students with varying experience levels. The learning styles for the US students were compared to data obtained in prior research and were found to be generally consistent with these studies. The Norwegian sample was compared to both the current United States results and prior research and was found to be significantly different from the US learning style preferences. Implications of these differences for both education and practice are explored.     

Standing by Your Organization: The Impact of Organizational Identification and Abusive Supervision on Followers’ Perceived Cohesion and Tendency to Gossip

Abusive supervision has been shown to have significant negative consequences for employees’ well-being, attitudes, and behavior. However, despite the devastating impact, it might well be that employees do not always react negatively toward a leader’s abusive behavior. In the present study, we show that employees’ organizational identification and abusive supervision interact for employees’ perceived cohesion with their work group and their tendency to gossip about their leader. Employees confronted with a highly abusive supervisor had a stronger perceived cohesion and engaged in less gossiping behavior when they identified more strongly with their organization. Our findings illustrate that organizational identification functions as a buffer for those confronted with an abusive supervisor.     

Are all startups affected similarly by clusters? Agglomeration,competition, firm heterogeneity,and survival

Are all startups similarly affected by the survival benefits and drawbacks of locating in geographic clusters? In this paper, we argue that prior theorizing may have missed important contingencies that affect whether a startup experiences the benefits and costs of locating in a cluster. In particular, while the local levels of skilled labor, suppliers, and purchasers have a beneficial influence and local competition has a detrimental influence on startup survival, these relationships are moderated by heterogeneity in firms' resources and capabilities. We find support for these arguments using a dataset covering the early life of all independent startups in the Canadian manufacturing sector from 1984 to 1998.     

Finanzielle Repression — ein Instrument zur Bewältigung der Krisenfolgen?

Financial repression committed by central banks has been put forward as a means to secretly reduce the real burden of high public debts. Financial repression has allegedly played an important role in the impressive reduction of the US debt ratio after World War II. A mix of conventional budget consolidation and rapid growth was the main driver in this relative debt reduction with a minor role for financial repression. But does financial repression really exist? The authors express different opinions on evidence for this concept. Those authors who find that there are indicators of financial repression fear redistributive tendencies between debtors and creditors and high opportunity costs in the form of savings and investment distortions. Therefore, financial repression is not a “cure” for the high public debts amassed in the euro area during the recent sovereign debt and banking crisis. Furthermore, the high sovereign debts in the euro area may threaten economic development and impose high costs on society. Therefore, reducing these debts is politically highly relevant, and fiscal policy should be characterised by a modest reduction in government spending and/or tax increases, combined with a policy promoting economic growth. Macroprudential regulations should supplement this financial policy.