Using the social system of a supply chain to improve a focal organization’s operating performance

In this paper, we explore how a large organization, operating in a mature, asset-intensive industry, used the social system of a key supply chain to generate significant improvement in operating performance (e.g., inventory turnover ratio improved from 0.8 to 3.2 in 5?years). A case study approach was used to study a steel rail supply chain involving an Australian railway company as the focal company. This supply chain consisted of two other companies: a steel manufacturer and a bulk transporter. Multiple forms of data were collected and analyzed, including models and process maps of the supply chain, published and internal documents, Enterprise Resource Planning system reports, and in-depth interviews of 31 key personnel involved in the supply chain. We found that the organizations had invested heavily in formal systems, such as governance processes and information technology systems. However, it was the informal mechanisms across and within the social system which made the greatest contribution to the resulting improvements. This suggests that organizations may be able to achieve significant operating performance outcomes at far lower cost and in shorter time frames by working through the existing social systems instead of focusing excessively on formal governance and IT systems.     

Harmonizing conflict in husband–wife purchase decision making: perceived fairness and spousal influence dynamics

To market important products to families successfully, salespeople must understand how couples behave in concert to resolve conflict across major decisions. The authors develop a model of spousal fairness and test it with a study of multi-period family purchase decision making. The results show that a spousal sense of fairness serves as a mechanism for contemporary couples to harmonize conflict over time in family decisions. Specifically, spouses’ perceived fairness mediates the relationship between spousal prior influence and spousal decision behavior in subsequent decisions. Spouses also consider their partner’s perceptions of fairness when taking action to restore fairness. Moreover, the effects of perceived fairness are moderated by spousal traits of empathy, egalitarianism, and empowerment in a gendered pattern.

Understanding Error Structures and Exploiting Panel Data in Meta-analytic Benefit Transfers

A regression meta-analysis is a statistical summary of results from a set of empirical studies. While, a meta-analysis is typically used to drawn inferences regarding the collective insights from an empirical literature, a regression meta-analysis can also be used to predict outcomes as a substitute for the conduct of a new study. Within the nonmarket-valuation literature benefit transfers are a special case of prediction where value estimates collected for one purpose are used as a basis for predicting value for unstudied applications. Balancing against the prediction opportunities provided by a regression meta-analysis is the potential prediction error. This paper considers some of these issues in the estimation of a regression meta-analysis to support prediction of nonmarket values for applications where an original study does not exist. We do not purport to address all elements of the error structure and prediction issues, but to present a more coherent focus to enhance future research on the validity and reliability of benefit-function transfers, and ultimately assist in enhancing the credibility of benefit transfers to support policy analyses.     

Explaining differences in the productivity of investment across countries in the context of ‘new growth theory’

The purpose of this paper is to explain differences in the productivity of investment across 84 rich and poor countries over the period 1980–2011, and to test the orthodox neoclassical assumption of diminishing returns to capital. The productivity of investment is measured as the ratio of the long-run growth of GDP to a country’s gross investment ratio. Twenty potential determinants are considered using a general-to-specific model selection algorithm. Education, government consumption, geography, export growth, openness, political rights and macroeconomic instability are the most important variables. The data also suggest constant returns to capital, so investment and the determinants of productivity of investment differences matter for long-run growth.     

Are remittances good for economic growth? The role of political institutions

Within a sample of 109 developing countries for the period 1975–2014 and controlling for country and time-fixed effects, this article presents evidence that workers’ remittances are more effective in promoting growth in developing countries with strong democratic institutions. The evidence is robust to alternative samples and different measures of democratic institutions.     

Joining a Queue or Staying Out: Effects of Information Structure and Service Time on Arrival and Staying Out Decisions

We study a class of single-server queueing systems with a finite population size, FIFO queue discipline, and no balking or reneging. In contrast to the predominant assumptions of queueing theory of exogenously determined arrivals and steady state behavior, we investigate queueing systems with endogenously determined arrival times and focus on transient rather than steady state behavior. When arrival times are endogenous, the resulting interactive decision process is modeled as a non-cooperative n-person game with complete information. Assuming discrete strategy spaces, the mixed-strategy equilibrium solution for groups of n = 20 agents is computed using a Markov chain method. Using a 2 × 2 between-subject design (private vs. public information by short vs. long service time), arrival and staying out decisions are presented and compared to the equilibrium predictions. The results indicate that players generate replicable patterns of behavior that are accounted for remarkably well on the aggregate, but not individual, level by the mixed-strategy equilibrium solution unless congestion is unavoidable and information about group behavior is not provided.JEL Classification: C71, C92, D81     

Delivering Public Health Care Services: Substitutes,Complements, or Both?

In this article we investigate how the availability of public health care providers increases (complement) or decreases (substitute) the likelihood of having public or private health insurance. The probability of each of three insurance alternatives (uninsured, Medicaid, private insurance) is modeled as a function of the availability of public programs in the respondents'community along with individual characteristics including family income, health status, and family structure. Using population-based estimates, public hospitals are associated with a crowd-out rate of 3.5 percent to 8.6 percent. Federally qualified health centers were associated with a net complementary effect (additional public insurance take-up) of 7.1 percent. (JEL I11 , I18 , I38 )     

Identifying individual differences: An algorithm with application to Phineas Gage

In many research contexts it is useful to group experimental subjects into behavioral “types.” Usually, this is done by pre-specifying a set of candidate decision-making heuristics and assigning each subject to a heuristic in that set. Such approaches might perform poorly when applied to subjects with prefrontal cortex damage, because it can be hard to know what cognitive heuristics such subjects might use. We suggest that the Houser, Keane and McCabe (HKM) robust classification algorithm can be a useful tool in these cases. An important advantage of this classification approach is that it does not require one to specify either the nature or number of subjects' heuristics in advance. Rather, both the number and nature of the heuristics are discerned directly from the data. To illustrate the HKM approach, we draw inferences about heuristics used by subjects in the well-known gambling task [Bechara, A., Damasio, A.R., Damasio, H., Anderson, S., 1994. Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex. Cognition 50, 7–12].     

You say you want a (Rose) Revolution? The effects of Georgia's 2004 market reforms

After Georgia declared its independence from the Soviet Union, it experienced civil war and strife for more than a decade. In late 2003, the peaceful Rose Revolution installed a new government that began a series of radical market‐liberal reforms. However, the effectiveness of these reforms was controversial. We offer a rigorous evaluation of these reforms via the synthetic control method which creates a credible counterfactual. Compared to the synthetic controls, we find that the reforms enacted after the Rose Revolution led to significant improvements in Georgia's social and economic development, albeit with temporary side effects and argue that this case provides some support for the effectiveness of rapid, multidimensional reform.     

Socioeconomic Status,Religion and Health in India: an Examination of Chronic and Communicable Diseases

The literature on socioeconomic status and health suggests that those in higher positions have better health, and those in lower positions have worse health. There is little evidence of an SES gradient in non-industrialized countries, however, and it is uncertain whether the health gradient established in many Western countries would apply in developing countries. In this study, the authors examine patterns in health outcomes by caste and religion in India, a developing country. Results from a nationally representative sample, the Indian Human Development Survey, suggest that while high SES social groups report less communicable disease, they report a higher prevalence of chronic diseases than low SES groups. This study demonstrates the need to examine diseases of affluence among high SES groups in developing countries while also identifying the particular health concerns that are prevalent among low SES groups.