Innovation Aesthetics: The Relationship between Category Cues,Categorization Certainty,and Newness Perceptions

Recent research notes a disconnect between what marketers deem new and innovative versus what consumers actually perceive. Many factors may contribute to this; however, the factor that has significant potential to first attract a consumer to a new product, visual aesthetic design, is investigated in this research. Findings from four studies indicate that if a consumer cannot affix a category label to a new product with certainty, as can happen with innovative aesthetics, a product's newness will be underappreciated and product evaluations will suffer. By utilizing a categorization framework and specifically accounting for the role of categorization certainty, insight into the effects of innovative visual aesthetics and why newness perceptions are inherently subjective, and therefore, potentially hazardous to new product adoption, is provided.     

After the famine: food aid policy and management issues in sub-Saharan Africa

The large amount of food aid that was required to meet Africa's emergency food situation resulted in the postponement of some fundamental decisions that were being taken about food aid use in sub-Saharan Africa. Now the donor community and recipient governments are again giving priority to integrating food aid with other available resources in order to meet longer-term food policy and wider development objectives. This paper looks at some of the policy and management issues which need to be addressed if the effectiveness of food aid assistance is to be improved in the current African context. Shortages of locally qualified personnel to administer project food aid have proven to be a major bottleneck in most sub-Saharan countries. Most sub-Saharan states receive food aid from a variety of sources: multilateral, bilateral and a few private-voluntary organizations. As a result, countervailing priorities are set by the donors themselves and give rise to conflicts. The recent drought and famine conditions have compounded an image problem in which food aid is narrowly identified by recipient governments as a project resource to be used primarily for nutrition interventions and for the rural sector. The image problem often limits project selection and overlooks innovative uses of food aid. Many sub-Saharan countries are starting to acquire considerable amounts of counterpart funds from program food aid. However, their use is not coherently integrated with the total aid flow. Multi-year programming has emerged as a management issue which has unnecessarily divided the food aid donor community. The fundamental issue is flexibility in programming, not multi-year programming. The major policy objective now facing the food aid donor community and recipient countries is how to lower emergency allocations while simultaneously increasing project and program aid. Most nonfood-aid donor agencies and their constituent bodies do not treat food aid as a valid economic resource, thereby undermining its effectiveness. The eventual success of food aid use in Africa may be a function of the recipient governments and other major donor and financial organizations.     

The determinants of nursing home costs in Nebraska's proprietary nursing homes.

In the past few years nursing home care expenditures in Nebraska and the U.S. have been the fastest growing component of total health care expenditures. This rate of increase is particularly alarming in view of the fact that nursing home care is financed primarily by the Medicaid program or direct out-of-pocket payments. In fact, given the cutbacks in federal and state funds for this program, consumers will be forced to allocate a larger share of their income to meet the costs of nursing home care. Although nursing home expenditures have grown at an extremely rapid rate, relatively few empirical studies exist which analyze the cost function of nursing home providers. The purpose of this study is to identify factors which have directly influenced the cost of nursing home care in Nebraska and to evaluate the current Nebraska Medicaid reimbursement system in terms of its impact upon nursing home costs. The study was limited to a sample of 40 nursing homes in Nebraska which represents 42% of the total proprietary nursing homes in the state. The sample was limited to those facilities licensed only as an Intermediate Care Facility--I and they had to be receiving some Medicaid revenue. The data were averaged over the period of 1977-79, but the year of analysis corresponded to 1978. Multiple regression analysis was used to measure the effect of the hypothesized independent variables upon two different measures of cost--the average total cost per patient day and the average variable cost per patient day. In the first regression model 76% of the variance was explained and 71% was explained in the second equation. The results of this analysis are basically consistent with the findings of other studies and indicate that the number of staffing hours, patient mix, facility age, administrator experience and administrative intensity are significant determinants of nursing home costs. The most important finding from a policy perspective is that the current retrospective cost-related Medicaid reimbursement system does not provide incentives for minimizing costs. In fact, the present system encourages administrators to overutilize resources and charge higher prices. Considerable evidence exists which suggests that a prospective system would encourage a more efficient allocation of resources without adversely affecting the quality of care. Given the increase in the state's share of the total Medicaid budget, it would appear that a change to a prospective system is critical in order to maintain the financial accessibility to nursing home care by all Nebraska residents.     

Comment choosing a monetary instrument the case of supply-side shocks

In a recent paper Craine and Havenner (1981) claim that ‘an additional advantage of the linear-quadratic framework (which is not well known) is that the basic forces affecting the instrument choice decision can be analyzed without an explicit specification for price expectations since the distribution of the error terms in a linear model is independent of the predetermined variables’ (p. 219). The aim of this note is to demonstrate that Craine and Havenner's claim does not generalize to models with expectations of future variables conditioned on present information, such as Turnovsky's (1980) model.     

Defining hospital clusters and associated service communities in metropolitan areas.

According to traditional concepts of hospital governance, each institution is considered responsible for the care of a defined community. Evaluation of hospital performance and effective service planning both require that hospitals' service communities be identified. However, in metropolitan regions it is difficult to associate a geographic population with any one hospital because of the wide choice of facilities available to area residents. The service community concept becomes more meaningful in these regions if several hospitals with overlapping geographic communities are defined as a cluster.This paper describes a two-step method for identifying hospital clusters and their associated service communities. The first step involves analysis of patient origin data to identify logical clusters of hospitals. Three algorithms for performing this analysis are presented. In the second step, analytical findings are reviewed by a panel of area planners and hospital experts who, considering additional qualitative factors, determine how the hospitals may be most appropriately grouped. Experience in using this method for hospitals in the seven-county region around Detroit, Michigan suggests that reasonable clusters can be identified, although clusters of central city hospitals are less well-defined than those in the suburban areas.     

Design of an interrelated quality system for a single product manufacturing process with assembly

The design of a single product manufacturing system with assembly is considered. The processing is on a lot-by-lot basis with the lot size fixed. The decision variables include interrelated single sampling plans, manufacturing process quality levels, incoming raw material quality levels and assembly process quality levels. A solution procedure is given to minimize the expected total of the costs associated with the quality of the finished product subject to a limit on the Average Outgoing Quality Limit of the finished product. An example is provided.     

Elderly activity patterns and demand for transportation in a small city setting2

Although elderly in a small city setting leave their homes for approximately the same purposes and at the same frequency as elderly in metropolitan settings, they are much more dependent on the automobile. A higher proportion of the elderly in a small city drive, but driving status did not have a significant impact on frequency of travel or the spatial extent of travel. Health status was not an important factor when other variables were taken into account, but the older elderly did take fewer trips than the younger elderly. Income, sex and residential location had modest impacts on activity patterns, but the use of a well-established Dial-a-Ride system was minimal. Variation in activity patterns among the elderly in a small city suggested continuity of behavior, a modest decline with age and a strong preference for automobile travel or walking from conveniently located housing complexes.     

Unionism and the public sector

It is incorrect and misleading to speak of unionization as a ‘human right’. The only human right is ‘self-ownership’, i.e. to pursue goals with one's own abilities but with no force or fraud against others. Government cannot dispense rights, only privileges and protections to some at the expense of others. A minimal degree of coercion exercised by government is unavoidable. But labor unions are not governments. Government has granted significant privileges to unions in the private sector, but such are not appropriate for public sector unions.     

Transfer payments and the Phillips Curve

Policy makers are today confronted with a worsening relationship between inflation and unemployment. Voluminous economic literature on the “Phillips Curve” has long attempted to show why inflation and unemployment are normally inversely correlated. More recent literature has sought to identify factors that could worsen the apparent tradeoff. This paper uses the labor sector of the System Dynamics National Model to analyze the potential impacts of increased transfer payments on inflation and unemployment. The results suggest that in the short run, higher transfer payments can prolong job search, thereby boosting unemployment, while simultaneously driving up wages due to reduced labor availability. But over the longer term, rising wages raise the attrractiveness of working, thereby compensating for higher transfer payments. Therefore, higher transfer payments are not permanently inflationary. Key long-run impacts of transfer payments may be to raise relative costs of labor, thereby lowering employment through factor substitution, and to discourage dropout from the labor force so as to maintain eligibility for payments.