Collapsing New Product Development Times: Six Case Studies

Today's customers are sophisticated. They demand product variety, functionality and performance. To survive in this arena, successful companies in a global economy must rapidly introduce new products (new product lines or improvements to existing lines) by collapsing their product development times. Vincent Mabert, John Muth and Roger Schmenner report results from a comparative case study of six new product introduction projects at six different firms, identifying those elements that are important to product introduction lead time and how they are influenced by customer and organizational and technical factors. They note that the new product innovation process is very complex, sensitive to external forces like customer demands or expectations and to internal issues like how team leadership is defined for the development team. The article describes the participating companies and analyzes the six projects with particular attention to four structural elements: motivation, workings of teams, external vendor's cooperation with the teams and project control. The authors conclude by identifying the top priority factors influencing new product introduction time.     

The Role of United Charities in Fundraising: The Case of Singapore

Abstract: Theory suggests that a united charity helps to economize on fundraising costs by reducing competition for donations among member charities. However, donors often cannot control the allocation of their donations, and charities may dislike the monitoring of their activities. This paper examines these and other issues relating to the Community Chest of Singapore. The results, based on analysis of financial positions and fundraising costs of a large number of charities, suggest that the Community Chest does possess important fundraising advantages. Thus charities in financial difficulties or in need of funds for additional programs tend to seek membership. However, organizations that value their autonomy and independence, and that are able to achieve low fundraising costs tend to remain as non‐members. Thus a monopoly agency raising funds for all charities in the future is unlikely in the case of Singapore.     

The Quest for Meaning in Public Choice

Abstract . The logical foundations of constitutional government are of basic importance if people are to be self‐governing. All forms of political order are Faustian bargains subject to numerous risks. If constitutional choice applies to all patterns of human association, the complexity of associated relationships and the potential threats to the viability of associated relationships in the aggregate exceed the limits of human cognition. The development of analytical capabilities depends on using frameworks, theories, and models for formulating hypotheses about conditions and consequences, undertaking diagnostic assessments, and conceptualizing and designing alternative possibilities. The relationship of ideas to deeds in an experimental epistemology is necessary to achieve a warrantable art and science of association.     

The Asian Currency Crises: Vulnerability, Contagion, or Unsustainability

The Asian currency crises have been introduced by many economists as evidence that almost any country could be vulnerable to speculative attacks and to contagion effects, even with apparently good economic fundamentals. These financial crises have also been interpreted by other economists as rational market reactions to the unsustainability of domestic macroeconomic policies or structural weaknesses. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the relative importance of macroeconomic unsustainability, financial vulnerability, and crisis contagion in a model that explains and predicts the Asian currency crises. Out-of-sample forecasts based on two-stage panel and logit regressions provide evidence of a pure contagion effect, which significantly worsened the crises. They also show that Indonesia was the only one of the six Asian nations examined (India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand) that was in an unsustainable economic situation, and that the other five nations were only vulnerable to a currency crisis.     

Static vs. dynamic priority rules for check processing in multiple dispatch-multiple branch banking

This paper presents a study comparing the use of four static and two dynamic priority rules for sequencing bundled checks in the check clearing operations in a bank's back office. The six priority rules are tested in a controlled computer simulation experiment, where bank factors of check bundle size, check bundle value, transit deadlines (dispatches), and destination proportions are systematically varied over prescribed levels. The results indicate that priority rule performance, measured by reduced float, is significantly affected by bank factors. The test results indicate that the two dynamic priority rules performed statistically better than three of the four static rules tested.The study reported here should prove useful to bank operation managers. The sequencing rules investigated here influence the level of float for a bank faced with multiple dispatches during the day. The test environments duplicated a variety of operating conditions that can be present in commercial banks. Therefore, the robustness of the tested static and dynamic rules were observed in reducing float under different conditions. Dynamic rules require recomputing priorities to reflect changes in time and create greater implementation effort to use effectively. Static rules require only one priority computation, resulting in easier implementation. This study indicates that one of the static priority rules tested provides comparable performance to the two dynamic rules.     

On the use of Markovian equilibrium distributions for land use policy evaluation

Using the Markov model of land use change as a framework for analyzing the impact of alternative land use policies, comparison of Markovian equilibrium distributions resulting from constrained simulations has been promoted as a means of evaluating the scope of land use policy impacts. Previous studies have not considered the question of measuring the confidence which can be placed in the predictions contained in the equilibrium distribution vector. This paper applies a method of assessing the levels of confidence in the predictions of the equilibrium distribution vector. Results suggest that use of equilibrium distributions of land use as a measure of policy impact has limited inferential value.