Asset Revaluations in the Accounts of UK National Health Service Trusts

This paper reports the results of an investigation into the impact of the revaluation of fixed assets on the reported results of NHS ambulance services. It recalculates the accounting rate of return of individual trusts after removing revaluation adjustments and examines the published responses of trusts. The numerical analysis demonstrates that, in general, revaluation has depressed the stated rate of return in an inconsistent manner. Failure to meet the required rate of return may cause a trust to be subjected to additional monitoring and management reorganisation while the trusts respond by explaining deviations in the accounting return measure by referring to revaluations and other technical adjustments. Management decisions made in response to these accounting measures may be sub-optimal in delivering health care but appropriate in achieving the desired accounting outcome.     

Public policy and health-care delivery: A practitioner’s perspective

Primary health care for inner-city residents is generally provided in institutional settings. This article describes a successful alternate model for health-care delivery: privately owned, for-profit, fee-for-service ambulatory care facilities. The Paul Robeson Health Organization in Harlem is described as an example of such a facility. Most of PRHO’s patients are black; 55% are adult females. Some of the special health needs of inner-city women and the range of services available to them at PRHO are described. A conclusion of this article is that the economic and social benefits derived from a health delivery center like PRHO make this model one worth consideration for replication in other communities.     

Toward a sustainable conceptualization of dependent variables in entrepreneurship research

Entrepreneurship researchers have yet to explore the full range variance that occurs in entrepreneurial value creation because we have focused almost exclusively on financial performance as the dependent variable in our research. However, such arbitrary narrowness is not supported by research, which shows entrepreneurs to not focus exclusively on income maximization. Consistent with calls for an expanded view of the consequences of entrepreneurship, we develop a typology of entrepreneurship dependent variables that supports broadening the scope of entrepreneurship research to include economic, environmental and social value. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Dimensions and Levels of Trust: Implications for Commitment to a Relationship

Previous research has found that trust is positively related to commitment in buyer-seller relationships. However, the validity of this finding is questionable because trust has been operationalized in many different ways. For example, prior research has not distinguished among levels of trust (interpersonal or organizational trust) and dimensions or motives of trust (credibility or benevolence). In this study, we distinguish among the levels and dimensions of trust. The results indicate that trust in a sales representative (interpersonal credibility) is more strongly related to commitment than trust in an organization (organizational credibility). In contrast, trust based on organizational benevolence is a stronger predictor of commitment than interpersonal benevolence.     

Developing Sustainable Strategies: Foundations,Method, and Pedagogy

While the United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) are a very positive development in the horizon of management education over the last decade, there are still many significant challenges for engaging the mind of the manager in ways that will foster the values of PRME and the UN Global Compact. Responsible management education must address three foundational challenges in business education if it is to actualize the aspirations of PRME: (1) it must confront the cognitional myth that knowing is like looking, (2) it must move beyond mere analysis to systems thinking, and (3) it must transition from a values-neutral stance to a values-driven stance. Using Developing Sustainable Strategies, an MBA practicum in the Sustainable Management Concentration at DePaul University’s Kellstadt Graduate School of Business as a case study, this article identifies the ways in which Pragmatic Inquiry can address these challenges. The method of Pragmatic Inquiry prepares students to become responsible managers, to develop sustainable strategies, and to be creators of shared value. Built from the philosophical foundations of American pragmatism and Bernard Lonergan’s critical realism, Pragmatic Inquiry is an effective method and pedagogy for responsible management education.     

Options pricing under the one-dimensional jump-diffusion model using the radial basis function interpolation scheme

This paper will demonstrate how European and American option prices can be computed under the jump-diffusion model using the radial basis function (RBF) interpolation scheme. The RBF interpolation scheme is demonstrated by solving an option pricing formula, a one-dimensional partial integro-differential equation (PIDE). We select the cubic spline radial basis function and adopt a simple numerical algorithm (Briani et al. in Calcolo 44:33–57, 2007) to establish a finite computational range for the improper integral of the PIDE. This algorithm reduces the truncation error of approximating the improper integral. As a result, we are able to achieve a higher approximation accuracy of the integral with the application of any quadrature. Moreover, we a numerical technique termed cubic spline factorisation (Bos and Salkauskas in J Approx Theory 51:81–88, 1987) to solve the inversion of an ill-conditioned RBF interpolant, which is a well-known research problem in the RBF field. Finally, our numerical experiments show that in the European case, our RBF-interpolation solution is second-order accurate for spatial variables, while in the American case, it is second-order accurate for spatial variables and first-order accurate for time variables.     

Towards a Strategy for Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is emerging as a significant organizational and management challenge. The pressures of the emergence of the global knowledge economy, and recognition of knowledge as a key and intangible asset are making the effective management of knowledge a priority. This surge of interest has paid relatively little attention to the object of management-knowledge. Epistemologists and sociologists have produced a variety of definitions and classifications, but there is no consensus. However, with the growth in IT capability, a clear operational distinction can be drawn between information and knowledge. The former can be captured, stored and transmitted in digital form. The latter can only exist in an intelligent system. This distinction is used to develop models of the interaction between knowledge and information, and of the appropriate balance between the two in different situations. On the basis of this model, the challenges of 'knowledge management' are: Establishing and optimizing the information-knowledge balance appropriate to (or providing a competitive advantage) a company or industry; Implementing IT-based productivity improvements in information management; Implementing people- and socially-based mechanisms to enhance knowledge management; Explicitly addressing the knowledge-information interface and mechanisms for improving the processes of transition from information to knowledge, and from knowledge to information; Identifying and maintaining the core knowledge of an organization.     

Understanding the Decline of China's State Sector

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -