Market games with asymmetric information: the core

This paper concerns cores of economies with asymmetric information. Alternative definitions of the information available to traders in coalitions and the cooperative games they generate are analyzed. An important technical result states that such NTU games in characteristic function form are well defined. Properties of various cores with asymmetric information are examined. Sufficient conditions on information sharing rules are provided for the induced games to be totally balanced or balanced, so that their cores are nonempty. Incentive compatibility issues are considered. Finally, a perspective on this research area is provided.     

Registered nurses' perceptions of nursing

In Part II of this six part series on the state of the registered nurse (RN) workforce in the United States, the focus is on RNs' perceptions of nursing including RNs' satisfaction with their jobs in general and on specific elements of their work experiences, such as the quality of professional relationships. Satisfaction with a nursing career and whether RNs would recommend nursing to others are also examined. The improvements in nursing found in this analysis of two national surveys in 2002 and 2004 should be broadly communicated not only to energize individuals and organizations to continue their efforts to improve the workplace environment, but to challenge the many individuals in the nursing profession who hold onto a sense that nothing will ever improve in their organizations.     

Allocating Government Education Expenditures Across K-12 and College Education

As of the late 1990s, public spending on education in the US comprised approximately 7.1% of GDP; about 60% of that support was directed at K-12 education and the remainder at college education. We investigate the welfare and output implications of this spending in a theoretical model in which agents of differential innate ability choose whether to pursue higher education. Higher ability agents support greater expenditures at both the K-12 and college levels. When public education expenditures are low, all agents prefer that spending be directed solely to K-12 education; when expenditures are high, all prefer that some spending be allocated to college education.     

STATE OF LOGISTICS: A VISIONARY PERSPECTIVE

Mentzer and Kahn (1994) advocated that the Journal of Business Logistics (JBL) needed to mature. As a follow‐up to that study, the authors analyzed the Journal from the second half of 1993 through the first issue of 2005. Though the study results suggest that more rigorous research has been conducted over the last decade in the field of logistics, did it improve the Journal? Are the standards and criteria put forth in Mentzer and Kahn (1994) the standards and criteria toward which JBL should strive? To address these questions, qualitative interviews were conducted with visionaries in the field of logistics to: (1) investigate the standards and criteria that should be used to gauge the maturity of JBL and (2) determine the future direction of JBL and the discipline.     

Structuring financial statement analysis projects to enhance critical thinking skills development

This paper documents a method of structuring financial statement analysis projects to enhance the development of students’ critical thinking skills. The project is structured in a cooperative learning framework in which a student accesses financial statement information from the World Wide Web, performs a financial statement analysis, and then engages in an exercise with other students who have analyzed firms in the same industry. Both the individual and team phases of the project offer opportunities for students to develop several important critical thinking skills.     

Patient safety: the four domains of nursing leadership

The role of the nurse leader in patient safety can be characterized as follows: to establish the right culture; to infuse that culture with shared leadership so that the expert voice at the bedside is really defining the work; to possess the competencies necessary to coordinate and advance this complex initiative; and to forge both internal and external partnerships, because we will not be able to do this work alone. To further the work on this topic, nurse leaders who participated in the Nursing Leadership Congress are committed to identifying additional resources to help nurse leader colleagues drive patient safety efforts throughout their organizations.     

Hospital RNs' and CNOs' perceptions of the impact of the nursing shortage on the quality of care

The results of analyses of the 2002 and 2004 National Sample Surveys of RNs and the 2004 National Sample of CNOs document the widespread perception that the shortage of nurses is a major problem for the overall quality of patient care in hospitals. In the eyes of the majority of hospital RNs and CNOs surveyed, care processes involving communication, timely response to pages and telephone calls, delays in patient discharges, and the time patients had to wait for tests and procedures were all affected negatively by the nursing shortage. These results are not encouraging.     

Is the shortage of hospital registered nurses getting better or worse? Findings from two recent national surveys of RNs

The results of two recent national surveys of RNs that were conducted at a time when the nursing shortage in the U.S. was in full force (2002) and 2 years later (2004) were compared. The findings provide a mixed assessment: on the one hand, there is evidence that the shortage has eased since 2002 and that there have been notable improvements in the lives of nurses; on the other hand, the shortage has had a negative impact on hospitals and nurses, and longstanding problems associated with the workplace environment remain.     

摒弃“年度”绩效考核

正年度绩效考核的目标之一是总结过去一年的表现,激励员工做好来年的工作。不幸的是,一年一度的绩效考核的效果往往事与愿违。虽然它的初衷是鼓励团队成员努力做好今后的工作,可是结果往往让员工感觉不被认可、不受重视,甚至灰心丧气。管理层则把绩效考核看做是一项强加的负担,让人感觉压力重重,毫无成就感可言。无论被考核的对象是谁,年度考核总是给人带来压力和紧张情绪,让人心生不满。那么,企业的领导者应该怎么做呢?对于大型企业而言,绩效考核可能