Recognizing Native Ads as Advertising: Attitudinal and Behavioral Consequences

This study assessed consumers' initial reactions to in‐feed native ads appearing as news content. In particular, it focuses on consumers' recognition of advertising when they realize that content they had thought were news stories had in fact been advertising. Recognition of advertising made consumers infer that advertisers had deliberately manipulated them. Consequently, consumers engaged less with the message, had less positive attitudes toward the brand, and were less likely to purchase and share. The results demonstrated the mechanisms through which the two mediators, manipulative intent and message engagement, lowered brand attitude, purchase intention, and sharing intention. In addition, ad disclosure made more people recognize the ad when they were exposed to it than when it was not disclosed as an ad.     

How to solve the cost crisis in health care

U.S. health care costs currently exceed 17% of GDP and continue to rise. One fundamental reason that providers are unable to reverse the trend is that they don't understand what it costs to deliver patient care or how those costs compare with outcomes. To put it bluntly, few health care providers measure the actual costs for treating a given patient with a given medical condition over a full cycle of care, or compare the costs they incur with the outcomes they achieve. What isn't measured cannot be managed or improved, and this is all too true in health care, where poor costing systems mean that effective and efficient providers go unrewarded, and inefficient ones have little incentive to improve. But all this can be remedied by exploring the concept of value in health care and carefully measuring costs. This article describes a new way to analyze costs that uses patients and their conditions--not organizational units or narrow diagnostic treatment groups--as the fundamental unit of analysis for measuring costs and outcomes. The new approach, called time-driven activity-cased costing, is currently being implemented in pilots at the Head and Neck Center at MD Anderson, the Cleft Lip and Palate Program at Children's Hospital in Boston, and units performing knee replacements at Sch?n Klinik in Germany and Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston. As providers and payors better understand costs, they will be positioned to achieve a true "bending of the cost curve" from within the system, not in response to top-down mandates. Accurate costing also unlocks a whole cascade of opportunities, such as process improvement, better organization of care, and new reimbursement approaches that will accelerate the pace of innovation and value creation.     

Salary Discrimination by Black Males?

A bstract . Utilizing the human capital framework , the authors apply OLS methods to cross-sectional salary data for 1989-90 for a Southern, historically black, public university (SHBU) to determine whether salary discrimination against other race-sex groups exists when black males hold the top economic power Results indicate that it does.     

Electronics manufacturing in 2020: A national technological university management of technology mini-Delphi

A Delphi study projects a series of critical changes in electronics manufacturing over the coming quarter-century. These changes imply a need for early planning to adapt production processes to altered materials, integrated products, environmentally conscious processes, different applications, and a markedly different workforce.     

The allocation of a shared resource within an organization

Many resources such as supercomputers, legal advisors, and university classrooms are shared by many members of an organization. When the supply of shared resources is limited, conflict usually results between contending demanders. If these conflicts can be adequately resolved, then value is created for the organization. In this paper we use the methodology of applied mechanism design to examine alternative processes for the resolution of such conflicts for a particular class of scheduling problems. We construct a laboratory environment, within which we evaluate the outcomes of various allocation mechanisms. In particular, we are able to measure efficiency, the value attained by the resulting allocations as a percentage of the maximum possible value. Our choice of environment and parameters is guided by a specific application, the allocation of time on NASA's Deep Space Network, but the results also provide insights relevant to other scheduling and allocation applications. We find (1) experienced user committees using decision support algorithms produce reasonably efficient allocations in lower conflict situations but perform badly when there is a high level of conflict between demanders, (2) there is a mechanism, called the Adaptive User Selection Mechanism (AUSM), which charges users for time and yields high efficiencies in high conflict situations but, because of the prices paid, in which the net surplus available to the users is less than that resulting from the inefficient user committee (a reason why users may not appreciate ‘market solutions’ to organization problems) and (3) there is a modification of AUSM in which tokens, or internal money, replaces real money, which results in highly efficient allocations without extracting any of the users' surplus. Although the distribution of surplus is still an issue, the significant increase in efficiency provides users with a strong incentive to replace inefficient user committees with the more efficient AUSM.     

INDIVIDUAL EQUITY RETURN DATA FROM THOMSON DATASTREAM: HANDLE WITH CARE!

We compare individual U.S. equity return data from Thomson Datastream (TDS) with similar data from the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) to evaluate TDS for use in studies involving large numbers of individual equities in markets outside the United States. We document important issues of coverage, classification, and data integrity and find that naive use of TDS data can have a large impact on economic inferences. We show that after careful screening of the TDS data, inferences drawn from TDS data are similar to those drawn from CRSP. We illustrate the importance of the screens we develop using U.S. TDS data by applying the screens to TDS data from four European equity markets.     

Innovation forecasting

Technological forecasting is premised on a certain orderliness of the innovation process. Myriad studies of technological substitution, diffusion, and transfer processes have yielded conceptual models of what matters for successful innovation, but most technological forecasts key on limited empirical measures quite divorced from those innovation process models. We glean a number of concepts from various innovation models, then present an array of bibliometric measures that offer the promise of operationalizing these concepts. Judicious combination of such bibliometrics with other forms of evidence offers an enriched form of technological forecasting we call “innovation forecasting.” This provides a good means to combine technological trends, mapping of technological interdependencies, and competitive intelligence to produce a viable forecast. We illustrate by assessing prospects for ceramic engine technologies.