A proposed enterprise risk management model for health organizations

Health care organizations are environments with high management complexity and subject to a constant exposure to risks. Enterprise risk management (ERM) has been studied and applied in different economic environments with the aim of improving organizational performance. However, the health sector still suffers from a lack of attention in this context, in particular with regard to the need for a high degree of financial transparency and for the establishment of process-orientated management, and this provides the motivation for the study described in this paper. An ERM model for health organizations is proposed, based on a systematic literature review and on seven case studies in Brazilian hospitals. An approach to economic risk assessment using indicators such as the cash flow at risk and the variability of costs and receipts from the proposed model is suggested. The health organizations involved in the case studies all interpret ERM as a source of information contributing to corporate governance, and the indicators listed provide constructive data for improvement-driven decision-making. Given the interest expressed by the organizations involved, further application and validation of the proposed model in subsequent studies is suggested.     

How do alternative strategic orientations influence social media performance?

Increasingly organisations are using social media due to its advantages over traditional media however, its successful implementation has been problematic. To address this issue this study drew from the organisational orientation literature to examine alternate frameworks for implementation. Survey data were obtained from senior marketers from various Australian industries and structural equation modelling was used to test the hypothesised relationships. The study identified the components of alternate strategic orientations which were positively or negatively related to social media performance. The contribution of the study is to identify how the different emphasis within market, entrepreneurial and e-marketing orientations impact social media performance in terms of customer retention and customer acquisition. Implications for theory and practice are provided. Finally, research limitations and future research suggestions are presented.     

Ethical and Unethical Leadership: A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Sectoral Analysis

Current literature on ethical leadership and unethical leadership reflects a Western-based private sector perspective, pointing toward a compliance-oriented understanding of ethical and unethical leadership. As today’s executives increasingly have to ethically lead across different cultures and sectors, it becomes vitally important to develop a more holistic picture how ethical and unethical leadership is perceived in the Western and Eastern cultural cluster and the private and the public/social sector. Addressing this issue, the present study aims to identify cross-cultural and cross-sectoral commonalities and differences in international executives’ perceptions of ethical and unethical leadership. Findings from in-depth interviews (N = 36) with executives from Western and Eastern cultures working in the private or the public/social sector reveal collectively held perceptions of ethical leadership (including leader honesty, integrity, concern for responsibility/sustainability, and people orientation) and of unethical leadership (referring to leader dishonesty, corruption, egocentrism, and manipulation). Results indicate limited support for a compliance-oriented perspective on ethical and unethical leadership but yield a much greater trend toward a value-oriented perspective. Concrete practice examples illustrate these different perspectives. Cultural and sectoral particularities of executive perceptions of ethical and unethical leadership are discussed.     

Comparing supervised learning algorithms and artificial neural networks for conflict prediction: performance and applicability of deep learning in the field

Quality & Quantity - Machine learning algorithms and artificial neural networks promise a new and powerful approach for making better and more transferable predictions in global conflict...     

The risk elicitation puzzle revisited: Across-methods (in)consistency?

Experimental Economics - With the rise of experimental research in the social sciences, numerous methods to elicit and classify people’s risk attitudes in the laboratory have evolved....     

Market imperfections, wealth inequality, and the distribution of trade gains

Globalization increasingly involves less-developed countries (LDCs), i.e., economies which usually suffer from severe imperfections in their financial systems. Taking these imperfections seriously, we analyze how credit frictions affect the distributive impact of trade liberalizations. We find that free trade significantly widens income differences among firm owners in LDCs: While wealthy entrepreneurs are better off, relatively poor business people lose. Intuitively, with integrated markets, profit margins shrink — which makes access to credit particularly difficult for the least-affluent agents. Richer entrepreneurs, by contrast, win because they can take advantage of new export opportunities. Our findings resonate well with a number of empirical regularities, in particular with the observation that some liberalizing LDCs have observed a surge in top-income shares.     

Predicting new service adoption with conjoint analysis: external validity of BDM-based incentive-aligned and dual-response choice designs

In this paper, we compare the standard, single-response choice-based conjoint (CBC) approach with three extended CBC procedures in terms of their external predictive validity and their ability to realistically capture consumers’ willingness to pay: (1) an incentive-aligned CBC mechanism (IA-CBC), (2) a dual-response CBC procedure (DR-CBC), and (3) an incentive-aligned dual-response CBC approach (IA-DR-CBC). Our empirical study features a unique sample of 2,679 music consumers who participated in a conjoint choice experiment prior to the market entry of a new music streaming service. To judge the predictive accuracy, we contacted the same respondents again 5 months after the launch and compared the predictions with the actual adoption decisions. The results demonstrate that IA-CBC and DR-CBC both increase the predictive accuracy. This result is promising because IA-CBC is not applicable to every research context so that DR-CBC provides a viable alternative. While we do not find an additional external validity improvement through the combination of both extensions, the IA-DR-CBC approach yields the most realistic willingness-to-pay estimates and should therefore be preferred when incentive alignment is feasible.     

Enhancing the Efficiency of Water Supply—Product Market Competition Versus Trade

In most developed countries, the provision of water is organized at a local level. The costs and tariffs vary significantly, even between adjacent water utilities. Such heterogeneity is an obvious indication of the sector??s overall inefficiency and stresses a need for institutional adjustments. We show that cooperation by water trade and the introduction of competition by common carriage between adjacent utilities are valuable alternatives to improve the industry??s efficiency, even when mergers are not feasible. Because both approaches require the physical connection of neighboring networks, they may have similar effects. This paper analyzes and compares the relevant welfare gains and shows that production efficiency and retail prices may differ depending on the initial cost differential, the application of regulations and the distribution of bargaining power. Using a theoretical model, we show that at higher initial production cost differentials, welfare is higher under competitive conditions, even in a lower-bound benchmark case without any regulation.     

Boundary conditions of the effect of customer coproduction: the case of service failure

Research on the relationship between customer coproduction and satisfaction has produced mixed results even after accounting for the role of attribution. This paper extends prior research on boundary conditions and examines the role of customer participation readiness (PR) during encounters that end with service failure. Based on congruence and zone-of-tolerance theories, the two empirical studies suggest that (a) increasing levels of coproduction combined with increasing levels of PR escalates dissatisfaction and weakens attitudinal loyalty; (b) psychological reactance and expectancy disconfirmation mediate these relationships; (c) increasing levels of coproduction combined with increasing levels of external attribution reduce dissatisfaction and mitigate the adverse effect on attitudinal loyalty; and (d) PR interacts with customer coproduction to influence how customers make attributions. Future research should consider the role of PR in service failures. Where feasible, managers should gather and utilise individual-level PR data in order to predict customer attributions and dissatisfaction.