A new frontier for health care risk management

Today's sophisticated medical environment, combined with society's penchant for litigation, has created a broad array of perils for risk managers in the health care industry. Risk managers must deal with dilemmas posed by regulatory and technological changes that have vastly altered the medical field.     

Ethical encounters of the second kind

When our society holds widely shared norms and values, we can agree on what constitutes unethical business practices. To the extent our social consensus is unraveling, agreement becomes increasingly problematic. Unfortunately, mainstream Western moral philosophy offers no guidance in this situation. We must therefore begin to focus on the types of social relationships that must exist for there to be agreement on what is right, good and just. This line of argument is, at best, merely suggested in discussions and articles on business ethics. Jonathan B. King is Associate Professor of Managment at the College of Business at Oregon State University. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Antioch College (1965); subsequently served for eight years as an officer in the United States Navy; received his M.B.A. (1975) and Ph.D. (1980) in Business, Government and Society from the University of Washington. His primary research interests are in the areas of epistemology and moral philosophy — e.g., the contribution of the liberal arts to interpretive thought, the sociology of moral knowledge, and the organizational distortion of information. His most important publications are: Teaching Business Ethics, Exchange1984 and A Case for the Humanities Perspective, Organizational Behavior Teaching Journal1984     

Timing and duration effects in residence histories and other longitudinal data: II. Studies of duration effects in Norway, 1965-1971

The main results of eleven studies of the nature and determinants of the timing of moves and duration of residence effects are presented. The studies (see table 1) illustrate the use of the methodological framework for studying individual histories of the previous article. There are substantial duration of residence effects in most population subgroups, implying that the migration process in non-Markovian at the mocro level and that the semi-Markov model is required. However, characterization of effects and their determinants are shown to depend so heavily on the type of interval and observation scheme used, that only within a comprehensive framework is proper interpretation of empirical results possible.     

Hölder continuity of the policy function approximation in the value function approximation

We show that given a value function approximation V of a strongly concave stochastic dynamic programming problem (SDDP), the associated policy function approximation is Hölder continuous in V.     

A General Method of Deriving the Inefficiencies of Banks from a Profit Function

This article develops a new method of estimating inefficiencies in joint production and shows that unlike the approaches utilized in the previous studies of inefficiency, this method maintains a consistent relationship between the error term of a profit function and the error terms of its price derivatives. A useful by-product of the method is a proof of a Hotelling-like lemma that relates stochastic input demand and output supply functions to stochastic profit functions. While the previous studies fit a single frontier to data on all firms, this paper estimates a frontier unique to every observed firm to allow each one to have a different potential of achieving maximal levels of profit. The new method is applied in the analysis of annual data, 1984–1989, for U.S. commercial banks. Both the analytical and numerical results of the paper show that the residual that the previous studies attribute to inefficiency includes the effects of excluded variables and of inaccuracies in the specified functional forms. Once accurate estimates of these effects are subtracted from the residual, the distortions in the measured inefficiencies should be considerably reduced. Consequently, this article considers how such estimates might be obtained.