The product elimination function

Historically, major consideration given to product management has focused on research and development or the introductory stage of the product life cycle. The authors present an empirical study delineating the variables to be considered in the product elimination process. More specifically, the elimination process is evaluated under a situation of poor product performance despite a generally viable market. The basic objectives of the study were: to determine the significant variables in the product elimination process of the Small Appliance Industry; to determine the relative importance of the variables; to examine the interaction among variables. The data obtained through personal structured questionnaire interviews were analyzed and provided a ranking of twenty-six variables relevant to the elimination process. Moreover, the Johnson's Hierarchical Clustering Schemes was applied to determine the interaction among variables. The results indicate that profitability and financial variables are most significant in the elimination decision-process. Second, the primary clusters of importance are concerned with market share, market growth rate, consumer awareness, and competitive action.     

Bureaucrats as "Social Engineers": Federal Welfare Programs in Herbert Hoover's America

A bstract . Historians interested in 20th century American reform often seek to analyze the ideologies of political leaders separately from the institutions that these same leaders created. Such emphases on ideas, as opposed to actions, has, for example, led "revisionist" American historians to argue that the presidencies of Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt were "conceptually continuous." Our examination of the major social welfare programs undertaken by the federal government in the 1920s disputes this claim. Examination of the operations of the federal bureaucracy instead of the rhetoric of politicians demonstrates the existence of decided policy differences between the Hoover and Roosevelt eras. "Efficiency" analogues dominant during the Hoover era were replaced with "direct service-provider" approaches which created a clear distinction between private and public welfare programs. Elements of "continuity" between the two eras have been overdrawn. Background is provided for increased understanding of some of the policy implications of America's contemporary welfare debate—particularly about "rehabilitation" strategies and/or rationales for action in the social welfare field.     

Sub additive measures of relative information and inaccuracy

Summary In the study of information theoretic measures, additivity has been the basic requirement. However it is quite interesting to investigate the sub-additive measures. Starting from subadditivity for measures associated with a pair of distributions of a discrete random variable, it has been changed into an equality relation using another function of a pair of distributions., Under the sum property of the function and the measures, the relation is expressed in terms of a functional equation of which the most general complex solutions have been obtained. In terms of the real continuous solutions of the functional equation, the sub-additive measures of Relative information and Inaccuracy have been defined and characterized. Particular cases and simple properties particularly the convexities of some of these new measures have also been studied.     

A new approach to optimal selection of services in health care organizations.

A new reimbursement policy adopted by Medicare in 1983 caused financial difficulties for many hospitals and health care organizations. Several organizations responded to these difficulties by developing systems to carefully measure their costs of providing services. The purpose of such systems was to provide relevant information about the profitability of hospital services. This paper presents a new method of making hospital service selection decisions: it is based on an optimization model that avoids arbitrary cost allocations as a basis for computing the costs of offering a given service. The new method provides more reliable information about which services are profitable or unprofitable, and it provides an accurate measure of the degree to which a service is profitable or unprofitable. The new method also provides useful information about the sensitivity of the optimal decision to changes in costs and revenues. Specialized algorithms for the optimization model lead to very efficient implementation of the method, even for the largest health care organizations.     

Costs, commitment, and rewards: factors influencing the design and implementation of internal labor markets.

Much research on internal labor markets has been hampered by the failure to differentiate the wide variety of ILMs, by accounts of their determinants that too heavily emphasize isolated causal factors, by the lack of detailed material describing the economic and organizational dimensions of their design and implementation, and by the neglect of managerial perceptions of and motivations for constructing ILMs. This paper presents detailed case studies of three organizations that have constructed very different ILMs. Based on this material, a model of the determinants of ILMs is developed that centers around the concepts of costs, commitment, and rewards and that attempts to assess the interactions of effects of markets and hierarchies on ILMs. The model is built on the premise that the underlying imperatives typically held to affect ILMs are inevitably filtered through managerial beliefs and the constraints on managerial decision making. The implications of these findings for theory and research on ILMs are discussed.     

Structural instability of the core

Let σ be a q-rule, where any coalition of size q, from the society of size n, is decisive. Let w(n,q)= 2q-n+1 and let W be a smooth ‘policy space’ of dimension w. Let U(W)^N be the space of all smooth profiles on W, endowed with the Whitney topology. It is shown that there exists an ‘instability dimension’ w^*(σ) with 2w^*(σ)w(n,q) such that:

1. (i) if ww^*(σ), and W has no boundary, then the core of σ is empty for a dense set of profiles in U(W)^N (i.e., almost always),

2. (ii) if ww^*(σ)+1, and W has a boundary, then the core of σ is empty, almost always,

3. (iii) if ww^*(σ)+1 then the cycle set is dense in W, almost always,

4. (iv) if ww^*(σ)+2 then the cycle set is also path connected, almost always.

The method of proof is first of all to show that if a point belongs to the core, then certain generalized symmetry conditions in terms of ‘pivotal’ coalitions of size 2q−n must be satisfied. Secondly, it is shown that these symmetry conditions can almost never be satisfied when either W has empty boundary and is of dimension w(n,q) or when W has non-empty boundary and is of dimension w(n,q)+1.