An Ordered Tobit Model of Market Participation: Evidence from Kenya and Ethiopia

Do rural households in developing countries make market participation and volume decisions simultaneously or sequentially? This article develops a two-stage econometric method to test between these two competing hypotheses regarding household-level marketing behavior. The first stage models the household's choice of whether to be a net buyer, autarkic, or a net seller in the market. The second stage models the quantity bought (sold) for net buyers (sellers) based on observable household characteristics. Using household data from Kenyan and Ethiopian livestock markets, we find evidence in favor of sequential decision making, the welfare implications of which we discuss.     

Towards a global food aid compact

Existing international mechanisms governing food aid are dysfunctional and outdated. A reasonably straightforward alternative could readily rectify the problem of an ineffective global food aid governance system. In this paper, we outline the basic design of such a Global Food Aid Compact.     

Justifying health IT investments: A process model of framing practices and reputational value

Despite important research contributions on the financial and operational dimensions of information technology (IT) value, justifying health IT (HIT) investments remains a difficult and enduring issue for IT managers. Recent work has expanded our understanding of HIT value, by focusing on the initial resource allocation stage, and through conceptualizations of value across multiple dimensions. Building on these developments, we adopt a performative perspective to examine the research question of how practitioners justify early stage HIT investments, with a focus on reputational value. We explored this question through a comparative field study of two hospital organizations in the English National Health Service (NHS). We found that practitioners' temporally orientated framing practices matter in justifying HIT investments, enacting different possibilities for reputational value. We develop a process model to explain these dynamics and highlight the mutability of reputational value, which can lead to different possibilities for restoring, enhancing, or maintaining reputation. We conclude by discussing the implications for justifying HIT investments.     

A bed management strategy for overcrowding in the emergency department

In 2006, the Institute of Medicine cited growing visit volumes, hospital closures, financial pressures, and operational inefficiencies as the principal reasons for emergency department (ED) overcrowding and called for regulatory measures to resolve the problem. A Midwest medical center with 59,000 annual ED visits instituted a bed management strategy to decrease the need to board, or hold, admitted hospital patients in the ED awaiting transfer to an inpatient care unit. This strategy was successful in improving the hold time from an average of 216 minutes to 103 minutes, or by 52%. This allowed the staff at the hospital to care for an additional 2,936 patients. During this same time, the overall hospital mortality decreased by 0.07% and patient satisfaction scores improved 1%. The greatest outcome from this intervention was realized in the potential revenue increase of over $2 million.     

Examining the global environmental impact of regional consumption activities — Part 1: A technical note on combining input-output and ecological footprint analysis

In recent years there have been a number of attempts to develop a more comprehensive approach to the issue of measuring resource use and/or pollution generation embodied in trade flows, including contributions that combine input-output techniques and Ecological Footprint analysis. In this two-part paper we describe how to enumerate the resource and/or pollution content of inter-regional and inter-national trade flows (Part 1) and we present a literature review of recent methodological and empirical developments (Part 2). It is straightforward in principle to extend the basic input-output approach to capture international trade flows. However, in practice, problems of data availability and compatibility, and of computability of extended input-output matrices, mean that simplifying assumptions are generally applied, but with the implications of these assumptions often not made fully explicit. What appears to be absent from previous applications is an account of the analytical method by which Ecological Footprints should ideally be estimated in an international input-output accounting analysis. This allows an explicit analysis of the problems that prevent the application of the full method and identification of the most appropriate short-cut methods in a transparent way. The objective of this paper is to provide such an account.     

Influencing factors on restaurant customers’ revisit intention: The roles of emotions and switching barriers

This study was designed to examine the relationships among consumption emotions, customer satisfaction, switching barriers, and revisit intention. Four positive and negative categories of switching barriers (preference, switching costs, relational investment, and lack of alternatives) were identified through a qualitative approach. Using structural equation analysis, the proposed relationships were tested in a full-service restaurant setting. The results showed that multiple components of consumption emotions significantly affected customer satisfaction, and satisfaction mediated the effect of emotion factors on revisit intention. The findings from the tests for metric invariances also indicated that the strength of the relationship between satisfaction and revisit intention was different across high- and low-switching barrier groups. In particular, the satisfaction-revisit intention relationship was stronger in each low-switching barrier group than in each high-switching barrier group.