Preventing fires with high temperature vaporizers

In 1986 one of Du Pont's plants experienced a damaging fire in and around a vaporizer containing a high-temperature heat transfer medium (HTHTM). There were no injuries, but there was considerable property damage and lost production. A review of HTHTM history showed other plants and companies had experienced both damaging fires and incidents of severe damage to the vaporizer with no accompanying fire. This suggested a study in more depth than usually associated with one specific incident.     

CHALLENGER: FINE-TUNING THE ODDS UNTIL SOMETHING BREAKS

The Challenger disaster illustrates the effects of repeated successes, gradual acclimatization, and the differing responsibilities of engineers and managers. Past successes and acclimatization alter decision-makers’ beliefs about probabilities of future success. Fine-tuning processes result from engineers’ and managers’ pursuing partially inconsistent goals while trying to learn from their experiences. Fine-tuning reduces probabilities of success, and it continues until a serious failure occurs.     

Exchange Rates and Income-Sensitive Capital Flows

Capital flows have recently been sensitive to income expectations, as well as to interest rates. This article considers some implications of this for policy.     

Cost Effectiveness of Water Supply Technologies in Rural Indonesia: Evidence From Nusa Tenggara Barat

The supply of adequate safe water to households in rural Indonesia remains a problem despite considerable government effort. Causes include lack of funds, the administrative shortcomings of water supply authorities, and inadequate consultation with the communities involved. The choice of water supply technology is crucial, because the alternatives vary widely in cost and in the demands they place on the organisational and technical capacity of water supply authorities and village communities. This paper compares the average incremental costs, in both financial and economic prices, of various technologies used in rural Indonesia, and discusses how to estimate their economic benefits. It shows that installing improved traditional wells and simple piped systems and rehabilitating large scale piped systems in Nusa Tenggara Barat province is likely to increase economic welfare, while installing new large scale piped systems may not. Finally, a distributional analysis of the different technologies is used to trace their beneficiaries.     

Social cost-benefit analysis in practice: Some reflections in the light of case studies using Little-Mirrlees techniques

This paper reviews case studies of SCBA using Little-Mirrlees methodology, in the light of earlier criticisms of the method. Two classes of criticisms are considered — first-order or transcendental, and second-order or immanent. While there were many differences between the case studies, it was found that with respect to second-order criticisms some (but not all) of the suggested pitfalls had been avoided in the best studies. But the first-order criticisms remained of fundamental importance in shedding doubt on the basis of SCBA: in particular this applied to the definition and derivation of social objectives, to the political economy of decision-making and to the question of factors making for dynamic versus static allocational efficiency.     

Teaching Business Ethics: Theory and Practice

Business ethics teaching can be improved when ethicists integrate the ethical theories they apply to business with the organizational design of the course. By utilizing three techniques – implementing a Total Quality Management-style survey and review, nominating and electing class virtues, and telling personal stories of moral action – classes can be organized to operate by the social contract, rights, stakeholder, and virtue theories that dominate business ethics literature. Classes then become laboratories for the practical articulation and application of the theories as well as providing real examples of the theories in action. This methodology produces benefits for the particular class and for the development and refinement of the theories themselves.This paper describes each of the three pedagogical techniques; and then explicitly relates them to these leading business ethics theories to demonstrate how the integration can lead to a community seeking and discovering moral truth in the classroom.     

Health insurance and outcomes: comprehensive assessment of health system outputs

Outcomes analysis in health care has historically meant the examination of clinical results of inpatient hospitalization. In response to climbing health care and health insurance costs, the organization of health care providers, the location of service delivery and reimbursement mechanisms have changed. As the health care industry changes, so too must the definition of outcomes. This article presents a conceptual framework for the analysis of health outcomes as health industry outputs, with an emphasis on the ways in which such outputs are being assessed and improved.