Value Co-Creation in Health Care: A Phenomenological Examination of the Doctor-Patient Encounter

Considering the increasing conceptualization of value co-creation, this study seeks to empirically understand the value co-creation process through a phenomenological approach to further understand the doctor-patient encounter process leading to value outcomes in a public healthcare context. Three key thematic areas of the co-creation process were identified: the encounter process, consumption experience, and value outcomes. The findings reveal the importance of trust, role clarity, and actor experiences in clinical encounters. Both actors placed emphasis on the emotional, cognitive, social, and behavioral responses in encounters that consequently affect their value outcomes that include receiving treatment, getting well, improved well-being, improved compliance, reduced visits to health facilities, and enhanced service engagement between the actors. This study contributes to these dyadic interactions to gain comprehensive knowledge of how these encounter processes and experiences are perceived by the actors to influence the effectiveness of public and professional services.     

Competing with Marketing Channels and Logistics in Africa's Booming Markets: An Investigation of Emerging Supply Chain Management Practices in Ghana

Using Ghana as the African context for testing the applicability of supply chain management, this study reveals that firms there place less emphasis on logistics and channels management practices relative to product and pricing marketing mix elements. However, this situation is changing in response to the perceived positive impact of the regulatory and technological environment on market-share competitive performance. Those firms that emphasize integration of both logistics and channels management practices exhibited the strongest competitive market-share and financial performance; firms whose practices placed moderate emphasis on both logistics and channels management integration reported moderate levels of market-share and financial performance. These results suggest that firms in Ghana compete along a continuum of supply chain integration primarily on the basis of the increasingly market-oriented business environment.     

Road crashes in Namibia: Challenges and opportunities for sustainable development

ABSTRACT

Within a broad framework for comprehensive advancement, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) directly address the importance of safe transport to human development. We analysed some 29 000 crashes recorded in Namibia between 2012 and 2015 to identify connections between road safety and sustainable development there and, by extension, throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and other developing countries. The results indicate that the heavy reliance on transport services for basic mobility, especially in rural areas, contributes to negative development outcomes in terms of significant burden of injuries and death, many of which affect younger people of prime working age. The results also suggest that development pressures such as increased commercial traffic and more private vehicles increase the burden of roadway crashes. Many of the underlying factors contributing to these crashes are attributable to driving behaviours and safety cultures that must be addressed as part of programmatic socioeconomic development in order to mitigate the negative effects of transportation and more fully realise its potential to support sustainable development. We document additional ways in which the provision of safe transport is interrelated to successful attainment of the broader SDGs including those not explicitly addressing safe transport such as 4, 5, 8, 9, 16, and 17.     

Demarketing strategy in shortage marketing environment

Although demarketing is widely offered as a potentially effective strategic response to the environment of economic shortages, empirical assessment of its application in either domestic or global markets is lacking. This paper explores the relationship between the incidence of economic shortages and demarketing activity performance in six African countries. The study results suggest the existence of several forms of shortage marketing environments which reflect different approaches to demarketing. The paper concludes with observations on methods firms employ to adapt their marketing programs in an environment of scarcity within seller-dominated economies.     

Stability in the patent race contest of Lee and Wilde

Summary. To determine how expenditure and profits vary with the number of firms in the patent race contest of Lee and Wilde, it is traditional to impose an ad-hoc stability condition on the best response function. This paper relates the stability condition to the standard myopic adjustment mechanism and shows that a concave hazard rate function with non- increasing hazard rate elasticity is sufficient for the analysis. We provide examples and reveal additional qualitative properties of the Lee and Wilde model. Received: November 15, 1996; revised version: March 25, 1998     

Effort and performance in group contests

We study contest performance by focusing on the per capita payoffs of the contestants in an important class of asymmetric two-group contests. The group with the higher valuation has a greater chance of winning the contest whenever the rent-seeking technology is increasing and concave. We note that equilibrium efforts and payoffs per capita are uniquely defined and can be subjected to a comparative statics analysis. We show that payoff per capita for a group increases with its own valuation but decreases with the valuation of the opposing group. Per capita payoff for a group increases with its population.