Evaluation of the trench‐bed method of vegetable growing in semi‐arid areas

Layered fertility trenches when compared with conventional gardening methods showed little, if any, benefits in yield or water conservation on two soils over several planting seasons. While not conclusively discounting the fertility trench method, it brings into question the wisdom of introducing new methods that may not have clear advantages over traditional methods.     

How does managed care do it?

Integrating the health services and insurance industries, as health maintenance organizations (HMOs) do, could lower expenditure by reducing either the quantity of services or unit price or both. We compare the treatment of heart disease in HMOs and traditional insurance plans using two datasets from Massachusetts. The nature of these health problems should minimize selection. HMOs have 30% to 40% lower expenditures than traditional plans. Both actual treatments and health outcomes differ little; virtually all the difference in spending comes from lower unit prices. Managed care may yield substantial increases in measured productivity relative to traditional insurance.     

Role of search for domain knowledge and architectural knowledge in alliance partner selection

Research Summary: The literature on technological alliances emphasizes that search for knowledge drives alliance formation. However, in conceptualizing technological knowledge, prior work on alliances has not made a distinction between domain knowledge—knowledge that firms possess in distinct technological domains—and architectural knowledge—knowledge that firms possess about how to combine elements from different technological domains. We argue that firms seek partners that are similar in domain knowledge to deepen their knowledge, and partners that are dissimilar in architectural knowledge to broaden their knowledge. Our results indicate that the likelihood of alliance formation increases when two firms are similar in domain knowledge and dissimilar in architectural knowledge. Further, our results show that these effects are positively moderated by the degree of decomposability of a firm's knowledge base. Managerial Summary: In dynamic environments, companies need to continually deepen and broaden their technological knowledge, and they often look for alliance partners who can provide them that knowledge. For knowledge deepening, companies are more likely to form alliances with those companies that have expertise in similar technological fields. For knowledge broadening, they are more likely to form alliances with those companies that have expertise in the same technological fields, but have different recipes for combining knowledge from those fields. Furthermore, a company with a modular knowledge base is more likely to seek a partner that has expertise in similar technological fields or whose recipes for combining knowledge from different technological fields are different from the recipes it has.     

Hospital Reimbursement Incentives: An Empirical Analysis

Reimbursement systems for health-care providers are very complex, like the production systems that they regulate. This complexity has led to some important misperceptions about the incentive consequences of major reimbursement reforms. One example is the prospective payment system (PPS), developed to provide "high-powered" incentives through fixed prices for hospital admissions for the US elderly. In fact, various features of the DRG system allow reimbursement to vary with actual treatment decisions during an admission, and so are not prospective. This paper develops a general method for measuring actual reimbursement incentives in complex regulated price systems. The method uses regression techniques with variance decompositions to quantify the effects of particular features of the payment system on prospective and retrospective cost sharing, as well as overall generosity of payments. I apply this method to microdata on 20 percent of Medicare hospital admissions in 1987 and 1990 to summarize the incentives created by PPS in practice, and how the incentives are evolving over time. I show that PPS involves limited and decreasing cost sharing with hospitals, most of which is not prospective. The reimbursement incentives vary substantially across diagnoses, demographic groups, and types of intensive treatments, possibly with important implications for hospital behavior and medical expenditure growth. The techniques developed here can be used to analyze a broad range of provider reimbursement mechanisms.     

Performance implications of outsourcing for technological innovations: managing the efficiency and adaptability trade‐off

We explore how increasing efficiency compromises adaptability when a firm outsources during the emergent stages of a technological innovation. Since efficiency ‐related problems differ in complexity and structure from those associated with adaptability, their optimal governance differs. While the former benefits from outsourcing, the latter is better off managed within organizational boundaries. In addition, a firm's ability to engage in complex problem solving buffers the efficiency‐adaptability trade‐off that occurs with increasing levels of outsourcing. In this study, we find support for our theses. Although outsourcing yields efficiency gains up to a certain point, it hurts adaptability. However, a firm's absorptive capacity mitigates this trade‐off. Our data on outsourcing for Internet banking is both archival and based on two surveys conducted with 100 U.S. banks. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Medicare reform: fundamental problems, incremental steps.

This paper presents an overview of the Medicare reform debate. I begin by reviewing some of the features of Medicare and then turn to a discussion of reforms, both on the benefits side and on the financing side of the program. The reform proposals raise difficult policy and political issues, and could have important implications for the federal budget, the efficiency of the health sector, and the well-being of the elderly and disabled.     

Short-term fluctuations in incidental happiness and economic decision-making: experimental evidence from a sports bar

Experimental Economics - We develop a new experimental paradigm to study how emotions affect decision-making. We use it to investigate the impact of short-term fluctuations in incidental happiness...     

The effects of hospital ownership on medical productivity

To develop new evidence on how hospital ownership and other aspects of hospital market composition affect health care productivity, we analyze longitudinal data on the medical expenditures and health outcomes of the vast majority of nonrural elderly Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized for new heart attacks over the period 1985-1996. We find that the effects of ownership status are quantitatively important. Areas with a presence of for-profit hospitals have approximately 2.4% lower levels of hospital expenditures, but virtually the same patient health outcomes. We conclude that for-profit hospitals have important spillover benefits for medical productivity.     

Knowledge,firm boundaries,and innovation: Mitigating the incumbent's curse during radical technological change

We explore the relationship between a firm's organization and its ability to face a radical technological change. We suggest that, during such a change, the presence of both in‐house upstream knowledge and downstream market linkages, within a firm's boundary, has its advantages. We test our predictions in the context of the robotics industry where manufacturers of mechanically controlled “brawny” robots, which were valued mainly for their payload capacity, faced the advent of electrically controlled “brainy” robots that emphasized accuracy and repeatability. We find that “preadapted” firms—the ones with prior relevant technological knowledge and with access to internal users of “brainy” robots—were the innovation leaders in the emerging new technology but were laggards in the old technology. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.