基于公平偏好的存货质押融资3PL激励机制研究

本文聚焦存货质押模式下银行与第三方物流(3PL)间的委托代理关系,将3PL公平偏好和能力信息不对称作为重要因素纳入委托监管契约机制设计中,探究二者对银行和3PL决策行为及效用的影响。结果表明：(1)相较于完全理性,3PL的公平偏好提高了物流企业承担的损失比例和付出的努力水平,且均随公平偏好程度的提高而不断增加;(2)相较于能力信息对称,3PL能力信息的不对称降低了物流企业承担的损失比例和付出的努力水平;(3)忽视3PL的公平偏好行为会损害银行的利益,特别是在3PL能力信息不对称情况下,银行提供的合同菜单将无法实现有效的信息甄别;(4)当银行考虑3PL公平偏好,则无论其是否存在公平偏好,能力信息对称时3PL只能获得保留效用;而当能力信息不对称时,3PL能够获得信息租金,且随3PL公平偏好程度和能力水平的提高而增加;(5)当3PL能力信息不对称且行业公平收益水平较低时,公平偏好的存在能够同时增加3PL和银行的期望效用,实现“双赢”。研究结果可为存货质押模式下3PL的激励机制设计问题提供理论依据和决策参考。     

整合工作、退休与一生收益决策的最优投资组合研究

将工作时间和退休年龄视为内生变量,用一个包含随机死亡概率和不确定劳动收入的标准化模型,探讨个人一生最优投资组合,拓展投资领域,使投资不仅包括购买股票和债券,而且还包括购买年金。研究表明,将劳动力供给看作内生变量不仅能提高老年人股票持有量,而且能极大提高年轻人工作努力程度,显著改善个人一生福利。此外,引入年金也将导致老年人提前退休和更多参与金融活动。最后,如果考虑取决于年龄的闲暇偏好,随着接近退休年龄,个人将减少工作时间和股票持有量。     

Ice‐Breaker vs. Standalone: Comparing Alternative Workflow Modes of Mid‐level Care Providers

Capitalizing on the operational concept of division‐of‐labor, clinics often reduce physician service time by off‐loading some of his/her clinical activities to lower‐cost personnel. These personnel, such as nurse practitioners and physician assistants, are often collectively referred to as “mid‐level providers” (MLPs) and can perform many patient‐consultation tasks. The common rationale is that using an MLP allows the physician to serve more patients, increase patients’ access to care, and, due to MLPs’ lower salaries, improve the clinic's financial performance. An MLP is typically integrated into the outpatient clinic process in one of two modes: as an “ice‐breaker,” seeing each patient before the physician, or as a “standalone” provider, a substitute for the physician for the entirety of some patients’ visits. Despite both of these modes being widely used in practice, we find no research that identifies the circumstances under which either one is preferable. This study examines these two modes’ effects on operational performance, such as patient flow and throughput, as well as on financial measures. Using queueing and bottleneck analysis, discrete‐event simulation, and profit modeling, we compare these two deployment modes and identify the optimal policies for deploying MLPs as either ice‐breakers or as standalone providers. Interestingly, we also find there exists a range of scenarios where not hiring an MLP at all (i.e., the physician works alone) is likely to be most profitable for the clinic. Implications for practice are discussed.     

Managing strategies incrementally

When sophisticated large organizations make significant changes in strategy, the approaches they use frequently bear little resemblance to the rational-analytical systems so often touted in the planning literature. Such systems are rarely the source of overall corporate strategies. Instead, the processes used to generate major strategies are typically fragmented and evolutionary with a high degree of intuitive content. Although one usually finds imbedded in these fragments some very refined pieces of formal analysis, overall strategies tend to emerge as a series of conscious internal decisions blend and interact with changing external events to slowly mutate key managers' broad consensus about what patterns of action make sense for the future. Based on a multi-year study of how large companies change their strategies, this article summarizes why strategic managers do proceed incrementally and how they manage the complex process of generating an overall strategy.     

Quality versus variance: a plea for a different focus and terminology

Much has been written about quality assurance in medical practice over the past 15 years. Medicine suddenly found itself trying to design systems that ensured that medicine was being practiced according to standards of quality when it had neither a definition of its product nor defined standards of practice. Consequently, early quality assurance programs focused primarily on documentation of patient care. As the process matured, it evolved to generic screens, with tolerances and outliers. The theory was that the quality of medical care was enhanced by physicians who practiced within often artificially established norms and was diminished by physicians who practiced outside those same norms. It was much like saying that the quality of manufacturing a new car could be improved by reducing all systems down to one of closely standardizing, observing, and documenting how each individual assembly worker put on a lock nut and then holding each worker independently accountable for the final quality of the care. Physicians felt they were being held responsible for conforming to a rigid set of poorly designed and retrospectively applied standards. Moreover, they were held accountable for applying those standards to all practice situations. Understandably, physicians felt at the mercy of nonphysician quality assurance "detectives" in hospitals and became increasingly suspicious of nurses and administrators, who were perceived as abusing the system at the expense of the physicians. Because of these inadequacies of the earlier quality assurance programs, paranoia among physicians about the quality assurance process remains rampant today. The use of blind outcome scores and practice patterns in credentialing and the reporting of these data to databanks have reinforced the paranoia.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Labour Force Transitions among Married Women in the USA

This paper describes the patterns of labour market transitions for a cohort of married women in the USA drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey and observed between 1968 and 1991. The empirical analysis of labour market movements is motivated by human capital theory augmented by demographic and life-cycle considerations. These movements are investigated by estimating competing risk models of labour force spell duration. The results show that the determinants of spell lengths and the determinants of the reasons for spell terminations vary across labour market states. More importantly, both the labour market state in which an individual is observed over her work cycle and the labour market state to which she moves are relevant in shaping her spell length and her tradeable characteristics in the labour market.     

Die Wechseljahre — Zeit des beruflichen Wandels Karriereberatung bei einer 50-jährigen Frau

The climacteric period — a time of professional change. Career coaching with a 50 years old womanThe climacteric period are valid as a time of great changes and often also represent a neworientation in professional life. In a career coaching with a 50 year old teacher and therapist, it was a question of a professional decision-making: returning in the teacher profession or developing her therapeutic career. In the course of common work and a created future-panorama her following professional way was more visible, which also considered her age and her reducing capability.     

Managers' uses of models

This paper argues that management scientists need to understand how models are used by managers and correspondingly apply appropriate criteria to their own efforts. Types of models used by managers are discussed. Then an example is presented of how such understanding can be used to evaluate the worth of formal analysis. The evidence points to patterns of quite different inquiry and response by managers than have typically been envisioned by management scientists.     

Managing Maturing Government‐Supported Networks: The Shift from Monitoring to Embeddedness Controls

In formal inter‐firm networks backed with significant financial support by policy‐makers, network boards are typically established to monitor network activities and to manage the tension between organizational and collective interests. This approach to network governance, however, builds mainly upon agency logic. We integrate agency with embeddedness theory to offer insights into the effectiveness of monitoring as a governance mechanism as networks mature and member firms become embedded. The analyses focus on two issues: (1) how network board characteristics typically associated with monitoring – board independence, board size and board compensation – influence network performance; and (2) how these effects are moderated by network age. The model is tested with longitudinal data on 53 government‐supported networks. In addition to the direct effects of board characteristics, network board size and board compensation have a stronger positive impact on network performance in younger networks than in more mature networks. This study provides insight into why the instituting of boards may prove successful for network‐level performance in newly formed government‐supported networks, but also explains why the positive effects from network board monitoring may diminish as networks grow older.     

Criteria for evaluating qualitative studies

Many countries are becoming increasingly reliant upon an aging workforce. Yet, much literature positions older workers as ‘last resort’ employees, held in low esteem by employers whose preference for youth extends into decision-making about workplace engagement and support. As part of a broader study on maintaining the competence of older workers, we investigated the extent to which a group of employees in Australia aged 45 or more perceived they were discriminated against because of their age, including access to training, promotion opportunities and job security. Against expectations arising from the literature, informants reported little in the way of explicit age-related bias in their employment, opportunities for advancement and further development. Although the informants have particular characteristics and featured paraprofessional and professional workers, the contrast is noteworthy between what is reported in the literature and often premised on surveys, and our data were based on interviews. The findings indicate a need to be wary of making easy generalizations about the extent to which older workers per se are discriminated against in the workplace, while at the same time acknowledging that such discrimination exists, and perhaps for particular kinds of workers. In addition, we found a range of nuanced responses that suggest there are tensions between discriminations policies and practice that are a challenge for human resource development professionals.     

Von der Kunst, sich für den richtigen Beruf zu entscheiden

Students often make their decision of a course of studies without being aware of the consequences for their future career and life, without having been informed about alternatives and — even more important — without having thought about their personal talents and interests. During their studies itself, they often run into difficulties when they realise that they took the wrong decision. High rates of changes in studies or cancelling all studies are the consequence (25 % in total, more than 40 % in special studies like social sciences). The author works as a students’ advisor and students’ coach and, among others, offers analyses of talents and a comprehensive advisory training for professional orientation. The present essay describes the theoretical basis of her work, the concrete procedure and a practical example of her daily work.     

Exact and heuristic algorithms for the circle cutting problem in the manufacturing industry of electric motors

Circular blanks are often cut from silicon steel plates to make stators and rotors of electric motors. The shearing and punching processes are often used to cut the blanks. First a guillotine shear cuts the plate into strips, and then a stamping press cuts the blanks from the strips. The unconstrained circle cutting problem discussed is the problem of cutting from a rectangular plate a number of circular blanks of given diameters and values, so as to maximize the value of blanks cut, where the shearing and punching processes are applied. Two algorithms based on dynamic programming are presented for generating cutting patterns, one is an exact algorithm and the other is a heuristic one. The computational results indicate that the exact algorithm is adequate for small and middle scale problems, the heuristic algorithm is much more time efficient, and can generate cutting patterns close to optimal.     

Integration and Autonomy in Organizational Governance: A Comparative Study of Two Government-Owned Railways in Hong Kong

This article identifies the patterns of integration and autonomy in organizational governance in two government-owned railways in Hong Kong in relation to relevant external and internal actors from the government, market and civil society. The Kowloon Canton Railway Corporation, a government department turned into a statutory corporation, and the Mass Transit Railway Corporation Limited, a statutory corporation turned into a listed company, are both profitable enterprises. They have been subjected to similar macro-governance influences (mainly political and policy changes), but their patterns of integration and autonomy with relevant actors in organizational governance are not the same. The historical variations in the integration-autonomy patterns, notably an increased tendency for government intervention, as well as major differences between the two railways in their relationships with market and civil society actors, can often be explained by three interrelated factors, namely, political conditions, community expectations and performance.

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Modeling Insurer‐Homeowner Interactions in Managing Natural Disaster Risk

The current system for managing natural disaster risk in the United States is problematic for both homeowners and insurers. Homeowners are often uninsured or underinsured against natural disaster losses, and typically do not invest in retrofits that can reduce losses. Insurers often do not want to insure against these losses, which are some of their biggest exposures and can cause an undesirably high chance of insolvency. There is a need to design an improved system that acknowledges the different perspectives of the stakeholders. In this article, we introduce a new modeling framework to help understand and manage the insurer's role in catastrophe risk management. The framework includes a new game‐theoretic optimization model of insurer decisions that interacts with a utility‐based homeowner decision model and is integrated with a regional catastrophe loss estimation model. Reinsurer and government roles are represented as bounds on the insurer‐insured interactions. We demonstrate the model for a full‐scale case study for hurricane risk to residential buildings in eastern North Carolina; present the results from the perspectives of all stakeholders—primary insurers, homeowners (insured and uninsured), and reinsurers; and examine the effect of key parameters on the results.     

Labour Markets and Organisational Change: Future Working Structures for an Ageing Work Force

Flexible manufacturing systems, team work with decentralisation of decision-making, integration of tasks and multiple allocation across functional barriers demand a skilled work force prepared for continuous learning and adaptation. It is common to see a younger, well-educated and trained work force as being required for such a production environment. A closer empirical look at most of the internal labour markets in this study shows that existing labour market structures do not match this image. Existing labour markets consist very often of an older (and ageing) labour force with relatively low skills and with resistance to continuous training. These structural features have, over the last ten years — despite the existence of costly early retirement measures and new entries into internal labour markets — not much improved, and in many cases have even deteriorated. While age-related exit measures have contributed to maintaining sound corporate cultures in offering socially cushioned exit options and have also prevented internal labour markets from growing older too rapidly, they have — in the “lean employment environment” of mature industrial sectors — not led to a sustained restructuring of internal labour markets. The ending of many of the age-related exit measures owing to their impact on public and company budgets could lead to a growing mismatch between the structure of demand and the structure of supply in internal labour markets. This could have negative effects on company performance and increase the probability of unemployment for workers if no proactive policies for managing the age problem are introduced. Such proactive policies might consist of appropriate age-related training, age-related flexible working time and work organisation patterns. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Board age and corporate financial fraud: An interactionist view

Unlike past studies which have focused on either executives or boards of directors, this study takes an interactionist view to investigate the determinants of corporate financial fraud. We propose that CEOs evaluate the opportunities for financial fraud according to both situational stimuli and their own personal characteristics. As older directors are often more experienced and have more to lose if they fail in their monitoring duties, we expect them to be more capable and to have stronger motivation for monitoring CEOs closely. As such, we propose that a CEO is less likely to engage in corporate financial fraud when the average age of the board of directors increases (i.e., board age). However, when the CEO is older than the board, the CEO may attach less importance to board age when deciding whether to commit fraud. Therefore, we further propose that the CEO–board directional age difference can weaken the effect of board age. Our empirical analyses provide strong support for these hypotheses. Our study contributes to the literature on corporate governance by highlighting the often neglected roles of board age and CEO–board directional age difference in deterring corporate financial fraud.     

Of euphemisms and euthanasia: the language games of the Nazi doctors and some implications for the modern euthanasia movement

Euphemisms are place-holders for important concepts. They may disguise a practice which one might abhor if it were given another name. In Nazi Germany during World War II, euphemisms were used to desensitize physicians and society to the horrors of a program of euthanasia. This article examines some of the euphemisms used by the Nazi physicians to redefine medicalized killing, compares the Nazi language games with those of contemporary proponents of medicalized killing, and concludes that the consistent application of euphemisms for medicalized killing significantly weakens arguments against assisted killing.     

Ageing, health and productivity: A challenge for the new millennium

The economic implications of Europe's ageing population are considerable. Without an increase in the size of the working population, reducing the possible fiscal deficits will be difficult. This paper reviews this area of increasing concern for basic, applied and strategic researchers, namely how to increase the age at which people typically stop working, without damaging health or productivity. Chronological age per se may not be a good predictor of health and job performance; rather we should examine various mediating and moderating factors. It is argued that attention should focus on national and organizational policies, management attitudes, training, work demands, the working environment, work organization, the psychosocial environment and health promotion. Older workers may currently be subject to discriminatory practices and to stereotypical and inappropriate attitudes which may adversely affect their health and performance. Flexible and intelligent solutions are required. Many organizations, perhaps reflecting western culture, have not yet evolved to the point where the potential contribution of older people is recognized and allowed to flourish. Once current barriers are removed, and existing and developing knowledge applied, an optimistic picture for older workers emerges.     

Das Böse und das Glück

Life-Coaching is promoting an ars laborandi as a part of a comprehensive ars vivendi. Then it must also deal the bad sites of the man, for example the Lucifer Effect or with vicious behavior patterns. Motivation for good work is, however, provided by the pursuit of happiness. This is where Life-Coaching takes up. The author presents in this article some new publications concerned with these issues and discusses the relevance for the work in Life-Coaching.     

Is high touch finally here?

Can anyone single-handedly create a caring environment without adding hours to his or her work week? As turnover continues to rise, it's worth considering. Techniques managers say have worked for them are suggested, including: Monitor workloads; celebrate successes; make niceness an expectation; mentor; offer training as often as possible; stamp out problems before they go public; consider offering flexible hours and extended leaves for all; and introduce yeast to keep people stimulated. Will these strategies--all of which may not work for you--fatten your bonus this year? Probably not, unless top management is monitoring retention and doing occasional exit interviews. However, one of the byproducts is that employees don't stop with each other. They begin to treat patients better, something neither bribery nor threats may produce.