Waiting for News in the Market for Lemons

We study a dynamic setting in which stochastic information (news) about the value of a privately informed seller's asset is gradually revealed to a market of buyers. We construct an equilibrium that involves periods of no trade or market failure. The no‐trade period ends in one of two ways: either enough good news arrives, restoring confidence and markets reopen, or bad news arrives, making buyers more pessimistic and forcing capitulation that is, a partial sell‐off of low‐value assets. Conditions under which the equilibrium is unique are provided. We analyze welfare and efficiency as they depend on the quality of the news. Higher quality news can lead to more inefficient outcomes. Our model encompasses settings with or without a standard static adverse selection problem—in a dynamic setting with sufficiently informative news, reservation values arise endogenously from the option to sell in the future and the two environments have the same equilibrium structure.     

Physician buy-in is essential for pay for performance

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida is counting on voluntary participation as it rolls out its innovative pay-for-performance program throughout the state.     

Tolerance for Failure and Incentives for Collaborative Innovation

Most organizations employ collaborative teams to manage innovation projects. Although the use of collaborative innovation teams is a good starting point, an organization's ability to innovate can be enhanced by managing risk‐taking behavior through monetary incentive schemes and through an organizational culture that tolerates failure. This article reports the results of two controlled experiments aimed at understanding how tolerance for failure and incentives impact the decisions of individuals engaged in a collaborative innovation initiative. A key element of our experiments is the notion of endogenous project risk, which we define as the explicit link between resources allocated to a project and the likelihood of project success. We observe that when penalties are low, the amount of risk an individual assumes is fairly insensitive to the rewards that are offered. In an analogous result, when individuals make decisions alone (rather than collaboratively), higher tolerance for failure does little to increase the amount of risk an individual is willing to take. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of implicit incentives that are created as a result of project and organizational characteristics.     

Multi-phase Algorithms for Throughput Maximization for Real-Time Scheduling

We consider the problem of off-line throughput maximization for job scheduling on one or more machines, where each job has a release time, a deadline and a profit. Most of the versions of the problem discussed here were already treated by Bar-Noy et al. (Proc. 31st ACM STOC, 1999, pp. 622–631; http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/amotz/). Our main contribution is to provide algorithms that do not use linear programming, are simple and much faster than the corresponding ones proposed in Bar-Noy et al. (ibid., 1999), while either having the same quality of approximation or improving it. More precisely, compared to the results of in Bar-Noy et al. (ibid., 1999), our pseudo-polynomial algorithm for multiple unrelated machines and all of our strongly-polynomial algorithms have better performance ratios, all of our algorithms run much faster, are combinatorial in nature and avoid linear programming. Finally, we show that algorithms with better performance ratios than 2 are possible if the stretch factors of the jobs are bounded; a straightforward consequence of this result is an improvement of the ratio of an optimal solution of the integer programming formulation of the JISP2 problem (see Spieksma, Journal of Scheduling, vol. 2, pp. 215–227, 1999) to its linear programming relaxation.     

Accounting for inflation: The need for action

The article was prepared at a time when the business community still seemed very uncertain about the significance of changing price levels in relation to accounting statements. Those, including the author, who believed that the unadjusted figures being produced in company revenue accounts and balance sheets gave potentially misleading information sought in various ways, mainly in books and articles, to give greater awareness of the problem. The author's contribution was designed to demonstrate, simply and unequivocally, how business capital, in real terms, is liable to be eroded in periods of rising prices.     

A conceptual framework for evaluating designs for corporate innovation

Innovation is becoming mandatory for an increasing number of organizations in order to sustain competitive advantage. This paper explores how designs for corporate entrepreneurship fit within other dimensions of a strategy configuration. To do this, first, seven innovation-related problems are diagnosed. The specific problem patterns arising in three representative approaches to corporate innovation efforts (internal research and development, joint ventures, and acquisition) are discussed. Next, issues related to strategy configuration are examined. The problem-accommodating characteristics associated with specific environmental domain choices and with two routes to competitive advantage are proposed. Hypotheses that reflect the problem characteristics of innovation approaches with the problem propensities resulting from organizational choices of domain and competitive advantages are offered. Specific directions for future research, as well as the practical applications of these concepts, are discussed.     

面向第4方物流的多代理人作业整合优化算法

物流作业整合是现代物流方法中减少物流成本的主要手段.在综合考虑代理商选择和线路优化两问题的基础上,建立了基于图状结构的面向第4方物流的多代理人作业整合优化模型.为了避免将代理商选择和线路优化作为两个互相分离的子问题来处理,提出了求解它的两层邻域搜索算法.第1层采用了转移、交换和环形移动3种移动策略求解作业在代理商之间的分配,而在第2层提出了路合并、路生成替换策略,形成了适于该问题的优化算法.随机产生20例算例,将两层邻域搜索算法的计算结果与基于k-最短路的枚举算法的计算结果进行比较,说明了该算法的可行性和有效性.     

群体性上访事件的成因及化解方式

近年来,随着工业化加快转型、城市化加速推进和各项改革的深入推进,由于生产生活方式和利益格局发生重大调整而引发的群体性事件呈逐年增多态势,已成为困扰各级党委、政府的普遍性问题.结合工作实践.笔者对各地中心城区群体性事件进行了归纳总结.提出一些个人看法.     

Comparing Experimental Designs for Benchmark Dose Calculations for Continuous Endpoints

The BMD (benchmark dose) method that is used in risk assessment of chemical compounds was introduced by Crump (1984) and is based on dose-response modeling. To take uncertainty in the data and model fitting into account, the lower confidence bound of the BMD estimate (BMDL) is suggested to be used as a point of departure in health risk assessments. In this article, we study how to design optimum experiments for applying the BMD method for continuous data. We exemplify our approach by considering the class of Hill models. The main aim is to study whether an increased number of dose groups and at the same time a decreased number of animals in each dose group improves conditions for estimating the benchmark dose. Since Hill models are nonlinear, the optimum design depends on the values of the unknown parameters. That is why we consider Bayesian designs and assume that the parameter vector has a prior distribution. A natural design criterion is to minimize the expected variance of the BMD estimator. We present an example where we calculate the value of the design criterion for several designs and try to find out how the number of dose groups, the number of animals in the dose groups, and the choice of doses affects this value for different Hill curves. It follows from our calculations that to avoid the risk of unfavorable dose placements, it is good to use designs with more than four dose groups. We can also conclude that any additional information about the expected dose-response curve, e.g., information obtained from studies made in the past, should be taken into account when planning a study because it can improve the design.     

Ethical Room for Maneuver: Playground for the Food Business

In a world of glossy corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, the shallowness of the actual CSR results may well be its counterpart. We claim that the possible gaps between aspirations and implementations are due to the company's overrating abilities to deal with the irrational and complex moral world of business. Many academic approaches aim to lift business ethics up to a higher level by enhancing competences but will fail because they are too rationalistic and generalistic to match the pluralistic and situational practice constituted by the mosaic of values and set of constraints. This is demonstrated by describing and analyzing the CSR development of the multinational caterer Sodexo and in particular its Dutch branch. We explain what they do and why they are not successful. We present a new tool named Ethical Room for Maneuver that centers experiences and concrete situations in a playground of inquiry and experiment to enhance abilities to operate in themoral world and to meliorate business and society with more effectiveness.     

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