实施质量战略:从ISO9000到6σ

有人断言:21世纪是质量的世纪。在经济全球化的激烈市场竞争中,价格战的作用变得越来越弱,质量已经成为企业成败的关键因素之一。从1875年泰勒提出科学管理理论,把质量检验作为一道工序引入生产过程中以保证产品质量以来,质量运动经历了质量控制、质量保证和质量管理三个历程。在这个历程中,质量管理手段和方法不断创新,其中最具有代表性的主要有全面质量管理(TQM)、卓越绩效管理(波多里奇质量奖标准)、ISO9000质量管理体系、6σ(六西格玛)管理等。20世纪90年代以来,一种新的“后ISO9000”质量管理模式———6σ管理在美国应运而生并取…     

ISO9000:中国工业国际化的“引擎”

ISO9000是企业走向世界的通行证,贯彻实施 ISO9000系列标准已风靡世界各国。在国门开放的今天,企业应当密切关注ISO9000。伴随全球经济一体化浪潮的波澜迭起,许多企业恍然悟出:商品价格不再是衡量竞争能力的唯一砝码,而必须追求市场公认的产品质量,     

QUALITY MANAGEMENT: UNIVERSAL OR CONTEXT DEPENDENT?

Quality management has often been advocated as being universally applicable to organizations. This is in contrast with the manufacturing strategy contingency approach of Operations Management that advocates internal and external consistency between manufacturing strategy choices. This article empirically investigates whether quality management practices are contingent on a plant's manufacturing strategy context, by examining the use of process quality management practices—a critical and distinctive subset of the whole set of quality management practices—across plants representative of different manufacturing strategy contexts. The study strongly suggests that process quality management practices are contingent on a plant's manufacturing strategy, and identifies mechanisms by which this takes place.     

NORM ENFORCEMENT: ANGER,INDIGNATION, OR RECIPROCITY?

The enforcement of social norms often requires that unaffected third parties sanction offenders. Given the renewed interest of economists in norms, the literature on third‐party punishment is surprisingly thin. In this paper, we report the results of an experiment designed to replicate the anger‐based punishment of directly affected second parties and evaluate two distinct explanations for third‐party punishment: indignation and group reciprocity. We find evidence in favor of both, with the caveat that the incidence of indignation‐driven sanctions is perhaps smaller than earlier studies have hinted. Furthermore, our results suggest that second parties use sanctions to promote conformism while third parties intervene primarily to promote efficiency.     

BIASES IN MACROECONOMIC FORECASTS: IRRATIONALITY OR ASYMMETRIC LOSS?

Empirical studies using survey data on expectations have frequently observed that forecasts are biased and have concluded that agents are not rational. We establish that existing rationality tests are not robust to even small deviations from symmetric loss and hence have little ability to tell whether the forecaster is irrational or the loss function is asymmetric. We quantify the trade‐off between forecast inefficiency and asymmetric loss leading to identical outcomes of standard rationality tests and explore new and more general methods for testing forecast rationality jointly with flexible families of loss functions that embed squared loss as a special case. Empirical applications to survey data on forecasts of real output growth and inflation suggest that rejections of rationality may largely have been driven by the assumption of squared loss. Moreover, our results suggest that agents are averse to “bad” outcomes such as lower‐than‐expected real output growth and higher‐than‐expected inflation and that they incorporate such loss aversion into their forecasts. (JEL: C22, C53, E37)     

RISK AVERSION RELATES TO COGNITIVE ABILITY: PREFERENCES OR NOISE?

Recent experimental studies suggest that risk aversion is negatively related to cognitive ability. In this paper we report evidence that this relation may be spurious. We recruit a large subject pool drawn from the general Danish population for our experiment. By presenting subjects with choice tasks that vary the bias induced by random choices, we are able to generate both negative and positive correlations between risk aversion and cognitive ability. Our results suggest that cognitive ability is related to random decision making rather than to risk preferences. (JEL: C81, C91, D12, D81)     

Complex problems with multiple stakeholders: how to bridge the gap between reality and OR/MS?

The world becomes increasingly complex and problems tend to be broader and multidisciplinary. At the same time, OR/MS research seems to be narrowing down, building even more on analytical models. The flip side is the risk that OR/MS is increasingly diverging from reality and that its dominant paradigm becomes insufficient to guide us in understanding and solving complicated real-world problems. A methodology that allows a broader insight into exploring a complex system’s behaviour is urgently needed to guide OR/MS analytical models. We propose system dynamics as a methodology to link reality with the dominant OR/MS paradigm of narrowly focused and highly analytical models.