Is health care a right or a privilege?

In this overview of the American health system, the author make arguments for declaring health care a right in the U.S. Constitution. Learn why he believes this is necessary.     

Rivalry and strategic groups: what makes a company a rival?

Strategic group literature has generated a significant amount of research over recent decades. However, the rivalry implications of strategic group have remained unclear. This paper analyses rivalry and strategic groups in the house building industry in a small town from a cognitive approach. We consider rivalry as a subjective and directional phenomenon. Estimating rivalry as the direct identification of competitors we try to explain whether similarity affects rivalry and what factors make a company a “rival”. Results show that perceived rivalry is strongly related to size, past performance, subjective similarity and strategic group structure.

How rival partners compete based on cooperation?

Prior studies of coopetition have explained the what, how and why of firms cooperating with competitors. Among these, examining the how question as to the stream of coopetition dynamics is the most challenging theme. Previous research has focused much more on the cooperation side. Less attention has been paid to the competition side to reveal what happens to competition after the competitors have collaborated. This study sheds light on the issue of cooperation-based competition by answering the question: while cooperating with competitors, how do rival partners compete based on cooperation? Linking the competitive dynamics perspective to coopetition, we conducted a single-case study to analyse the competition between two leading competitors in the Taiwanese bicycle industry. We collected the reported issues pertaining to the competition in the European market and supported by in-depth interviews. The analysis leads us to develop three propositions and a conceptual framework for illustrating the cooperation-based competition and addressing how cooperation may influence competition in a coopetition relationship. This study provides new insights into a theoretical issue of cooperation-based competition. The case also provides management implications while taking a coopetition strategy.     

Does an attractive partner make you a better leader? Only if you are a male!

We integrate the research on evolutionary leadership with the evolutionary psychology of mate choice to argue that a facially attractive partner signals unobservable leadership qualities of their mate, and thus, partner's attractiveness spills over to their mate's perceived leadership. Study 1 found that while partner's attractiveness enhanced the perceived leadership of male CEOs, female CEOs' leadership was downgraded in the presence of an attractive partner. Study 2 validated that the leadership penalty for female CEOs increased when they were seen with more attractive males than with less attractive males. Study 3 found that conservative candidates that were male benefitted more from an attractive partner than their liberal counterparts but female candidates were penalized regardless of political ideology. Our findings suggest that indirect cues that emanate from the partner are critical for leadership assessment. They invoke attributions that enhance the perceived leadership of males but disapprove of females as leaders.     

Is there a physician union in your future?

Physician unions are in the news. Patient management and patient care decisions are increasingly being taken out of the hands of physicians and put into the hands of "The Suits." To take their case for a return to physician-driven patient care to the people, some physicians are joining unions. Some are even collectively bargaining for salary and other issues that are historically more closely associated with unions. The simple fact is that physician unions exist and the number of physicians joining them is expected to increase. What are the pros and cons of unionization? What motivates physicians to join unions, and what potential negative and positive factors are associated with physician unionization? This article reviews the pros and cons and the issues related to physician unions, for physicians attempting to answer the question, "Is there a union in my future?"     

Is there a distinctive MENA model of corporate governance?

This study explores the diversity of corporate governance practices in the MENA region, with particular emphasis on Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Interviews with senior managers find that the state, foreign investors and large family groups act as monitors of corporations in both countries, whereas the role of institutional investors and other shareholder activist groups is minimal. Ownership was more concentrated in Egypt than in Saudi Arabia, particularly in family firms. However, control is firmly in the hands of dominant shareholders even when ownership concentration is not high enough to merit such control and boards are dominated by majority shareholders. The high levels of concentrated ownership and control, and the low levels of disclosure and transparency, clearly differentiates the corporate governance system in the region from that in Anglo-American countries while the importance of state and family shareholders reflects characteristics of organisation and control found in many developing countries, predominantly those in Asia. However, it remains premature to speak of a unique MENA model of corporate governance.     

Are you on the right track?

Physicians in early or mid-level leadership positions need different skills than those at the top. What are the skills they need and what are the risks of focusing on the wrong skills?     

Is outsourcing of intangibles a real source of competitive advantage?

Intangible investments constitute an emerging and important field of management. The objective of this article is to further consider the problem of intangible resource externalization from a theoretical as well as an operational point of view. The first section reviews the problem of defining intangibles; the second section considers the issue of outsourcing intangibles from a theoretical as well as an operational point of view; the third section reviews the practical issues (especially costrelated) of outsourcing, for two main intangible activities: research and development and information technology services (information logistics functions). The fourth section summarizes the main issues and discusses their implications for accounting analysis and practice.     

Is health care ready for a full menu of prices?

Examine the emerging trend of price transparency in health care and learn what some states are doing to make prices widely available on the Web.     

Is There a Motherhood Wage Penalty in the Finnish Private Sector?

This paper investigates the effects of children on women's wages in the Finnish private sector. The paper finds evidence of the motherhood wage penalty, the penalty varying with the length of the child‐related career break. Mothers staying at home no longer than for 2 years face considerably smaller penalties than mothers spending longer periods at home. The negative wage effects of children decrease, however, quickly with time. For example, mothers who experience a career break of 2 years or less do not lag behind non‐mothers in terms of wages after the second year from the return to employment. There is also variation in the motherhood wage penalty across the wage distribution. The penalty is higher at the top of the distribution than in the middle of it, especially in the cases of prolonged child‐related career breaks.     

Is Cooperation with Competitors a Good Idea? An Example in Practice

Coopetition has become a heated issue in the last decade. In this study, a scrutinized review of previous research on coopetition is presented to clarify the research stream on coopetition, from which the implications are derived and a framework to analyse the phenomenon is proposed. Given the complex nature of coopetition, an in‐depth case study was undertaken to investigate the competition–cooperation relationship and coopetition performance over a 15‐year period in a Taiwanese supermarket network, which was formed by a focal company and its competitors. Performance was analysed before and after launching the coopetition strategy, in which 31 indicators were examined. The findings imply that competition (Yang) and cooperation (Yin) are reciprocally rooted in and mutually promoted by each other. The findings also confirmed that cooperation with competitors did lead to better performance, at least over a period, in two ways. The first was that the adoption of coopetition permitted the attainment of performance levels beyond what would otherwise have been possible; the second was that the adoption of coopetition changed the timeframe, permitting earlier achievement of higher performance levels. This study contributes to and extends knowledge of the dynamics and consequences of cooperation with competitors and demonstrates that coopetition has a significant temporary advantage.     

Public Versus Private Job Satisfaction. Is there a Trade-off between Wages and Stability?

Public Organization Review - This paper examines the differences in job satisfaction in the public and private sector using the Spanish Survey of Life Quality at Work throughout the period...     

Is stock price a good measure for assessing value-relevance of earnings? An empirical test

Recently, a growing body of literature has created a widespread impression that financial statements have lost their value-relevance because of a shift from traditional capital-intensive economy into a high technology, service-oriented economy. In particular, the claim is that financial statements are less relevant in assessing the fundamental value of high technology, service-oriented firms/activities, which are by nature knowledge-intensive. These conclusions are based on past studies that examine the association between accounting numbers (i.e., earnings and book values) and stock prices and show that, in general, the association between accounting information and stock prices has been declining, over time. These findings have been interpreted to be the result of a decline in value relevance of accounting. We examine the predictive content of stock prices and accounting information, as against the contemporaneous association between accounting information and stock prices. We find that while both the predictive content of earnings and prices declined over time, the predictive content of price signals declined by even more. Our analysis suggests that the declining association could be the consequence of increased noise in stock prices over time resulting from increases in trading volume driven by non-information based trades, and not just a decline in the predictive content of earnings. More importantly, this conclusion is consistent with the insights of the noisy rational expectations equilibrium framework analysis, i.e. that increased noise has caused the predictive content of prices to degrade over time. Overall, our evidence suggests that stock prices may not be an appropriate benchmark for gauging the information content of accounting earnings.

Is There a Curse of Dimensionality for Contraction Fixed Points in the Worst Case?

This paper analyzes the complexity of the contraction fixed point problem: compute an ε‐approximation to the fixed point V*Γ(V*) of a contraction mapping Γ that maps a Banach space B_d of continuous functions of d variables into itself. We focus on quasi linear contractions where Γ is a nonlinear functional of a finite number of conditional expectation operators. This class includes contractive Fredholm integral equations that arise in asset pricing applications and the contractive Bellman equation from dynamic programming. In the absence of further restrictions on the domain of Γ, the quasi linear fixed point problem is subject to the curse of dimensionality, i.e., in the worst case the minimal number of function evaluations and arithmetic operations required to compute an ε‐approximation to a fixed point V*∈B_d increases exponentially in d. We show that the curse of dimensionality disappears if the domain of Γ has additional special structure. We identify a particular type of special structure for which the problem is strongly tractable even in the worst case, i.e., the number of function evaluations and arithmetic operations needed to compute an ε‐approximation of V* is bounded by Cε^−p where C and p are constants independent of d. We present examples of economic problems that have this type of special structure including a class of rational expectations asset pricing problems for which the optimal exponent p1 is nearly achieved.     

Is there a liability of localness? How emerging market firms respond to regulatory punctuations

In the 1990s, emerging economies all over the world deregulated, privatized and liberalized their domestic markets. These regulatory punctuations caused radical institutional changes for emerging market firms (EMFs). We argue that, for EMFs, regulatory punctuations created a liability of localness, parallel to the liability of foreignness that firms face when they go abroad. Whereas liability of foreignness comes from the differences caused by changing one's geographic place from ‘here’ to ‘there’; liability of localness comes from changing one's point in time from ‘then’ (pre-exogenous regulatory shock) to ‘now’ (post-exogenous regulatory shock). In both cases, firms incur additional costs, and the ones that survive are ones that best develop strategies for coping with “being in a strange land”. We apply our arguments to the Mexican banking industry, which was privatized and liberalized in the 1990s.     

Is Safe Production an Oxymoron?

This research examines how organizations simultaneously manage their operations and occupational health and safety. Although both safety and operations scholars conduct research in the same operational settings, they have reached different, yet untested, conclusions about the relationship between creating a safe workplace and creating a productive workplace. The results from a series of 10 case studies show that it is possible to create safe and productive workplaces, but that many facilities fail at this task because of problems associated with the culture management creates and the practices management adopts.     

Is leadership born or made?

Is leadership born or made? By profiling three colleagues who made the transition from clinician to top-flight executive in a health care organization, the author provides case studies from which to discuss leadership issues. An evolutionary pattern has developed with respect to physicians changing careers: The first model was the medical director, followed by the vice president for medical affairs, and finally the move to managing the health care system, group practice, or managed care organization. Are physician executives fundamentally different from clinicians in terms of leadership characteristics? What are the essential qualities needed to lead health care organizations? These questions are explored in-depth.