Understanding Life-Threatening Risks

Modern science and medicine, and increasing prosperity, have brought many benefits to our society, but not without costs. One cost is that some of the technological innovations and new activities bring with them different and perhaps greater risks that threaten our lives. Any problem involving life-threatening risks is complex, so it is difficult to think through all the implications of the alternatives proposed to address it. This paper presents a number of "facts" to guide constructive thinking about decisions concerning life-threatening risks. The intent is to help us appraise alternatives, design public policy and laws, and communicate about specific risk problems.     

TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT: A LITERATURE REVIEW AND AN AGENDA FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Total quality management (TQM) is a revolutionary approach to effective management. The research in TQM has emerged from practical needs of organizations embracing this philosophy, and the literature is mostly conceptual and practitioner-oriented. There is a lack of sound theoretical framework classifying past efforts and guiding future research. To fill the void, a study of the published TQM literature is undertaken. A review, classification, and analysis of the research in TQM spanning the last two decades is presented. A total of 226 TQM-related articles are identified from 44 refereed management journals published from 1970 to 1993. These articles are then classified and analyzed using the following two-dimensional scheme: (1) article orientation (conceptual, case study, empirical, analytical, simulation, and overview) and (2) article focus using the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria. The analysis of the literature presents pertinent developments in each of the seven criteria. In addition, it provides future research directions as well as a ready reference of the TQM literature. The suggestions for research should guide future developments in the TQM field and help transform it into a formal discipline.     

The effect of accounting standards on Big Bath behavior

This paper investigates the influence of accounting standards on systematic earnings understatement. To isolate the effect of reporting regulations from those of other institutional drivers of earnings management, Holthausen (2003) proposes analyzing reporting practices in a country undergoing a transition in accounting standards. We respond to this call by analyzing earnings management practices of large German-listed companies before and after their transitions from German GAAP to IFRS. Specifically, we focus on Big Bath behavior following Chief Financial Officer turnovers between 1999 and 2006. Our findings provide evidence of the effect of accounting standards on the existence of this particular earnings understatement pattern. However, while we detect Big Bath behavior for our sample of German GAAP firms, we find no such indication for those firms reporting under IFRS. Controlling for alternative explanations such as self-selection bias does not change our findings. We conclude that accounting standards seem to have a considerable influence on earnings management behavior, independent of managers’ and auditors’ incentives.     

Mission Rivalry: Use and Preservation Conflicts in National Parks Policy

The purpose of this study is to explore the conflict between use and preservation in national parks policy as seen through the mission statement of the National Parks Service. The histories of the national parks were qualitatively coded in order to further explore this controversy, or what we have termed “mission rivalry”.     

A real option theoretic fuzzy evaluation model for enterprise resource planning investment

The high failure rate of ERP implementation is due to a common pitfall that ERP projects are often enacted as merely investment into installation of IT infrastructure, rather than systematic planning of operation changes, business process re-engineering and a paradigm shift for the operation and management. To manage ERP investment in a changing environment for high payoff, this paper adopts a real option theoretic method. Fuzzy payoff valuation is introduced to deal with uncertainties in order to minimize the risk of failure. The proposed ERP evaluation model is geared towards small and medium enterprises. A case study is presented to validate the proposed fuzzy real options. The results indicate the potential of modeling ERP investment as “Expand”, “Contain” and “Abandon” options in different scenarios. The fuzzy real option model bestows a novel ex-ante cost analysis for justifying ERP investment in the implementation cycle.     

Conceptual and design issues in instrument development for research with bereaved parents

Many childhood deaths in the United States occur in pediatric intensive care units (PICUs) and parents have special needs in this death context. As an interdisciplinary research team, we discuss conceptual and design issues encountered in creating a new instrument, the Bereaved Parent Needs Assessment-PICU, for assessing parents' needs in this setting. Using a qualitative approach, our team previously explored how the culture and related ways of providing care in one urban Midwestern children's hospital PICU affected parents' bereavement needs and experiences. We describe using this qualitative foundation in the development of a new quantitative instrument to more widely validate and measure bereaved parents' needs around the time of a child's death across multiple PICUs. We highlight a series of issues that warrant consideration in designing a research instrument for this vulnerable population including setting and context, format and content, temporality, recruitment, and content expertise.     

Ambulance allocation for maximal survival with heterogeneous outcome measures

This paper proposes new models for locating emergency medical services (EMS) by incorporating survival functions for capturing multiple-classes of heterogeneous patients. The Maximal Expected Survival Location Model for Heterogeneous Patients (MESLMHP) aims to maximize the overall expected survival probability of multiple-classes of patients, whereby different classes could be defined according to agreed patient categories based on response time targets, or by capturing differing medical conditions each with a corresponding survival function. Furthermore, we propose and demonstrate an approximation approach to solving the extended stochastic version of MESLMHP, which utilizes queuing theory to permit the modeling of congestion and utilization at each ambulance station, and does not require assumptions to be made on the utilization of ambulances. Both models are demonstrated using data from the ambulance service in Wales. We show that our multiple outcome measures and survival-maximizing approach, rather than one based on average response time targets alone or a single patient class provides more effective EMS ambulance allocations.     

Container Scheduling: Complexity and Algorithms

We consider the transport of containers through a fleet of ships. Each ship has a capacity constraint limiting the total number of containers it can carry and each ship visits a given set of ports following a predetermined route. Each container has a release date at its origination port, and a due date at its destination port. A container has a size 1 or size 2; size 1 represents a 1 TEU (20‐foot equivalent unit) and size 2 represents 2 TEUs. The delivery time of a container is defined as the time when the ship that carries the container arrives at its destination port. We consider the problem of minimizing the maximum tardiness over all containers. We consider three scenarios with regard to the routes of the ships, namely, the ships having (i) identical, (ii) nested, and (iii) arbitrary routes. For each scenario, we consider different settings for origination ports, release dates, sizes of containers, and number of ports; we determine the computational complexity of various cases. We also provide a simple heuristic for some cases, with its worst case analysis. Finally, we discuss the relationship of our problems with other scheduling problems that are known to be open.