Advance Selling by a Newsvendor Retailer

Retailers often face a newsvendor problem. Advance selling helps retailers to reduce demand uncertainty. Consumers, however, may prefer not to purchase in advance unless given a discount because they are uncertain about their valuation for the product in advance. It is then unclear whether or when advance selling to pass some uncertainty risk to consumers is optimal for the retailer. This paper examines the advance selling price and inventory decisions in a two‐period setting, where the first period is the advance selling period and the second is the selling (and consumption) period. We find that an advance selling strategy is not always optimal, but is contingent on parameters of the market (e.g., market potential and uncertainty) and the consumers (e.g., valuation, risk aversion, and heterogeneity). For example, we find that retailers should sell in advance if the consumers' expected valuation exceeds consumers' expected surplus when not buying early by a certain threshold. This threshold increases with the degree of risk aversion but decreases with stock out risk. If the degree of risk aversion varies across consumers, then a retailer should sell in advance if the probability for a consumer to spot buy is less than a critical fractile.     

Cameras and community health

Photography projects are an alternative teaching method that can be easily integrated into community programs with adolescents and children. This article provides a brief review of the use of photography in documenting social and health issues. Two examples of community photography projects with easily ignored populations are described. These projects gave a voice to participants and allowed them to demonstrate their creativity with cameras. An implementation guide is presented to provide concrete suggestions for implementing community photography projects.     

A framework for evaluating eHealth research

Health care is in the midst of a consumer-oriented technology explosion. Individuals of all ages and backgrounds have discovered eHealth. But the challenges of implementing and evaluating eHealth are just beginning to surface, and, as technology changes, new challenges emerge. Evaluation is critical to the future of eHealth. This article addresses four dimensions of eHealth evaluation: (1) design and methodology issues; (2) challenges related to the technology itself; (3) environmental issues that are not specific to eHealth but pose special problems for eHealth researchers; and (4) logistic or administrative concerns of the evaluation methodology selected. We suggest that these four dimensions must be integrated to provide a holistic framework for designing and implementing eHealth research projects, as well as for understanding the totality of the eHealth intervention. The framework must be flexible enough to adapt to a variety of end users, regardless of whether the end user is a healthcare organization, a for-profit business, a community organization, or an individual. The framework is depicted as a puzzle with four interlocking pieces.     

The Role of Clinical and Process Quality in Achieving Patient Satisfaction in Hospitals

Managers constantly struggle with where to allocate their resources and efforts in managing the complex service delivery system called a hospital. In the broadest sense, their decisions and actions focus on two important aspects of health care—clinical or technical medical care that emphasizes “what” the patient receives and process performance that emphasizes “how” health care services are delivered to patients. Here, we investigate the role of leadership, clinical quality, and process quality on patient satisfaction. A causal model is hypothesized and evaluated using structural equation modeling for a sample of 202 U.S. hospitals. Statistical results support the idea that leadership is a good exogenous construct and that clinical and process quality are good intermediate outcomes in determining patient satisfaction. Statistical results also suggest that hospital leadership has more influence on process quality than on clinical quality, which is predominantly the doctors' domain. Other results are discussed, such as that hospital managers must be mindful of the fact that process quality is at least as important as clinical quality in predicting patient satisfaction. The article concludes by proposing areas for future research.     

Human and organizational factors in offshore safety

The role of human and organizational factors in predicting accidents and incidents has become of major interest to the UK offshore oil and gas industry. Some of these factors had been measured in an earlier study focusing on the role of risk perception in determining accident involvement. The current study sought to extend the methodology by focusing on perceptions of organizational factors that could have an impact on safety. A self-report questionnaire was developed and distributed to 11 installations operating on the UK Continental Shelf. A total of 722 were returned (33% response rate) from a representative sample of the offshore workforce on these installations. The study investigated the underlying structure and content of offshore employees' attitudes to safety, feelings of safety and satisfaction with safety measures. Correlations and step-wise regression analysis were used to test the relationships between measures. The results suggest that 'unsafe' behaviour is the 'best' predictor of accidents/near misses as measured by self-report data and that unsafe behaviour is, in turn, driven by perceptions of pressure for production.     

A Design Theory Approach to Building Strategic Network‐Based Customer Service Systems*

Customer service is a key component of a firm's value proposition and a fundamental driver of differentiation and competitive advantage in nearly every industry. Moreover, the relentless coevolution of service opportunities with novel and more powerful information technologies has made this area exciting for academic researchers who can contribute to shaping the design and management of future customer service systems. We engage in interdisciplinary research—across information systems, marketing, and computer science—in order to contribute to the service design and service management literature. Grounded in the design‐science perspective, our study leverages marketing theory on the service‐dominant logic and recent findings pertaining to the evolution of customer service systems. Our theorizing culminates with the articulation of four design principles. These design principles underlie the emerging class of customer service systems that, we believe, will enable firms to better compete in an environment characterized by an increase in customer centricity and in customers' ability to self‐serve and dynamically assemble the components of solutions that fit their needs. In this environment, customers retain control over their transactional data, as well as the timing and mode of their interactions with firms, as they increasingly gravitate toward integrated complete customer solutions rather than single products or services. Guided by these design principles, we iterated through, and evaluated, two instantiations of the class of systems we propose, before outlining implications and directions for further cross‐disciplinary scholarly research.     

An Evaluation of the Effects of Very Difficult Goals

In 1968 the first cohesive theory on goal setting proposed that difficult goals produce higher levels of performance than easy goals and that specific goals produce a higher level of performance than “do your best” goals. While over 40 years of research supports this theory, there has been some discrepancy regarding the use of very difficult goals. This study was designed to examine the effects on performance of different levels of performance improvement goals and two different types of feedback, as feedback is often used in conjunction with goal setting. A group design was used with participants receiving one of two goal levels, and two different types of feedback. While no significant effects were found between the two types of feedback, goal level produced significant results in terms of performance and accuracy.     

Beyond (But Including) the CEO: Diffusing Corporate Social Responsibility throughout the Organization through Social Networks

Chief Executive Officers and other organizational leaders can affect how corporate social responsibility initiatives are perceived in their organizations. However, in order to be successful with regard to promoting CSR, leaders need to have strong network competencies and to move beyond charismatic leadership. In this paper we offer a critique of charismatic leadership as it relates to CSR, posit that the intellectual stimulation brought about by transformational leadership is more important in this regard, propose that internal and networking is a leadership competence highly relevant to CSR, and emphasize the importance of working through highly credible opinion leaders in promoting CSR.