Assessing and communicating heterogeneity of treatment effects for patient subpopulations: Panel discussion on considerations in design and analysis

Clinical trials are primarily conducted to understand the average effects treatments have on patients. However, patients are heterogeneous in the severity of the condition and in ways that affect what treatment effect they can expect. It is therefore important to understand and characterize how treatment effects vary. The design and analysis of clinical studies play critical roles in evaluating and characterizing heterogeneous treatment effects. This panel discussed considerations in design and analysis under the recognition that there are heterogeneous treatment effects across subgroups of patients. Panel members discussed many questions including: What is a good estimate of the treatment effect in me, a 65-year-old, bald, Caucasian-American, male patient? What magnitude of heterogeneity of treatment effects (HTE) is sufficiently large to merit attention? What role can prior evidence about HTE play in confirmatory trial design and analysis? Is there anything described in the 21st Century Cures Act that would benefit from greater attention to HTE? An example of a Bayesian approach addressing multiplicity when testing for treatment effects in subgroups will be provided. We can do more or better at understanding heterogeneous treatment effects and providing the best information on heterogeneous treatment effects.     

中国文论的传统性与现代性

中国文论的“传统性”指它在长期的发展演化过程中形成的一系列特征,“现代性”则指它所隐含的现代文论因子及其与西方文论的关系,二者之间的关系涉及古代文论研究的基本观念和方法问题,有必要从理论上加以反思和清理。一种普遍的误解是以为西方文论都是大部头的体系性著作,对“西方”的理解也过于狭隘。“中西比较”这样的研究方式几乎是不成立的,因为它将原本庞大、复杂的文化发展过程大大简化、割裂,抽取出一些所谓的特征来进行比较;如果一定要比较,至少要在中、西、南亚3个传统之间进行。历史在变化,不可能“回到”古代文论,只能不断地学习它、使用它。学术研究的要义是把问题搞清楚,不能把纯粹的学术问题转化为社会问题或文化问题。     

Separation of powers and the Ecuadorian Supreme Court: exploring presidential–judicial conflict in a post-transition democracy

In 2005 ongoing political conflict between the executive and legislative branches of government in Ecuador culminated in a struggle over the judiciary. These events resulted in the dismissal, re-constitution, and dismissal again of the Ecuadorian high court (the Corte Suprema de Justicia) and the impeachment of the president. This paper uses the political crisis surrounding the dismissal of the Ecuadorian Supreme Court of Justice to examine the broader phenomenon of executive branch attacks on the judiciary in South American and Africa. We make three general observations: (1) the longevity of the judiciary alone (time without attack) does not guarantee a sufficiently deep reservoir of diffuse support to protect it from successful efforts at structural change or dissolution, (2) despite previous evidence that multilateral constitutional processes result in increased court independence (Dargent, 2009), we conclude that multi-party institutional arrangements are more vulnerable to the types of crisis that cause them to seek to use courts and their legitimacy to achieve political goals thereby limiting previous gains in independence, and (3) a court's institutional legitimacy is enhanced when it survives political threats from other branches of government. The crisis in Ecuador is used to demonstrate the challenges facing newer democracies with continuing multilateral conflict as well as the utility of thinking about how, why and when political institutions attack high courts and how the judiciary and citizens respond.     

Search for Alternatives and Collaboration with Incumbents: Two-Sided Sourcing Behavior in Business Markets*

Sourcing strategies in business markets have been considered separately and the practice of two-sided sourcing behavior—engaging in search for alternative suppliers and collaboration with an incumbent supplier—has not been examined. To fill that gap, we first identify boundary conditions under which the poor performance of an incumbent supplier intensifies an original equipment manufacturer's (OEM) search and collaboration. Then, we examine how an OEM's two-sided sourcing behavior influences one of the critical elements of sourcing performance: the responsiveness of the incumbent supplier. Our proposed hypotheses were tested with data from a national survey of 539 OEM purchasing managers in the Japanese electronics industry. The analysis results indicate three main findings. First, two environmental conditions—pace of technological change and volume uncertainty—have contrasting influences on the link between incumbent supplier performance and an OEM's search and collaboration. While uncertainty from the upstream channel (pace of technological change) enhances an OEM's search and collaboration, uncertainty from the downstream channel (volume uncertainty) lowers an OEM's search and collaboration. Second, an OEM's dependence on its incumbent supplier has differential effects: an OEM reduces search as its dependence on incumbent supplier increases, while it enhances collaboration as its dependence on incumbent supplier increases. Third, while search alone has a negative effect on responsiveness of an incumbent supplier, engaging in two-sided sourcing behavior (i.e., combining search with collaboration) has a positive effect on responsiveness of the incumbent supplier.     

Coaching for insight. A tool for dealing with disruptive physician behavior

Discover ways to provide disruptive physicians with a clear picture of themselves so they can better understand how their behaviors affect others.     

A Note on the Best Linear Unbiased Estimation Based on Order Statistics

The appropriateness of replacing the term regression to the mean with regression to the mode is discussed.     

A synthetic control chart for the coefficient of variation

The coefficient of variation (CV) control chart has recently been introduced in the literature. Here, the salient features of this chart and the conforming run length chart are integrated to produce a synthetic coefficient of variation (SynCV) chart. The run length profile of the SynCV chart is numerically compared with the originally proposed chart and the upward EWMA-γ² chart. The SynCV chart outperforms the original CV chart, while the EWMA-γ² outperforms the SynCV chart for small increases in the CV. However, for large increases in the CV, the SynCV chart outperforms the EWMA-γ² chart.     

Estimation of Mode Using Auxiliary Information

In this article, we propose naïve estimator, ratio estimator, and difference estimator of the mode of a study variable by using the known mode of an auxiliary variable. The asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators are studied analytically as well as empirically for different situations. The proper use of auxiliary information is found to result in efficient ratio and difference estimators than the naïve estimator.