The once and future crisis

The insurance crisis of the mid-1980s produced a number of legal and public policy reactions. Although many of the immediate symptoms of that crisis have disappeared, a number of its underlying causes remain. This article analyzes the continuing effect of these factors on the insurance markets, and predicts the occurrence of a milder crisis during the mid-1990s.     

The emerging self in conceptualizing and treating mental illness

1. The course of severe mental illnesses is more heterogeneous than previously thought and is influenced by many complex, interacting factors. 2. The experience of self and capacity to cope of people with mental illnesses contribute to the recovery process. 3. Changes in traditional treatment models and a focus on broader societal interventions are needed to facilitate recovery. 4. Psychiatric nurses play an important role in these new developments as evident, for example, in the 3R Program (relapse, recovery, and rehabilitation).     

Practical problems associated with programme evaluation in third world countries

Problems in conducting programme evaluation in third world countries can be divided into four interrelated categories: those associated with design, personnel, time, and budget. Some of the problems in each of these areas are considered and suggestions for dealing with them are presented.     

Product Life‐Cycle Management of Packaged Software

A software product becomes less valuable for its consumers over time due to technological and economic obsolescence. As a result, firms have an opportunity to introduce and sell upgrades that provide higher utility to consumers compared to an older and out‐of‐date software product. In a market that is growing and consists of homogeneous customers, we prove that the optimal upgrade intervals are monotonically increasing throughout the product's life cycle solely because of demand and cost considerations. This finding is in conformity with empirical evidence, thus validating our theoretical model. We then present comparative statics results to show that increase in the rate of obsolescence or network externalities may sometimes increase upgrade intervals for early upgrades and decrease these for later upgrades in the product's life cycle, but increase in market growth rate always decreases these intervals. Further, when successive software upgrades are forward compatible, upgrade intervals are longer than when they are not. Finally, we present three separate extensions of our model to showcase the robustness of our results. Since upgrade development costs depend on upgrade intervals, these insights help managers understand how costing for upgrades changes over the product's life cycle.     

An Industrial Ocean-Cargo Shipping Problem

This paper reports the modeling and solution of an industrial ocean-cargo shipping problem. The problem involves the delivery of bulk products from an overseas port to transshipment ports on the Atlantic Coast, and then over land to customers. The decisions made include the number and the size of ships to charter in each time period during the planning horizon, the number and location of transshipment ports to use, and transportation from ports to customers. The complexity of this problem is compounded by the cost structure, which includes fixed charges in both ship charters and port operations. Such a large scale, dynamic, and stochastic problem is reduced to a solvable stationary, deterministic, and cyclical model. The process of modeling the problem and the solution of the resultant mixed integer program are described in detail. Recommendations from this study have been implemented.