Locating Facilities in the Presence of Disruptions and Incomplete Information*

In this article, we analyze a location model where facilities may be subject to disruptions. Customers do not have advance information about whether a given facility is operational or not, and thus may have to visit several facilities before finding an operational one. The objective is to locate a set of facilities to minimize the total expected cost of customer travel. We decompose the total cost into travel, reliability, and information components. This decomposition allows us to put a value on the advance information about the states of facilities and compare it to the reliability and travel cost components, which allows a decision maker to evaluate which part of the system would benefit the most from improvements. The structure of optimal solutions is analyzed, with two interesting effects identified: facility centralization and co‐location; both effects appear to be stronger than in the complete information case, where the status of each facility is known in advance.     

Inducing fertility change

This paper explores the inducement of fertility change in situations where actual fertility levels do not coincide with socially optimal fertility levels. The motivating example is that of higher than socially optimal levels of fertility in LDCs, but the approach is equally applicable to contexts of lower than socially optimal levels of fertility in DCs. The paper proposes a prisoner's dilemma characterization of higher than socially optimal levels of fertility in LDCs and offers a resolution of the dilemma, and hence a possible route to fertility-reduction policies, through the generation of mutual altruism. The prisoner's dilemma characterization hinges on the assumption that there is some social sharing of the costs associated with a given level of fertility but less or none with respect to the benefits. The mutual altruism solution depends on representing an agent's preferences as a specific convex combination of his/her and the other agent's original utilities. The unique critical level of such altruism is identified and hence a stopping rule is provided. Several examples from the array of extensions and possible implications of this approach are discussed briefly.     

Reputation, Image, Prestige, and Goodwill: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Organizational Standing

Reputation, image, prestige, and goodwill areconcepts used by different disciplines, e.g., economics,marketing, sociology, and accounting, to denote thegeneral standing of organizations among their counterparts. In this paper, the variousconcepts are reviewed and compared in terms ofsemantics, organizational cost, determinants, andimplications, among others. An interdisciplinary,multiconstituency framework of organizational standing isdeveloped, and research propositions aredelineated.