Are Happier Nations More Responsible? Examining the Link Between Happiness and Sustainability

Social Indicators Research - The paper uses aggregate data from 152 countries to analyze the association between happiness and sustainability. Our paper provides new evidence on happiness and...     

Reserving Capacity for Urgent Patients in Primary Care

This paper examines the effect of the common practice of reserving slots for urgent patients in a primary health care practice on two service quality measures: the average number of urgent patients that are not handled during normal hours (either handled as overtime, referred to other physicians, or referred to the emergency room) and the average queue of non‐urgent or routine patients. We formulate a stochastic model of appointment scheduling in a primary care practice. We conduct numerical experiments to optimize the performance of this system accounting for revenue and these two service quality measures as a function of the number of reserved slots for urgent patients. We compare traditional methods with the advanced‐access system advocated by some physicians, in which urgent slots are not reserved, and evaluate the conditions under which alternative appointment scheduling mechanisms are optimal. Finally, we demonstrate the importance of patient arrival dynamics to their relative performance finding that encouraging routine patients to call for same‐day appointments is a key ingredient for the success of advanced‐access.     

Supplies from developing countries: Optimal order quantities under loss risks

When raw material suppliers of a global supply chain are situated in developing countries, not only will there be long lead times but there could also be a possibility of material losses in transit. The magnitude of the losses will be uncertain and can be significant. We consider the optimization of order quantity decisions in such situations. The long lead times imply that we need to take into account the uncertainty in finished goods demands for which the raw materials are to be ordered. The order quantities have to be optimized carefully as they determine the “real options” that become available later in production plans. Using data from the plywood industry and using stochastic programming we demonstrate a method for solving such problems. The method combines simulation and optimization. An interesting observation we make is that the optimal order quantity of a material need not be monotonic in expected loss of that material. In addition, we offer explanations as to why the expected loss need not be monotonic.     

Designing Efficient Infrastructural Investment and Asset Transfer Mechanisms in Humanitarian Supply Chains

We analyze the efficacy of different asset transfer mechanisms and provide policy recommendations for the design of humanitarian supply chains. As a part of their preparedness effort, humanitarian organizations often make decisions on resource investments ex ante because doing so allows for rapid response if an adverse event occurs. However, programs typically operate under funding constraints and donor earmarks with autonomous decision‐making authority resting with the local entities, which makes the design of efficient humanitarian supply chains a challenging problem. We formulate this problem in an agency setting with two independent aid programs, where different asset transfer mechanisms are considered and where investments in resources are of two types: primary resources that are needed for providing the aid and infrastructural investments that improve the operation of the aid program in using the primary resources. The primary resources are acquired from earmarked donations. We show that allowing aid programs the flexibility of transferring primary resources improves the efficiency of the system by yielding greater social welfare than when this flexibility does not exist. More importantly, we show that a central entity that can acquire primary resources from one program and sell them to the other program can further improve system efficiency by providing a mechanism that facilitates the transfer of primary resources and eliminates losses from gaming. This outcome is achieved without depriving the individual aid programs of their decision‐making autonomy while maintaining the constraints under which they operate. We find that outcomes with centralized resource transfer but decentralized infrastructural investments by the aid programs are the same as with a completely centralized system (where both resource transfer and infrastructural investments are centralized).     

Correction to: Are Happier Nations More Responsible? Examining the Link Between Happiness and Sustainability

Social Indicators Research - A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-021-02725-4     

Time series analysis of fertility and female labor market behavior

Cointegration methods are employed to investigate relations among total fertility, female wages, labor force participation, educational attainment, and male relative cohort size. Two long run relations among the series are found, and these are identified as a fertility and a labor supply equation. All covariates enter into these relations with significant coefficients and theoretically plausible signs. Innovation analysis shows that both fertility and female labor force participation respond to changes in relative cohort size in directions consistent with the Easterlin hypothesis. Female labor force participation responds significantly to fertility shocks, but reverse effects are insignificant.All correspondence to Robert McNown. The authors wish to thank Cristobal Ridao-Cano, Kenneth Land, Alessandro Cigno, and an anonymous referee for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Responsible editor: Alessandro Cigno.     

The Effectiveness of Decisional Guidance: An Empirical Evaluation

Decisional guidance is defined as how a decision support system (DSS) influences its users as they structure and execute the decision‐making process. It is assumed that decisional guidance has profound effects on decision making, but these effects are understudied and empirically unproven. This paper describes an empirical, laboratory‐experiment‐based evaluation of the effectiveness of deliberate decisional guidance and its four types. We developed and used a comprehensive model consisting of four evaluation criteria: decision quality, user satisfaction, user learning, and decision‐making efficiency. On these criteria, we compared decisional guidance versus no guidance, informative versus suggestive decisional guidance, and predefined versus dynamic decisional guidance. We found that deliberate decisional guidance was more effective on all four criteria; suggestive guidance was more effective in improving decision quality and user satisfaction, and informative guidance was more effective in user learning about the problem domain, whereas dynamic guidance was more effective than predefined guidance in improving decision quality and user learning; and both suggestive guidance and dynamic guidance reduced the decision time.     

Process evaluation of the midwifery initiated oral health-dental service program: Perceptions of midwives in Greater Western Sydney,Australia

Background

Despite links between poor maternal oral health, adverse pregnancy outcomes and early childhood decay there is limited emphasis on maternal oral health in Australia. To address this, the Midwifery Initiated Oral Health Dental Service (MIOH-DS) program was developed in collaboration with the Australian College of Midwives.

The Detection of Nuclear Materials Losses*

The identification and location of materials losses in nuclear facilities is an important issue. Many complexities arise in monitoring such losses. These complexities include the dependency among materials balance observations and the influence of errors (outliers) on parameter estimates of various monitoring methods. The proposed Joint Estimation procedure is superior to standard methods (control chart and CUSUM) and to methods that build in correlation (ARMA control chart, ARMA CUSUM, and the Generalized M procedure) in the detection of nuclear materials losses. The Joint Estimation procedure is robust to the influence of outliers, is flexible in accommodating a range of dependencies among observations, and provides information on the type of loss. Further, the procedure is reliable in that it yields a probability of false alarms and a probability of detecting losses closer to specifications.