Assessing Risk of Victimization through Epidemiological Concepts: An Alternative Analytic Strategy Applied to Routine Activities Theory*

Cet article fait appel aux concepts et aux techniques de l'épidémiologie pour examiner la capacité de la théorie des activités routinières à expliquer le risque de victimisation criminelle. En allant au-delà de l'identification des facteurs de risque de victimisation, les auteurs se demandent comment les changements des facteurs de causalité pourraient influer sur ce risque dans la population générale. lis trouvent que les prédicteurs établis avec des méthodes plus traditionnelles expliquent la plus grande partie du risque, mais que certains sont moins importants pour la compréhension du risque de la population dans l'ensemble en raison du petit nombre de personnes qui leur est associé, tandis que d'autres sont plus utiles parce qu'ils s'appliquent à un plus grand nombre de personnes.
This paper draws upon concepts and techniques from epidemiology to examine the ability of routine activities theory to account for the risk of criminal victimization. Moving beyond the identification of risk factors for victimization, we ask how changes to causal factors might affect the risk of victimization in the general population. We find that predictors identified with more traditional methods account for the bulk of the risk, but that some are less important for understanding overall population risk because of the small numbers of people associated with them, while others are more helpful because they apply to larger numbers.     

SHIFTING PRODUCTION BOTTLENECKS: CAUSES,CURES, AND CONUNDRUMS

We examine the phenomenon of shifting production bottlenecks from an analytic perspective. We quantify the propensity of a work center to be a bottleneck, defined as maximal queue length, using a simple Jackson production network model. Comparison of the analytic model against an empirical simulation-based model shows that the two are in good agreement. A scalar measure of bottleneck shiftiness is proposed and used to investigate several policies for mitigating shiftiness. Simulation experiments show that several commonly observed managerial policies for coping with shifting bottlenecks actually increase shiftiness, but that shiftiness declines when the capacity of nonbottleneck resources is increased.     

POSTED PRICES VERSUS BARGAINING IN MARKETS WITH ASYMMETRIC INFORMATION

A search model is employed to analyze the choice between posting a price and bargaining for the seller of an asset who is imperfectly informed about both buyer valuations and buyer bargaining abilities. A mean preserving increase in risk of buyer valuations is relevant (and beneficial) to the seller; however, only the mean (and not the distribution) of buyer bargaining abilities is relevant. If is sufficiently high, the seller utilizes a posted price. Interestingly, social welfare decreases in while an increase in reduces expected search costs, it also results in misallocation of the good because the seller is less discriminating. ( JEL D42, D83)     

POM TEACHING AND RESEARCH IN THE 21st CENTURY

We offer a view of operations management in the future based on a mapping of the field's history. We discuss issues raised by this view of the future that we expect will affect those who will teach and conduct research in operations management.