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.     

Trial and Lifetime Smoking Risks Among African American College Students

Abstract

The authors surveyed 614 African American university students to determine the magnitude of cigarette use, identify risk factors, and develop models to predict smoking. More than half (58.3%) of the participants had smoked at least once, and 9.3% of that group were lifetime smokers. Among the lifetime smokers, 71.3% had smoked during the 30 days preceding the survey. More women (66.8%) than men (56.1%) had tried smoking and were classed as lifetime smokers. Residence, parental, and peer smoking (current and childhood) were associated with trying smoking; age, race/ethnicity, and marital status were additional factors for becoming a lifetime smoker. The risk of being a lifetime smoker was reduced when neither friends nor parents of the student smoked and the student viewed spirituality as important. The results of this study add to the growing understanding of health risk behaviors among African Americans and can be useful in reducing smoking.     

Orchestras as “Ensembles of Possibility”: Understanding the Experience of Orchestral Musicians Through the Lens of Communities of Practice

This article examines the professional culture of a UK symphony orchestra and the ways the musicians perceive themselves as a Community of Practice (CoP). The study draws on data from semi-structured interviews. Findings illuminated aspects of a CoP among the musicians, including having a shared purpose, valuing their collective endeavor, and experiencing tension between individual and collective development. These elements provide insights for our understanding of CoP, and highlight critical aspects of musical and interpersonal interactions that emerging professional musicians and advanced students need to develop and skillfully balance if they are to operate effectively within an orchestral CoP.     

A Service Provider's Elicitation of Its Customers’ Demand Distributions by a Price Mechanism

In a service environment a service provider needs to determine the amount and kinds of capacity to meet customers’ needs over many periods. To make good decisions, she needs to know the probability distribution of her customers’ demand in each period. We study a situation in which customers’ demand for a given service is random in each period, but inelastic, or modeled well by this assumption, and cannot be delayed to the next period. This article presents a mechanism that allows a service provider to learn the distribution of a customer's demand by offering him a set of contracts through which he can partially prepay for future service for a reduced cost for units of service based on anticipated needs. We describe the form of a set of contracts that will cause the customer to reveal his demand distribution as he minimizes his expected costs. To justify the effort of organizing and offering contracts, we present an application that demonstrates the cost savings to the service provider with better capacity planning using the truthfully elicited distribution.     

Are football referees really biased and inconsistent?: evidence on the incidence of disciplinary sanction in the English Premier League

Summary.  The paper presents a statistical analysis of patterns in the incidence of disciplinary sanction (yellow and red cards) that were taken against players in the English Premier League over the period 1996–2003. Several questions concerning sources of inconsistency and bias in refereeing standards are examined. Evidence is found to support a time consistency hypothesis, that the average incidence of disciplinary sanction is predominantly stable over time. However, a refereeing consistency hypothesis, that the incidence of disciplinary sanction does not vary between referees, is rejected. The tendency for away teams to incur more disciplinary points than home teams cannot be attributed to the home advantage effect on match results and appears to be due to a refereeing bias favouring the home team.     

Testing Branching Process Estimators of Cascading Failure with Data from a Simulation of Transmission Line Outages

We suggest a statistical estimator to quantify the propagation of cascading transmission line failures in large blackouts of electric power systems. We use a Galton‐Watson branching process model of cascading failure and the standard Harris estimator of the mean propagation modified to work when the process saturates at a maximum number of components. If the mean number of initial failures and the mean propagation are estimated, then the branching process model predicts the distribution of the total number of failures. We initially test this prediction on failure data generated by a simulation of cascading transmission line outages on two standard test systems. We discuss the effectiveness of the estimator in terms of how many cascades need to be simulated to predict the distribution of the total number of line outages accurately.     

The situational logic of entrepreneurship: a realist approach to national policy

National policy initiatives to encourage entrepreneurial behaviour are often developed with limited knowledge of the contextual constraints and causal factors. In this paper, we adopt a social realist approach, generally associated with critical realism, as a framework for analysing levels of entrepreneurial behaviour. The trigger for our study is the apparent anomaly of low levels of German entrepreneurship. We apply the morphogenetic framework of the sociologist Margaret Archer to Germany and then compare this to the United States. We conclude that particular so-called situational logics at the intersection of structure and culture constitute mechanisms which provide strategic direction for the decisions of potential entrepreneurs. We argue that a social realist stance based upon Archer’s sociology provides a practical grounding for research and policy development.     

Predicting the Comparative Strengths of National Football Teams*

Objectives. The aim of this study was to identify the chief social and economic factors predicting the strength of national Association Football (soccer) teams. Methods. A theoretical model was developed to establish an appropriate functional form for the relationship between team strength and the number of individuals available for selection. OLS regression was used to predict the performance ratings of 201 national teams. Results. The results showed that the strength of a nation's football team depends on the number of men who regularly play football, the length of its football tradition, the wealth of its population, the percentage of expatriate players in the national team, and climatic conditions. These factors explain 70 percent of the variance in international team ratings. Conclusions. Many of the factors that determine team strength are structural and cannot be manipulated by policymakers. Nations could, however, strengthen their teams by encouraging wider participation in the sport. Poorer nations could develop stronger teams by encouraging their best players to play professional club football abroad, although this might have negative consequences for domestic football.