Motivating Retail Marketing Effort: Optimal Contract Design

We study a distribution channel where a manufacturer relies on a sales agent for selling the product, and for investing in the most appropriate marketing effort. The agent's effort is hard to monitor. In addition, the cost of effort is the agent's private information. These impose challenges to the manufacturer in its endeavor to influence the agent's marketing effort provisions and to allocate profit between the two parties. We propose two contract forms. The franchise fee contract is a two‐part price schedule specifying a variable wholesale price and a fixed franchise fee. The retail price maintenance contract links the allowed retail price that the agent charges customers with total payment to the manufacturer and sales level. Under information asymmetry, for implementing either contract form, the manufacturer needs to offer a menu of contracts, hoping to invoke the “revelation principle” when the agent picks a certain contract from that menu. We show that the two contract forms perform differently, and each party's preference toward a particular contract form is linked with the total reservation profit level and/or the sales agent's cost type. We provide managerial guidelines for the manufacturer in selecting a better contract form under different conditions.     

Motivations to Volunteer Among College Students in India

India’s cultural context suggests that student volunteering may be influenced by a constellation of factors. However, scholars have not examined student volunteering in India. Addressing this, we examine motivations to volunteer in a sample of 596 Indian college students. A majority of students volunteered. Three types of volunteering emerged: formal volunteering in non-profit agencies, informal volunteering outside these agencies, and hybrid volunteering consisting of volunteering informally in non-profit agencies. Structural and individual-level factors influenced volunteering. Altruism was associated with volunteering in all three sectors, but did not influence volunteering frequency. Parents, friends, and the internet were salient sources of information that encouraged volunteering. Two instrumental pathways of volunteering emerged: poor- and upper-class students volunteered to secure educational opportunities, while middle-class students volunteered to secure employment. Institutional opportunities to volunteer in religious settings and as mentors facilitated volunteering, while mandated volunteering in educational institutions, decreased engagement in it later.     

An Entropy Measure of Flow Dominance for Predicting Operations Performance

The flow of jobs within a system is an important operating characteristic that influences system performance. While the majority of previous studies on manufacturing performance consider product flows only as an implicit parameter of the design, we introduce an explicit measure of flow dominance based on entropy and test its efficacy in predicting the performance of manufacturing systems. In computing entropy flow dominance (EFD), we aggregate information embedded in the routings of all products within a system into a single measure. EFD is designed to indicate on a 0–1 scale the level of flow dominance, where 1 represents a pure flow shop and 0 represents a pure job shop. The result is a simple measure that provides managers a way to explain and predict complex phenomena. Our experimental results indicate that EFD is a statistically significant determinant of manufacturing system performance. Furthermore, the model including EFD as an independent variable accurately predicts manufacturing system performance as measured by job flow time, flow time standard deviation, and work in process. We note that the same results can also apply to service systems, such as the “back‐room” low‐contact type systems, that have similar characteristics as manufacturing systems.     

Stilling the tremors: Resurrecting HIV services in Haiti's post‐earthquake tent cities

The January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti severely undermined HIV service provision in the country. Almost 10 percent of Haitians were displaced and now live in temporary tent communities. Little is known about how HIV services are being provided to Haitians with HIV in these encampments. This study addresses this lacuna by conducting a process evaluation of the manner in which a collaboration among Haitian community‐based HIV service providers, a US‐based HIV service provider, and a US‐based academic research team resurrected HIV services in the encampments. Efforts to set up HIV services in the encampments proceeded through three stages: (i) an initial crisis response that activated established networks and identified feasible goals; (ii) the development of services by building research capacity, conducting needs assessments, addressing logistical challenges, and establishing community‐based services; and (iii) the sustaining of the initiative by targeting resources and negotiating in the political arena. Implications of the protocol for future efforts are discussed. Key Practitioner Message: ● Resurrecting HIV services in post‐disaster zones; ● Utilizing cross‐country, provider–academic partnerships to develop service capacity; ● Targeting structural barriers to establish HIV services in resource‐poor settings.