As a way to generate interest in the Mars program, the Mars Society held a competition challenging groups to build a Mars Rover. Engineering students from the University of Michigan entered this worldwide competition. It was through the Mars Rover Project's association with Stewart & Stevenson that Generac came into...
Adhering to the tradition of excellence that is synonymous with its parent institution, the University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers recently received Hospitals for a Healthy Environment's Environmental Leadership Award in April 2002. Despite the hospital-wide efforts to cut back medical waste, the UM Department of Pathology realized the...
The authors present and implement an infrastructure for automating the negotiation of business contracts. Underlying the system is a declarative language for both (1) fully-specified, executable contracts and (2) partially-specified contracts that are in the midst of being negotiated, specifically via automated auctions. The language is based on Courteous Logic...
After a year of disappointing scores, the annual American Customer Satisfaction Index put together by the University of Michigan saw a modest 0.4 percent jump on the index's 100 point scale to 75.2. WINNERS. Scoring well were hotels such as Marriott, Hyatt and Hilton with scores of...
Merrill Lynch recently provided us with a perfect example of poor succession planning. As more and more baby boomers go into retirement in the next decade -- with some staying on board but taking a back seat -- organizations will need to learn from failures like this. After leaders put their plans...
How Tata's Talent Development Keeps MBAs from Saying Goodbye to IndiaDidn't BNet just devalue the MBA degree?Hi - Well, given that BNet recently published a set of articles casting negative views on the value o/t MBA ... it's not a real concern, right?http://www.bnet.com/2403-13070_23-170538.htmlTAS- Chartered AccountantsThe similar scheme was introduced for...
Jack Welch is famous for implementing GE's brutal performance evaluation, where employees are ranked against each other and the bottom 10 percent of the list gets booted every year. Such "forced ranking" systems have long been controversial, with experts divided on if they are truly effective. New research from the...
Material imbalances at some companies have been traced to the procedures they use for forecasting demand based on the usual normality assumption. In this paper we discuss a simple and easy to implent nonparametric technique to forecast the demand distribution based on statistical learning, and ordering policies based on it,...
This paper investigates the influence of incumbent firms on the decision to allow foreign direct investment into an industry. Based on data from India's economic reforms, the results suggest that firms in concentrated industries are more successful at preventing foreign entry that state-owned firms are more successful at stopping foreign...
While the incentives to support regional arrangements in East Asia are limited resistance to market opening remains strong in agriculture and basic materials. Japan therefore has not pursued regional arrangements with much enthusiasm, though it has taken tentative steps like the JSEPA treaty. The books analytical framework suggests that grander...
The ever increasing cross border flows of trade, investment and finance, as well as the rise of technology, have given rise to a global economy. There are numerous advantages in this shift to a global economy in terms of lower costs and greater economies of scale. However, domestically and internationally,...
There is a powerful impulse in the world today hastening the process of international economic integration. Economic integration means greater inter-dependency among countries, greater international trade, greater market integration in commodity prices, and more extensive flows of investment and revenues. The process of globalization incorporates a number of factors: the...
This paper addresses the issues of authority and communication in the management of innovation within an organization. In particular, the paper shows that when the principal can fund only one of two competing research or investment ideas, it can be optimal for the principal to listen to only one of...
Dynamic three-dimensional 3D animation can be of significant value in improving the verification validation, and communication of Discrete-Event Simulation DES models of construction operations, which in turn can make the models more credible and thus useful in operations planning and decision making. This paper presents research that led to the...
This study explored the relationships between emotional intelligence, locus of control, and self-efficacy among gifted and talented students participating in a two week long summer educational program. Result revealed statistically significant correlations between these variables. Gender was found to moderate the relationships. Result of this study alludes to the theoretical...
Globalization and the growth of outsourcing and off shoring are challenging international trade regulations. This paper asserts that current GATS framework suffers from several weaknesses including an inadequate classification method, difficulties in determining rules of origin and an opening for protectionist approaches through an inconclusive interpretation to footnote 9 to...
This paper emphasizes the key roles that services play domestically and internationally in terms of accounting for rising shares of domestic output and employment as well as cross-border trade and foreign direct investment that provide enhanced export opportunities and lower-cost imports. Services are commonly subject to a variety of regulatory...
This paper develops a methodology for decomposing cross-country variation in export unit values into quality versus real price components. The methodology is based on revealed preferences in an environment where consumers have a taste for variety. The authors have derived conditions under which the unobserved export quality ratio of any...
