It is a common problem. Every year, hospitals lose millions of dollars when items used in the course of a patient's care somehow slip through the system without ever being charged or reimbursed. At Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, a Six Sigma project team decided to look at the opportunities...
Since its founding in 1701, Yale University has offered undergraduate courses of study leading to a bachelor's degree. Until now, facility upgrades and retrofits were made with little consideration given to data management or integration. All the systems -- including several generations of building automation systems BAS, the power plant...
Affective Decision-Making ADM is a refutable and predictive theory of individual choice under risk and uncertainty. It generalizes expected utility theory by positing the existence of two cognitive processes - the "rational" and the "emotional" process. Observed choice is the result of their simultaneous interaction. This paper presents a model...
A new global study out today from Nokia and The Future Laboratory has found that by 2012 one quarter of entertainment will be generated "within peer communities" rather than by media companies. Nokia calls the phenomenon "circular entertainment." Tom Savigar, Trends Director at The Future Laboratory, comments: "Consumers are...
The expansion of global trade over the past few years has contributed to economic welfare, poverty reduction, and human development in important ways. Private sector-led standards - and increasingly open standards systems developed in the information technology and communications industries - promise a strong platform for continued innovation and economic...
We show that intermediate goods can be sourced to firms on the "Outside" that do not compete in the final product market, even when there are no economies of scale or cost advantages for these firms. What drives the phenomenon is that "Inside" firms, by accepting such orders, incur the...
This paper explains the behavior of firms in markets with one-way essential complements. These are markets in which one good is essential to the use of another but not vice versa, as arises with an operating system and application software. Our interest is in the division of surplus between the...
This paper provides strong evidence of advantageous selection in the Medigap insurance market, and analyze its sources. Using Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey MCBS data, the authors find that, conditional on controls for the price of Medigap, medical expenditures for senior citizens with Medigap coverage are, on average, about $4,000 less...
A dynamic model of experience goods pricing with independent private valuations has been developed. This paper shows that the optimal paths of sales and prices can be described in terms of a simple dichotomy. In a mass market, prices are declining over time. In a niche market, the optimal prices...
Bankruptcy is the legal procedure by which the assets of a debtor are distributed among its creditors. The debtor can be either an individual or a firm. In corporations, bankruptcy happens when either the firm or the creditors delegate a third party - be it a judge or other public...
The authors have determined that empirically how the Big Three automakers accommodate shocks to demand. They have the capability to change prices, alter labor inputs through temporary layoffs and overtime, or adjust inventories. These adjustments are interrelated, non-convex, and dynamic in nature. Combining weekly plant-level data on production schedules and...
Marketers have long recognized the opportunity to use timing as a segmentation device. In many markets, firms routinely use a sequential release strategy by introducing their higher-end products several months or even years before they release the lower-end products. While there has been much theoretical research on the optimal inter-release...
Entertainment products such as movies and DVDs have short life-cycles; their demand is usually greatest at the time of launch and declines very quickly in subsequent weeks. Hence marketers have to decide on advertising levels for such products even before the product is launched. This paper introduces the problem of...
The workplace intervention utilized in the Yale Work and Family Stress Program is based on a tripartite conceptual model of adaptive coping behavior: attacking the problem, rethinking the problem, and managing the stress. The model is derived from Pearlin and Schooler's hierarchy of coping mechanisms: responses that change the situation;...
Personalization services such as individual-specific advertising and couponing are a growth market. Some personalization service firms offer their services on an exclusive basis to manufacturers in a product category while others offer it on a non-exclusive basis. Some restrict the length of purchase history data used for personalization, while others...
This research paper shows analytically that, for large numbers of primary insurers, this mathematical expression provides a "square-root rule"; i.e., the optimal number of reinsurers in a market is given asymptotically by the square root of the total number of primary insurers. It notes further that an analogous "fourth root...
This paper shows that offshore outsourcing can occur even when there are no economies of scale or cost advantages for the foreign firms. What drives the phenomenon is that domestic firms, by accepting orders for intermediate goods, incur the disadvantage of becoming Stackelberg followers in the ensuing competition to sell...
One key implication of the possibility of transferring massive volumes of data across international borders at near-zero cost has been the opening up of the countries to what is called "Offshore outsourcing" or just "Outsourcing." The possibility holds the potential to effectively unite the global market for skilled labor. While...
The end of the twentieth century was marked by a sea change in global governance in the realm of Intellectual Property Rights IPRs. Whereas countries historically retained substantial autonomy with regard to what they defined as intellectual ''Property'' and the rights granted to the owners of intellectual property, the 1990s...
This paper applies a methodology of for decomposing large panel data into systematic and idiosyncratic components to both returns and turnover. Combining the methodology with a generalized-least-squares-based principal components procedure, the paper demonstrates that this approach works well for both returns and turnover despite the presence of severe heteroscedasticity and...
