Personalized Digital Assistants (PDAs) and other forms of hardware needed to collect survey data electronically have become more affordable and powerful in recent years, leading to their use in a number of surveys in developing countries. Simple use of these devices can offer the prospect of more timely data entry and greater accuracy in guiding respondents through skip patterns. Further benefi...

Making decisions about the economic selection of the customers plays a significant role in the sale and logistic management of the companies. Furthermore, another issue affecting the relationship between the suppliers and the customers is the proper and timely distribution of the products as well as the optimum mixing of the distribution routes to reduce transportation costs. In this paper, the...

Although recent policy initiatives aimed at concentrating selected surgical procedures in high-volume hospitals may reduce mortality, their economic implications have not been considered fully. From the hospital perspective, the primary effect of these policies will be to redistribute surgical profits to bigger centers. From the payer perspective, prices paid for procedures will likely increase...

Medicare claims for elderly admitted for psychiatric care were used to estimate the impact of hospital profit status on costs, length of stay (LOS), and rehospitalizations. No evidence was found that not-for-profits (NFPs) treated sicker patients or had fewer rehospitalizations. For-profits (FPs) actually treated poorer patients. Longer LOS and lower daily costs of NFPs were attributable to the...

An objective of many proposed corporate governance reforms is increased transparency. This goal has been relatively uncontroversial, as most observers believe increased transparency to be unambiguously good. We argue that, from a corporate governance perspective, there are likely to be both costs and benefits to increased transparency, leading to an optimum level beyond which increasing transpa...

A number of recent papers find that the volatility implied by index option prices significantly overstates future stock market volatility. We investigate whether this bias is purely due to measurement error and model misspecification, or whether the bias is also apparent in option market prices. We accomplish this by examining the profits for trading strategies designed to exploit the apparent ...

About 25% of the world's fisheries are depleted such that their current biomass is lower than the level that would maximize the sustained yield (MSY). By using methods not previously applied in the fisheries conservation context, we show in four disparate fisheries (including the long-lived and slow-growing orange roughy) that the dynamic maximum economic yield (MEY), the biomass that produces ...

What will your customer do next? Customers behave differently; they are not all average. Can you simultaneously meet your customers’ needs and improve profitability? You can by communicating and providing better offers to customers based on their behavior and demographics. Segmentation gives you the ability to group customers in many ways: 1) Business rules; 2) Supervised clustering – decision ...