When producers of goods (or services) are confronted by a situation in which their offerings no longer perfectly match consumer preferences, they must determine the extent to which the advertised features of the product reflect the product’s actual attributes. We find that the two important determinants of sellers’ advertising strategy are the Repeg cost ratio, Rp, and the Repeat Sales Coeffici...

The research at University College London School of Medicine (UCLSM) is supported by the Wellcome Trust, Action Research, the Special Trustees of University College Hospital, and the Muscular Dystrophy Group of Great Britain. The studies have been carried out with the assistance of Dr. P. S. Tofts, Mr. D. Delpy and Mr. A. Chu of the Department of Medical Physics (UCLSM), and Mr. N.Taylor of Kin...

System-initiated digressive proposals may be used to introduce new and unexpected information into automated telephone services. These digressions may be viewed as particularly pronounced forms of unsolicited interruptions as they contain information not directly related to the caller’s intended activity. In human–human conversation, interruptions are considered to be speech acts which intrinsi...

This paper develops a dynamic model of the decisions on the quantity and quality of children that is based on two premises: (1) the quality of children is uncertain when parents make a human capital investment decision, and (2) the quality distributions of two children of a woman are less correlated if they are fathered by different men than by the same man due to genetic inheritance. It natura...

Healthcare is increasingly dependent upon information technology (IT), but the accumulation of data has outpaced our capacity to use it to improve operating efficiency, clinical quality, and financial effectiveness. Moreover, hospitals have lagged in adopting thoughtful analytic approaches that would allow operational leaders and providers to capitalize upon existing data stores. In this manusc...

BACKGROUND Hospital leaders usually provide financial support to hospitalists groups, often with an expectation of improved performance on publicly reported quality metrics. Whether the presence of hospitalists is associated with differences in hospital-level performance is unknown. OBJECTIVE Assess the relationship between hospitalist prevalence and quality performance. DESIGN Cross-sectio...

We consider a repeated duopoly game where each firm privately chooses its investment in quality, and realized quality is a noisy indicator of the firm’s investment. We focus on dynamic reputation equilibria, whereby consumers ‘discipline’ a firm by switching to its rival in the case that the realized quality of its product is too low. This type of equilibrium is characterized by consumers’ tole...

In 1981, Paris and Wilkie [28] indicated it was an open question whether IΣ0 would satisfy the Second Incompleteness Theorem for Herbrand deduction. We will show that some specially formulated axiomizations for IΣ0 can evade the Herbrandized version of the Second Incompleteness Theorem.