About two years ago I was asked to undertake a short-term project for the Washington Wheat Commission. The commission had become increasingly concerned with the rapid and continual growth in year-end, carry-over stocks. Their concern was reflected in a project request, which asked for a “quickie” investigation of the potential for expanding the level of domestic utilization of wheat as a means ...

Drug companies may be required to report shortages sooner, but the FDA legislation still lacks power.

Financial contagion from liquidity shocks has being recently ascribed as a prominent driver of systemic risk in interbank lending markets. Building on standard compartment models used in epidemics, here we develop an EDB (Exposed-Distressed-Bankrupted) model for the dynamics of liquidity shocks reverberation between banks, and validate it on electronic market for interbank deposits data. We sho...

This paper describes a multi-methodology approach used to reveal feedback dynamics operating in supply of, and demand for, skilled information and communications technology (ICT) employees. It describes how a large public service organization has had difficulty in adapting to rapid technological change, and how this has been exacerbated by employee shortages. The impacts of changing demographic...

Personnel shortages are evident for a number of disciplines in the health professions, from physicians to nurses. Project CRISTAL (Collaborative Rural Interdisciplinary Service Training and Learning) was designed to immerse students in rural and reservation communities and encourage them to consider practicing in locations that have shortages of health care providers. Students gain an understan...

The changing pattern of shortages in our remote hospital is not unexpected, reflecting the well-documented burden of international drug shortages. 2 What is alarming though, particularly with the vulnerabilities of supply in a remote setting, is the lack of national response from government or industry to reduce the occurrence and mitigate the impact of shortages. 2–3 As a recent example, in Ma...

In practice the items received in a lot may contain defective items, and the screening process to eliminate the defective items may involve both a Type I and a Type II error. Due to the defective items and the inspection errors, shortages may sometimes occur. In this paper, we develop an economic order quantity model with imperfect quality items, inspection errors, shortage backordering, and sa...