Lean manufacturing has been widely adopted by many production companies. Apart from the operational difficulty associated with conversion from a traditional, functional based operation, adoption of Lean manufacturing involves significant organizational transformations. It requires formation of work teams, comprised of multi-skilled workers. The work teams are preferably self directed and need t...

We utilize a unique pair of experiments to study the precise ways in which reductions in asymmetric information alter the outcome in a credit market. We formulate a general model in which the information set held by lenders, and what borrowers believe their lenders to know, enter separately. This model illustrates that non-experimental identification of the supplyand demand-side information in ...

Endosymbiotic bacteria within some insects supply their hosts with essential nutrients that enable those hosts to live in specialized environmental niches. In particular, blood-feeders such as bedbugs and tsetse flies, and plant-sap feeders such as pea aphids, citrus mealybugs, and cicadas rely heavily on their microbial symbiotic partners for B vitamins and amino acids that are otherwise lacki...

Harm reduction approaches to drug control have almost exclusively focussed on consumers in northern countries. This article supports recent analysis that indicates that such policies also hold relevance for producer countries by drawing on recent policy innovations in Bolivia. When Evo Morales, the president of the national coca grower confederation, was elected the country's first indigenous p...

This article assesses the arguments and evidence concerning the likely effectiveness of four supply-side cost-containment measures. The health planning efforts of the 1970s, particularly certificate-of-need regulations, had very limited success in containing costs. The new and related tools of technology assessment and practice guidelines hold some promise for refining benefit packages, but the...

The risk of supply disruption increases as firms seek to procure from cheaper, but unproven, suppliers. We model a supply chain consisting of a single buyer and two suppliers, both of whom compete for the buyer’s order and face risk of supply disruption. One supplier is comparatively more reliable but also more expensive, while the other unreliable one is cheaper and faces higher risk of disrup...

As managed care gains increasing influence over the American health financing system, economic pressures and emerging market realities have created a fertile climate for wishful thinking on the part of hospital executives and physicians. Rather than accept the inevitability of reducing excess capacity and incomes, providers cling to self-serving myths about managed care's strategic direction. H...

Demand for primary and revision arthroplasty is expected to double in 10 years. Coincident with this is a decreased interest in arthroplasty by residents. Retirement of arthroplasty surgeons further threatens access. This study determines if supply will meet demand. Survey data were used to calculate the 2016 workforce. Demand in 2016 was estimated using the Nationwide Inpatients Sample. Betwee...

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This article introduces a supply-side perspective to the study of counterterrorism, where terrorists are viewed as combining terrorist attacks to achieve an aggregate output (e.g., social anxiety). With this novel approach, the elasticity of substitution, associated with the terrorists’ production function, becomes a key determinant of the effectiveness of deterrence. If this elasticity is larg...