Decision Making & Negotiations

The problem of determining nurse staffing levels in a hospital environment is a complex task due to variable patient census levels and uncertain service capacity caused by nurse absenteeism. In this paper, we combine an empirical investigation of the factors affecting nurse absenteeism rates with an analytical treatment of nurse staffing decisions using a novel variant of the newsvendor model. Using data from the emergency department of a large urban hospital, we find that absenteeism rates are correlated with anticipated future nurse workload levels.

Many organizations, such as banks, airlines, telecommunications companies, and police departments, routinely use queueing models to help manage and allocate resources in order to respond to demands in a timely and cost-efficient fashion. Though queueing analysis has been used in hospitals and other healthcare settings, its use in this sector is not widespread.

In July 2007, Scripps Networks acquired Recipezaar, a user-generated recipe and cooking Website with a captive community of 2.3 million visitors. By September, Deanna Brown, president of Scripps Networks Digital, grappled with how to best integrate the recent acquisition into Scripps Networks Digital and its affiliated Website, FoodNetwork.com. Should monetization efforts trump the interests and aesthetic tastes of Recipezaar's members? Would restructuring the Recipezaar team dampen the enthusiasm of its five crucial employees and adversely affect the community they had built?

Blight findings have functioned as a cornerstone for condemnation since the great urban decline of the mid-twentieth century prompted governments at all levels throughout the country to intervene in the real estate market. Elements of blight, and then the term itself, became a basis for this intervention. But the use of blight as a basis for takings has become increasingly controversial as its application has migrated from slum clearance to urban renewal, then to economic development projects, and on to revenue-enhancing projects.

This paper shows that Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) meaningfully affect firm performance. Using variation in CEO exposure resulting from the numer of days a CEO is hospitalized, we provide estimates of the effect of CEOs on firm policies, holding firm and CEO matches constant. We have four main findings. First, CEOs have an economically and statistically significant effect on profitability, revenue, and investment outcomes. Firms whose CEOs are hospitalized underperform when their chief executives are sick but otherwise exhibit similar performance relative to other firms.

The Internet has increased the flexibility of retailers, allowing them to operate an online arm in addition to their physical stores. The online channel offers potential benefits in selling to customer segments that value the convenience of online shopping, but it also raises new challenges. These include the higher likelihood of costly product returns when customers' ability to "touch and feel" products is important in determining fit.

This paper reviews the pattern of bank failures during the financial crisis and asks whether there was a link with corporate governance. It revisits the theory of bank governance and suggests a multiconstituency approach that emphasizes the role of weak creditors. The empirical evidence suggests that, on average, banks with stronger risk officers, less independent boards, and executives with less variable remuneration incurred fewer losses. There is no evidence that institutional shareholders opposed aggressive risk-taking.

Direct advertising—sending promotional messages to individual customers—is increasingly used by marketers as a result of the recent improvements in consumer reachability. Most current methods to calculate optimal budgets for such advertising campaigns consider customers in isolation and ignore word-of-mouth communication (WOM). When the customer base forms a network (as is the case in telecom or social network databases) ignoring WOM clearly leads to suboptimal advertising budgets. This paper develops a model to help address this challenge.