Background: Health-care institutions have looked to business for models to respond to the requirement for reform. This has changed the perspective of institutions that were founded on charitable principles, and managed with liberal employment policies and deficit budgeting. Using lesions from...

This paper investigates the economic role of bank mergers in creating shareholder value based on the idea that shareholder wealth will increase if the consolidation leads to the aforementioned gains. This paper is divided into seven sections. The second section of my paper provides an academic...

This paper develops a maximum likelihood based method for simultaneously performing multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis on two-way dominance or profile data. This MULTICLUS procedure utilizes mixtures of multivariate conditional normal distributions to estimate a joint space of...

The vast majority of existing multidimensional scaling (MDS) procedures devised for the analysis of paired comparison preference/choice judgments are typically based on either scalar product (i.e., vector) or unfolding (i.e., ideal-point) models. Such methods tend to ignore many of the essential...

This paper presents a new stochastic multidimensional scaling procedure for the analysis of three-mode, three-way pick any/ J data. The method provides either a vector or ideal-point model to represent the structure in such data, as well as “floating” model specifications (e.g., different...

The psychometric and classification literatures have illustrated the fact that a wide class of discrete or network models (e.g., hierarchical or ultrametric trees) for the analysis of ordinal proximity data are plagued by potential degenerate solutions if estimated using traditional nonmetric...

A mixture model approach is developed that simultaneously estimates the posterior membership probabilities of observations to a number of unobservable groups or latent classes, and the parameters of a generalized linear model which relates the observations, distributed according to some member...

In many studies, lattice or area data are observed and spatial analysis is performed. A spatial process observed over a lattice or a set of irregular regions is usually modeled using a conditionally autoregressive (CAR) model. The neighborhoods within a CAR model are generally formed using only...

Air toxic emission factor data often contain one or more censored points below a single or multiple detection limits. Such data sets are referred to as "censored." Conventional methods used to deal with censored data sets include removing non-detects, or replacing the censored points with zero,...

This study examined the theoretical basis for decision making behavior of patients with right or left temporal lobectomy and a control group when they participated in the Iowa Gambling Task. Two cognitive decision models, Expectancy Valence Model and Strategy Switching Heuristic Choice Model,...