Purpose – This paper examines the 2008 collapse of the US tax-exempt auction rate securities (ARS) market, from the perspective of not-for-profit auction rate debt issuers. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use a multiple case study methodology to examine the financial and operating...

A feature present in countries with a National Health Service is the coexistence of a public and a private sector. Often, the public payer contracts with private providers while holding idle capacity. This is often seen as inefficiency from the management of public facilities. We present here a...

In several instances, third-party payers negotiate prices of health care services with providers. We show that a third-party payer may prefer to deal with a professional association than with the sub-set constituted by the more efficient providers, and then apply the same price to all providers....

Based on four years of province-level health care data, this paper analyzes the productive efficiency of China's health care sector in the post reform period. Data envelopment analysis is used to compute efficiency measures, which indicate that there was still room for improvement in the...

Mississippi has a long-standing place as one of the least healthy states in the country. Problems related to chronic illness, high mortality, and insufficient medical infrastructure are magnified within the state's Delta region. Efforts to improve patient care require an understanding of the...

Motivated by a project in health-care management, we study the resource allocation problem in multisite service systems with intersite customer flows. We aim at providing insights to and guidelines for resource allocation in these service systems when some service criterion, such as average...

In Management Science (Vol. 24, No. 14, October, 1978), Nichols and Weinstein describe a model of a hypertension detection and treatment program, in which individuals proceed through a series of stages with transition probabilities that depend on expenditures at each stage. We generalize the...

This paper extends the usual regression analysis to include the partition of the variance to examine the possible secondary and higher order impact of policy variables in a policy impact model. The federal Medicaid program is analyzed using the methodology to assess the impact of the policy...

Queueing systems with scheduled arrivals, i.e., appointment systems, are typical for frontal service systems, e.g., health clinics. An aspect of customer behavior that influences the overall efficiency of such systems is the phenomenon of no-shows. The consequences of no-shows cannot be...

This paper examines the nature of pharmacy retail distribution in several different countries. Evidence in the market place supports the view that innovations in distribution technology are or could be plentiful; conversely, because of institutional rigidities bolstered by law, retail...