In a hospital environment that demands a careful balance between commercial and clinical interests, the extent to which physicians are involved in hospital leadership varies greatly. This paper assesses the influence of the extent of this involvement on staff-to-patient ratios. Using data...

This paper deals with the dispatch problem in providing electric power with minimal costs using different technologies. Initially, we describe this problem in terms of a linear program. This enables us to take generally neglected start-up costs into account. The main result is the explicit...

We study the robustness of empirical efficiency valuations of production processes in an extended Farrell model. Based on input and output data, an empirical efficiency status---efficient or inefficient---is assigned to each of the processes. This status may change if the data of the observed...

Research in the field of operations management and medicine analyzed how workload affects productivity and patient outcomes. However, staff quality has largely been neglected, and if staffing information has indeed been included, then it takes the form of quantitative measures like...

This paper analyzes the effects of start-up costs of different technologies in providing electricity power. We explicitly solve a simplified linear formulation of the dispatch problem. Transforming this primal problem, we show that dominated technologies should be used only in the case of...

We discuss the impact of organizational workload on professional service outcomes, such as survival rates in hospitals. The prevailing view in the literature is that service quality deteriorates when organizational workload increases. In contrast, we argue that the relationship between workload...

We report on an application of data envelopment analysis to hospital capacity planning in Germany. This work was carried out as part of a ministry report prepared by a major German health care consulting company. Our input into this report is a first attempt to incorporate the relative economic...

We investigate the effect of two group characteristics, willingness to compromise and distribution of power, on the procedural rationality of group decisions in the context of large capital investment decisions made by the executive teams of German hospitals. Both characteristics have a positive...