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.
Will Rogers, commenting on the Depression, famously quipped: "If stupidity got us into this mess, why can't it get us out?" Rogers's rhetorical question has an obvious answer: persistent stupidity fails to recognize prior errors and, therefore, does not correct them. For three decades, many financial economists have been arguing that there are deep flaws in the financial policies of the U.S.
This paper describes the motives that gave rise to the creation of the Federal Reserve System, summarizes the history of Fed monetary policy from its origins in 1914 through the Treasury-Fed Accord of 1951, and reviews several of the principal controversies that surround that history. The persistence of conceptual errors in Fed monetary policy — particularly adherence to the "real bills doctrine" — is a central puzzle in monetary history, particularly in light of the enormous costs of Fed failures during the Great Depression.
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.
This article discusses the diffusion process in an online social network given the individual connections between members. The authors model the adoption decision of individuals as a binary choice affected by three factors: (1) the local network structure formed by already adopted neighbors, (2) the average characteristics of adopted neighbors (influencers), and (3) the characteristics of the potential adopters. Focusing on the first factor, the authors find two marked effects. First, an individual who is connected to many adopters has a greater adoption probability (degree effect).
This research investigates the effects of regulatory focus on alternative search and consideration set formation in consumer decision making. Results from three experiments yield two primary findings. First, promotion‐focused consumers tend to search for alternatives at a more global level, whereas prevention‐focused consumers tend to search for alternatives at a more local level. Second, promotion‐focused consumers tend to have larger consideration sets than do prevention‐focused consumers.