Business Commons^™

Public Healthcare: Changes Introduced When Implementing E-Procurement, Tommaso Federici

Federici Tommaso

The large and growing size of the healthcare public spending for goods and services worries the institutions of many European countries, including Italy, and asks for rationalization initiatives. In parallel, e-procurement solutions spread into Public Administrations (PA's) and introduce innovative processes, primarily in the purchasing phase.

In this scenario, e-procurement has the potential to enable significant efficiency improvements in the public healthcare sector, with the reduction of purchasing and administrative costs. However, most e-procurement initiatives met difficulties and did not fully delivered the expected benefits so far. This is mainly due to the healthcare procurement complexity, specific characteristics and peculiar …

Drawing Emerging Business Models For The Mobile Music Industry, Pavlos A. Vlachos, Adam Vrechopoulos

Pavlos A Vlachos

No abstract provided.

Optimal Sequential Exploration: A Binary Learning Model, J. Eric Bickel, James E. Smith

Eric Bickel

In this paper, we develop a practical and flexible framework for evaluating sequential exploration strategies in the case where the exploration prospects are dependent. Our interest in this problem was motivated by an oil exploration problem, and our approach begins with marginal assessments for each prospect (e.g., what is the probability that the well is wet?) and pairwise assessments of the dependence between prospects (e.g., what is the probability that both wells i and j are wet?). We then use information-theoretic methods to construct a full joint distribution for all outcomes from these marginal and pairwise assessments. This joint distribution …

Some Determinants Of Corporate Risk Aversion, Eric Bickel

Eric Bickel

In this paper we roughly quantify the degree of risk aversion induced by three rationales for corporate risk management: the cost of financial distress, costly external finance, and the principal-agent relationship between shareholders and management. In so doing, we provide a foundation for the use of corporate utility functions. However, we are unable to fully support the degree of risk aversion reported in the decision analysis literature. Specifically, financial distress and costly external finance appear to induce relatively little risk aversion, while principal-agent concerns lend only partial support to published corporate risk tolerance guidelines.