"Why, If Things Are So Good, Are They So Bad?" Magnitogorsk, Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, and American Engineers, 1928–1932

Why are health care report cards so bad (good)?

This paper provides a signaling-game theoretical foundation for empirically testing the effects of quality report cards in the U.S. health care industry. It shows that, when health care providers face an identical distribution of patient illness severities, the multidimensional measures in the existing report cards render them a mechanism that reveals the providers' qualities without causing th...

Observational studies: why are they so important?

How Can People Be so Good at Intercepting Accelerating Objects if They Are so Poor at Visually Judging Acceleration?

People are known to be very poor at visually judging acceleration. Yet, they are extremely proficient at intercepting balls that fall under gravitational acceleration. How is this possible? We previously found that people make systematic errors when trying to tap on targets that move with different constant accelerations or decelerations on interleaved trials. Here, we show that providing conte...

Faults in Grids: Why are they so bad and What can be done about it?

Computational Grids have the potential to become the main execution platform for high performance and distributed applications. However, such systems are extremely complex and prone to failures. In this paper, we present a survey with the grid community on which several people shared their actual experience regarding fault treatment. The survey reveals that, nowadays, users have to be highly in...

Why Are Bad Products So Hard to Kill?

I is puzzling that firms often continue to invest in product development projects when they should know that demand will be low. We argue that bad products are hard to kill because firms face an inherent conflict when designing managers’ incentives. Rewarding success encourages managers to forge ahead even when demand is low. To avoid investing in low-demand products, the firm must also reward ...