The importance in promoting, sustaining industries, manufacturing systems and economy through reliability measurement has become an area of interest. The profit of a system may be enhanced using highly reliable structural design of the system or subsystem of higher reliability. On improving the reliability and availability of a system, the production and associated profit will also increase. Re...

In many markets, such as education, health care and public utilities, firms are often profit-constrained either due to regulation or because they have non-profit status. At the same time such firms might have altruistic concerns towards consumers. In this paper we study semi-altruistic firms’ incentives to invest in quality and cost-reducing effort when facing constraints on the distribution of...

This short note provides a systematic construction of market models without unbounded profits but with arbitrage opportunities.

We report our analysis, using account data from a large discount brokerage firm, of the common stock investment performance of 166 investment clubs from February 1991 through January 1997. The average club tilted its common stock investment toward high-beta, small-cap growth stocks and turned over 65 percent of its portfolio annually. The average club lagged the performance of a broad-based mar...

In many cases, buyers must incur search costs to find the price of a product. This search cost affects the behavior of consumers, and through that, it affects the profit maximizing behavior of the firms. As search costs change, so do the competitive marketing mix strategies of the firms. In predicting the effect of changing search costs on the equilibrium prices and allocations, it is important...

For-profit, or proprietary, colleges are the fastest-growing postsecondary schools in the nation, enrolling a disproportionately high share of disadvantaged and minority students and those ill-prepared for college. Because these schools, many of them big national chains, derive most of their revenue from taxpayer-funded student financial aid, they are of interest to policy makers not only for t...

There have been heated debates on the controversial role of healthcare Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) which negotiate contracts with vendor on the behalf of healthcare providers. These GPOs cover their costs by charging manufacturers ‘‘Contract Admi nistrative Fees,’’ instead of being reimbursed by the providers. This causes conflicts of interests. Therefore, purchasing through GPOs migh...

Technology (BCHT) has been working with the Integrated Healthcare Association (IHA) on its Value-Based Purchasing of Medical Devices (VBP) Project, which has included the collection and analysis of hospital and patient data on seven orthopedic, cardiac, and spinal procedures. This Issue Brief is the second in a series that comes out of this project, and presents fi ndings on implant costs, comp...