bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Subjective Estimates and Scheduling Decisions
Authors: Abernathy William J. 
Published: November 2008

Network scheduling models typically assume that estimates of individual activities are stable and are not improved or degraded as progress is made in a project and the time to undertake a particular activity comes near. The formulation of scheduling models is usually compatible with this assumption about estimates and excludes the effect of actions such as rescheduling which might be taken in response to changes in estimation error. The present paper examines the nature of subjective estimates in an actual development project. Error characteristics as determined from prior estimates and actual outcomes are analyzed using a multiple regression model. Several variables are significant in their association with changes in estimation accuracy as activities are reestimated. Contrary to previously reported results there is a strong learning phenomenon. Implications for future work are discussed.
The Operation of Academic Departments
Authors: Hobbs Walter C. , Anderson G. Lester 
Published: November 2008

An organizational model of academic departments is developed, showing that departments consist of several coexistent structures. Commonly, curricular decisions are made democratically (i.e., by the “collegium”) and professional matters such as tenure are reserved to the senior ranks (an “oligarchy”). The organizational mode for administrative (i.e., implementive) tasks is a division of labor among peers, which varies from minimal to extensive with the degree to which the departmental members engage in service, teaching and/or research activities requiring coordination. The implications of distortions in one structure induced by the threat or use of power in another, and the implications of issues which fall neither in one area nor another but in the intersection between them, are noted.
Callplan: An Interactive Salesman's Call Planning System
Authors: Lodish Leonard M. 
Published: November 2008

CALLPLAN is an interactive computer system designed to aid salesmen or sales management in allocating sales call time more efficiently. The system increases their capacity to consider the allocation in a logical and consistent manner. CALLPLAN uses as input the salesman's own best estimates of expected contribution of all possible call policies for each account and prospect. The computer can help the estimating procedure by fitting curves through estimated points on a response function or by obtaining expected values from probability estimates. The system solves a mathematical program which determines the best time allocation to maximize contribution according to these estimates. Factors considered by the system include travel time and costs to get to geographical areas within the territory, amount of time required per call on an account within an area, account profitability, and minimum and maximum account call frequency limitations. An efficient incremental analysis routine is discussed as a solution procedure for the mathematical program. CALLPLAN seems best suited to repetitive selling situations where the amount of time the salesman spends with an account is an important factor in the magnitude of sales generated. Preliminary applications have been made by fourteen salesmen in six sales situations. A transcript of a session at the computer terminal of one application is presented. Anticipated sales increases, based on the salesman's judgmental inputs, for the call policy generated by CALLPLAN were between five and twenty-five per cent in the majority of applications.
Optimal Advertising Expenditure
Authors: Sasieni Maurice W. 
Published: November 2008

This paper discusses the optimal rate of advertising expenditure given the relationship between the rate of change of sales and the rate of expenditure. It is shown that we may assume that the marginal return of increased expenditure is never increasing. This is because when marginal returns increase there is always a “mixed” pattern in which two levels of expenditure are used, each for infinitesimally short intervals, with the property that the average cost for a given sales change is lower than with a fixed policy, and marginal returns are constant. If we assume that marginal returns do not increase, then, provided it is profitable to advertise, there exists an over-all optimal sales rate and an expenditure level, just sufficient to maintain it, with the following properties with respect to long-run discounted profits:— (1) If sales even reach this level it is optimal to keep them there. (2) Starting from any other level, the optimal policy is to spend in such a way as to drive sales towards this level. The only requirements for these results are that the cost of achieving a given change in the sales rate be an increasing function of the sales rate and the rate of change of sales rate. It is also shown that the optimal sales rate to be maintained in the long run is not the rate which maximises the rate of gaining profit after advertising, unless the discount rate is zero. In practice, the mixed policy cannot be followed because discreet changes in expenditure levels cannot be made too frequently. When a mixed policy is optimal the best we can achieve is to use a cyclic policy in which we advertise for short intervals at each of the appropriate levels. A simple example calling for such a policy is when we have an advertising threshold below which expenditure has no effect, together with a relatively small market with low profit margins. Whether or not advertising thresholds exist requires psychological theory or controlled experimentation beyond the scope of this paper.
OR/MS Implementation in Valle, Colombia, S. A.: A Profile of a Developing Region
Authors: Vertinsky Ilan 
Published: November 2008

The purpose of the study was to explore the processes of diffusion of management science and operation research managerial technologies into industrial organizations in a developing region. The study focused mainly on the impact of cultural and environmental variables on the process of diffusion. Two complementary strategies of research were employed: (1) A community study of organizations in the region, and (2) A longitudinal case study of implementations of OR/MS. The paper presents a profile of OR/MS implementation and managerial innovation in the region. The implications of environmental and organizational infra-structures as well as profiles of attitudes toward the formation of possible implementation and diffusion strategies are analyzed. In addition an inventory of propositions are offered to form a base for future cross-cultural analysis of implementation processes of managerial innovation.
Optimal Screening Plans for Nonserial Production Systems
Authors: Britney Robert R. 
Published: November 2008

Quality control screening programs are defined and evaluated for the general n-stage nonserial production process. A total expected cost criterion, developed as a function of the screening applied at each inspection station, embraces the various costs of inspection, defect repair and defects passing through the process undetected. Absorbing Markov chains aid in the identification of probabilistic flows of defective materials through the production network. Minimum cost screening programs are developed, giving the optimal level of screening at every potential inspection station. For a quasi-concave cost structure, it is shown that the optimal screening program will employ either zero or 100 percent effective screening throughout. A standard branch and bound “backtrack” strategy readily identifies optimal screening programs for the unconstrained (0, 1) nonlinear integer programming problem. An illustrative problem is presented.
Optimal Issuing Policies
Authors: Brown Mark , Ross Sheldon M. 
Published: November 2008

Consider a stockpile consisting of n items where the ith item has a rating ri, i = 1, …, n. An item with rating r, if kept in stockpile until time t and then released to the field, will have a field life of rd(t). Thus it is assumed that for any t, the field life for issuance at time t is proportional to the time 0 field life. Items are to be issued one by one from the stockpile to the field until the stockpile is depleted. The ith issued item is placed in the field immediately upon the death in the field of the (i − 1)st issued item. Conditions for LIFO and FIFO optimality are obtained.
Distributional Constraints in Public Expenditure Planning
Authors: Feldstein Martin , Luft Harold 
Published: November 2008

Distributional aspects are of primary importance in the design of many of our largest public programs. National health insurance, low-income housing subsidies, grants for higher education and payments for income maintenance all emphasize the use of public expenditure to alter the distribution of real resources among income classes. The traditional cost-benefit approach, with its focus on the efficiency of resource use, is inadequate for dealing with such programs. Moreover, the basic problem of choice in these programs is not the selection of one of several mutually exclusive projects but the design of optimal income-related schedules of benefits and charges. The current paper defines this problem more specifically and suggests a linear programming formulation for its solution. An application to the design of a national health insurance program is then presented.
Portfolio Models with Stochastic Cash Demands
Authors: Chen Andrew H. Y. , Jen Prank C. , Zionts Stanley 
Published: November 2008

The problem of unifying portfolio planning and transaction demands for cash in a single model is considered. We distinguish between portfolio selection and portfolio revision problems. Each problem is formulated as a single-period model allowing exogenous stochastic cash demands and: (1) deterministic returns on the earning assets, (2) stochastic returns on the earning assets. Thus, four single-period models are presented. An analytic solution for one of the models is derived, and numerical examples given. The other models are nonlinear programming problems, two of which are computationally tractable. Implication's of the models are discussed.
An Application of Operations Research to School Desegregation
Authors: Lutz R. P. , Devine M. D. , Kumin H. J. , Smith W. C. 
Published: November 2008

This paper describes an operations research approach taken to implement a desegregation plan for the Oklahoma City Public Schools. While the main objective of the plan was desegregation, it also provides for an equal educational opportunity for all students and more efficient utilization of facilities. The essential element of the plan is that students attend their same home schools, but each school is responsible for a certain specialty area, such as science, mathematics, or foreign language. Students taking specialty courses travel to those schools. Thus, inherent in the plan is the technically complex problem of scheduling students among several schools in varying time patterns to minimize total weekly student travel time. A form of modular scheduling was developed which allowed different courses to be taught for different lengths of time. From an educational point of view, class times could be tailored to the needs of a particular course. Since students take courses in overlapping time blocks at more than one school, the problem of building the Master Schedule was quite complex. In general, a Master Schedule could result in a large number of student conflicts. A master scheduling program was, therefore, developed which (1) operates in a time-sharing mode so that it is interactive with the principal, (2) attempts to minimize student conflicts and (3) works for any time block configuration.
Decentralization by Function and Location
Authors: Kochen Manfred , Deutsch Karl W. 
Published: November 2008

Under what conditions is decentralization of facilities rational for a client-centered system of service or administration, and when is great centralization more cost-effective? Four aspects of decentralization are identified: (1) pluralization of facilities (e.g., service points or channels); (2) dispersal in geographic space; (3) specialization by function or kind of service; and (4) adaptation to the specific requirements of each case through repeated feedback passes or negotiating queries. Different functions or kinds of service are treated as being located in a function space; the distances among them correspond to the number and cost of adjustment steps which a server or a service facility needs to shift from one function to another. For calculating the optimal number of facilities, n, the most important variables, calculated as averages, are the service load; the geographic distance; the cost of time spent in transporting a request and the response to it, and the transport speed; the functional distance or number of functions; the cost of time in adjusting to the function requested; and the adjustment speed; and the total fixed cost per facility. Other important variables are the number of negotiating queries per request, and an indicator of the value of time (i.e., of a speedier response). Under certain assumptions, such as neglecting economies or diseconomies of scale, the optimum number of facilities for a system with a single function then varies as the square root of the service load; this is also the case for a system with a single location but several functions. For a system with several functions and locations, the optimal number of facilities varies as the two-thirds power of the service load. Long-term trends may be toward decentralization when service loads and the costs of service time grow faster than capital costs and transport and adjustment speeds, as seems likely for the next several decades. Where the opposite conditions prevail, cost-effectiveness should favor centralization, such as perhaps in some earlier periods, and possibly in the more distant future. Possible applications through eventual elaborations of these oversimple models are suggested for fire, ambulance, and police, school and local government systems; hospitals and clinics; libraries, telephone exchanges, and computer systems; laboratories, repair shops, and mail order houses; law courts and judicial districts; and the numbers of administrative districts and sovereign states.
Parameters of Discrete Time Models of Detection of Change
Authors: Rapoport Amnon , Burkheimer Graham J. 
Published: November 2008

A discrete time detection of change (DC) process is characterized by a state S0 that at some stage t turns into state S1. Either of two decisions is made at each stage τ: W—take another observation, or D—S1 is the true state. In the former case, the result of each observation is a random variable x, which has a probability density function fo(x) if t > τ or f1(x) if t ≦ τ. In the latter case, if t > τ, an error loss is incurred, the knowledge that t > τ is gained, and the process continues, whereas if t ≦ τ the process terminates with a delay loss proportional to τ − t. In the modified detection of change (MDC) process D is a terminal decision. Equations are presented for recursively computing useful parameters, such as the probability distributions of the number of observations and of the number of errors in the DC process. The relationships between the two processes are examined, yielding an alternative method for determining the minimum expected loss.
Formulating a Theory of Work Measurement
Authors: Abruzzi Adam 
Published: November 2008

Most everyone would agree that optimal management decisions can only be made on the basis of sharp information. However, this question has not received much specific attention in the literature, largely because of a preoccupation with formal theories and models. This is quite understandable for, until comparatively recently, there was little theory in the field of management science. This is no longer the case, and the theories have far outrun data-gathering procedures. Indeed, the theories themselves suggest that better data-gathering procedures are needed than have heretofore been available. Improved theories and models simply demand improved sources and types of data. This need is particularly pressing in the field of work measurement. Stable and precise estimates of production rates would be highly useful, for example, in working out an optimal production policy, particularly with respect to planning and scheduling. In addition to this, stable and precise estimates of production rates are highly useful for implementing production policy at local levels. The success of a production policy depends on the quality of local implementation. It is also local implementation that gives flexibility and, hence, realism to the results obtained from broad formal models. Formal results would otherwise degenerate to elegant cookbook recipes which might easily turn out to be worse than intuitive solutions arrived at from “off-the-shelf” models.
Management Science—Fact or Theory?
Authors: Churchman C. West 
Published: November 2008

Theory and fact are just two sides of the same coin; but the two sides of a coin are different, and this difference will continue to characterize the development of management science. I hope that the future issues of the journal will more and more emphasize the problems of measurement and data-determination, just as they have emphasized “theoretical” formulations in the past. I take the diversity of point of view as a sign of a healthy organism. I see too that as this diversity shapes itself into a more unified attack, the objectives of TIMS and its peculiar role in intellectual and management activity will become clear.
An Equilibrium-Point Interpretation of Stable Sets and a Proposed Alternative Definition
Authors: Harsanyi John C. 
Published: November 2008

The paper argues that the von Neumann-Morgenstern definition of stable sets is unsatisfactory because it neglects the destabilizing effect of indirect dominance relations. This argument is supported both by heuristic considerations and by construction of a bargaining game B(G), formalizing the bargaining process by which the players agree on their payoffs from an n-person cooperative game G. (G itself is assumed to be given in characteristic-function form allowing side payments.) The strategies ρi, the players use in this bargaining game will determine which payoff vectors x will be stationary, i.e., will have the property that, should such a payoff vector x be proposed to the players, all further bargaining will stop and x will be accepted as the outcome of the game. It will be suggested that a stable set should be defined as the set V of all stationary payoff vectors x, on the assumption that the players' bargaining strategies p, will form a canonical equilibrium point ρ in the bargaining game B(G). In a certain class of games, to be called absolutely stable games, indirect dominance relations turn out to be irrelevant, and in these games the suggested definition for stable sets is equivalent to the von Neumann-Morgenstern definition. But in general this is not the case. However, if we assume that the players will adopt bargaining strategies deliberately discouraging any use of indirect dominance relations, then, in every game, the stable sets our model yields will always be von Neumann-Morgenstern stable sets. At the end of the paper, we briefly discuss a possible modification in the suggested definition for stable sets, based on a modified bargaining game B0(G), in which the players are permitted to accept cuts in their provisional payoffs if they think that this move will increase their final payoffs.
Antecedents and Consequences of Research Planning in a University Setting
Authors: Glueck William F. , Deich Ingrid 
Published: November 2008

This paper reports on some of the results of a study on research administration at the University of Missouri, Columbia. The subjects were 248 professors with research grants. The paper first examines some characteristics that are likely to lead to research planning. Some of the characteristics examined include size of research grant, number of subordinates in the research project, and preferences for type of research problems investigated. The consequences of planning, the satisfaction of the research professor, his rewards and productivity are also examined. In general, planning did not lead to greater researcher satisfaction, but it did lead to greater productivity for the researcher.
Educational Innovation; The Impact of Organizational and Community Variables on Performance Contract
Authors: Belasco James A. 
Published: November 2008

In astrology this is the age of Aquarius. In education this is the age of accountability and innovation. At the most general level, the principal concern of this paper is to identify those organizational, teacher and community characteristics which are associated with varying levels of student achievement growth—one measure of success for a performance contract. Social systems analysis suggests that the most general hypothesis of this study is: there will be a direct relationship between the ability of the innovation to satisfy the input supplying and output accepting dependencies and the success of the innovation. Based on prior research, four specific dependencies were examined in this study: Expectations concerning decisional participation levels in the school held by parents, [Belasco, James, Joseph Alutto, Alan Glassman. Differing perceptions of authority structures held by teachers and community members. Education and Urban Society (forthcoming).] teachers, [Morphet, Edgar, Roe Johns, Theodore Reller. 1967. Educational Organization and Administration, 2nd ed. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs.] personal predispositions of teachers to accept change, [Rokeach, Milton. 1960. The Open and Closed Mind. Basic Books, New York.] and the maintenance of manageable tension levels and high commitment levels [Miles, Matthew. 1965. Planned changes and organization health. Change Processes in the Public School. Center for the Advanced Study of Educational Administration, Oregon University.].
On Bridging the Gaps
Authors: Daly D. J. , Peterson Rein 
Published: November 2008

In this paper the authors present an interpretive discussion of the scope for management scientists to make a more effective contribution to improving the performance of the Canadian economy, by active involvement in management and decision making in Canadian institutions, both private and public. Initially the paper surveys the evidence on the differences in economic performance between Canada and the United States, outlining the methods used, and the results. Some factors turn out to be relatively unimportant in the differences, while others are quite crucial. In the broad area of manufacturing, the gap in economic performance is particularly wide. Tariffs in Canada and other countries have become important contributions to the existing product diversity, short production runs, high cost and low productivity in relation to performance in other countries. A further important area is the pattern of decision making in Canada which has led to a survival strategy and resistance to change rather than innovation, creativity and risk taking. This tends to perpetuate the lower levels of productivity found to exist. In the light of this analysis of economic factors and decision making, the paper makes some broad recommendations on the role of management scientists, the need for change in management style, and changes in tariffs that would accelerate change and would recognize the importance of interdependence for more efficient performance. The paper concludes on the theme “The Time is Now!”