RLG210Y1 Lecture : March 14.docx

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sapphirewasp325

23 Apr 2012

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Powerful families would make sure that their male offspring would be trained to obtain high positions in the church. In 8th and 9th centuries popes leo iv and john vii promised that all who died in defending against arabs, magyars, or vikings will win eternal life. By 1050, the church monopolizes the ordination of knights, widely considered as constituting an 8th sacrament. The initiate s armour and weaponry would then be blessed and smeared with holy oil. Pope gregory vii (1073-85) proclaimed that military service for. Holy war as penance killing the enemies of god is deemed more effective than prayer, fasting, or works of mercy. Crusading a devotional act of armed pilgrimage, initially to reclaim the holy land from muslim control, but which expanded to include religious wars against pagans in eastern europe and the. Baltic region, greek and russian orthodox christians, tartars, and.

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Case Study: Reducing Waiting Time

One of the few determinants of demand that healthcare managers can control is waiting time. Ample evidence indicates that long waits discourage patients and drive up costs. Acton (1975) estimated that the elasticity of demand with respect to waiting time was â 0.96 in clinics (where waits tended to be long) and â 0.25 in physiciansâ offices (where waits tended to be shorter). This finding suggests that reducing waits by 10 percent could increase volume by 3 to 10 percent. In an environment in which many providers would like to add patients, reducing waits represents a strat-egy worth considering.Christie Clinic in Champaign, Illinois, uses a simple management technique called a huddle to increase efficiency. Each day the staff, including physicians, meets briefly to identify problems and review potential solutions. In less than a year after starting the huddles, waits for appointments decreased by 28 percent, volume rose by 10 percent with no increase in head count (meaning that costs went down), and patient satisfaction rose by 9 percent (Toussaint and Berry 2013). More volume may not be the only benefit of reducing waiting time. Long waits for patients often mean long waits and wasted time for staff as well. Another hospital experienced unacceptable wait times for intravenous pumps in the emergency department. Initially diagnosed as an inadequate number of pumps, the problem turned out to be a poorly defined process for making pumps available. In fact, the hos-pital had more pumps than it needed. It was able to reduce waits for pumps while decreasing its inventory by 20 percent, saving $300,000 in the process. The new process also sharply reduced the amount of time nurses spent looking for pumps, increasing their time with patients (Toussaint and Berry 2013).Both of these examples took place in organizations that were using Lean approaches to performance improvement. Lean emphasizes eliminating steps in production that do not add value for customers and can lead to major gains. The major alternative to Lean is Six Sigma, which can also result in significant improvements. Six Sigma is a structured approach that stresses defining the organizationâs problem from the perspective of internal and external customers, measuring key aspects of performance, analyzing the data, and implementing an improvement plan (McLaughlin and Olson 2012). Organizations that are not using Lean or Six Sigma to become more efficient will find it increasingly hard to compete with organizations that are.

Discussion questions:

â¢ Actonâs estimates suggest that demand is more sensitive to waiting time than to out-of-pocket price. Why might that be the case?

â¢ For the sake of argument, assume that the entire 10 percent increase in volume at Christie Clinic is due to the 28 percent reduction in waits for appointments. What elasticity of demand with respect to appointment waits do the data for the Christie Clinic imply?

â¢ Why would waits for patients result in waits for staff?

Required: After reading the Bye, Bye SOX? Article comment on the issue of small business compliance with Section 404 of SOX

Bye, Bye, SOX?
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX)	SOX compliance has been extended
may be declawed by upcoming	four times, but they wonât need to
U.S. Congress and	comply at all if the Garrett-Adler
Supreme Court decisions.	amendment makes it to the Senate
The House of Representatives	floor as a standalone bill.
recently voted to approve the	SOX also established the
Garrett-Adler amendment, which	PCAOB to oversee and regulate
would exempt small companies	audit firms. PCAOB operates under
from SOX Section 404 provisions,	the supervision of the Securities
while the Supreme Court is considering	and Exchange Commission (SEC),
the constitutionality of the	which also appoints PCAOB members.
Public Company Accounting Oversight	It is funded by fees charged to
Board (PCAOB).	audited firms. When it was established,
These developments may have	Congress wanted the board
long-term implications for SOX, the	to be separate, with its own funding
2002 legislation passed in the wake	stream, and outside normal civil
of the Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco	service laws so it could attract
scandals. The outcomes may also	highly qualified specialists. PCAOB
have implications for records managers,	membersâ salaries are more than
information technology specialists,	$500,000 and are reviewed by the
and compliance officers	SEC.
who devise and implement company	Pro-business advocates, represented
controls.	by the Free Enterprise
Section 404 of SOX requires	Fund, argue that the PCAOBâs governance
company auditors to attest to the	structure is unconstitutional
soundness of the firmâs internal	because it is an independent
controls and financial statements.	agency that does not allow for the
Internal controls may include anything	president to appoint members. Additionally,
from transaction approval authorizations	because only the president
to records retention	can remove SEC commissioners
programs. This provision is widely	for cause, and because
blamed for an increase in auditorsâ	the SEC can only remove PCAOB
fees, as well as increased expenditures	members for cause, some court
to ensure that proper internal	members believe this is a formerly
controls are in place.	unrecognized limit of the presidentâs
Small firms â those with	powers that may contradict
less than $75 million in	the constitution.
market capitalization	The Supreme Court will take up
â have protested that	the issue soon, and some legal experts
compliance with SOX 404 would	believe that SOX could be
cost them a disproportionate share	abolished completely if the court
of their earnings. The complaint is	rules the PCAOB unconstitutional.
supported by an independent study
conducted at Pennsylvania State
University, which showed that
firms just over the $75 million
mark paid nearly $700,000 more in
audit fees and had average earnings
of negative $1.4 million in 2004

aquamarinebear162

Hello, could I get some assistance summarizing this article for a discussion:

Read the articles and discuss the problems of Economic Inequality in the U.S.economy, summarize key points and post in the Discussions area:

Competition police crossing continents

Competition authorities are increasingly reaching beyond their country's borders

Feb 22^nd, 2014

WHEN TWO AMERICAN presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, embarked on a trustbusting mission a century ago, they were taking government into a new policy area: competition. Industrialization was still relatively new, and any monopolies that had emerged, such as the British and Dutch East India companies, had been created by governments.

The robber-baron companies of the late 19th century were accused of using their industrial muscle to drive competitors out of business. Private monopolies, the argument ran, diminished the benefits of capitalism; by definition, the existence of a monopoly made it impossible for a free market to operate.

Since then, governments have generally had some kind of competition policy, though not necessarily a coherent one. Politicians have tried to juggle several different priorities, among them putting the government in control of "strategic" industries (a category that has always included defense but often also a range of other industries, from airlines to car manufacturing, power generation, and telecoms); shielding domestic businesses from foreign ownership or competition, and protecting consumers from price-gouging.

In the past two decades, a new concern has emerged: that monopolies may be restricting innovation. The technology industry seems to have been particularly prone to creating near-monopolies, from Microsoft in software to Amazon in retailing and Google in an internet search. This is due to network effects. Consumers gravitate to the dominant technology, either because it offers more products or because many of their friends are already using the network concerned. These monopolists, it is feared, will be slow to introduce new technologies that might cannibalize their existing business; and they will be so entrenched that new competitors will find it hard to get a foothold.

Microsoft bundled its Internet Explorer browser with its dominant Windows operating software on personal computers. America's Department of Justice saw this as an attempt to force Netscape, a rival browser, out of the market. In a long court case that began in 1998, Microsoft was initially ordered to break itself in two. This ruling was overturned on appeal and a less onerous settlement was arrived at.

At the time many commentators felt that the authorities had overreached themselves. Internet Explorer was provided free of charge, so it was hard to see how consumers were being harmed. But this is a tricky area. On the one hand, rapid technological change can cause once-dominant companies to lose their position very quickly if they do not adapt; look at Nokia's and BlackBerry's mobile-phone businesses. Some argue that if the market is capable of such adjustment, governments should not get involved. The fact that some consumers make the wrong decision some of the time is not the basis for intervention, as long as all consumers are not being ripped off, says Simon Bishop of RBB Economics, a consultancy. On the other hand, such rapid change makes it hard to tell whether monopoly positions are being exploited, or whether a more competitive market would have produced more innovations.

Competition authorities have also had to rethink their role in cross-border deals. If one multinational takes over another, that might not create a monopoly in the country where the two groups have their headquarters, but it could do so in another country. A proposal for a merger between General Electric and Honeywell, announced in October 2000, was cleared by America's Department of Justice but blocked by the European Commission the following year. That objection appeared to herald a new era of transatlantic takeover disputes; in fact, it remains the only deal so far to have been cleared in America but blocked on the other side of the Atlantic.

However, there have been other instances of transatlantic disputes. In 2009 the European Commission imposed a 1.06 billion ($1.4 billion) fine on Intel, a chipmaker, after a complaint brought by an American rival, AMD. The ruling seemed to suggest that multinationals faced the prospect of double jeopardy because of inconsistent international rules.

We do it our way

There are some philosophical differences between Europe and America. Europe has a long tradition of state ownership of industry; even after privatization, many such companies retain dominant positions, at least in their national markets. In America, by contrast, market leaders have got there the hard way, by having superior technology or being more efficient. In Europe competition policy tends to be rules-based, with the European Commission issuing guidance for future mergers to follow; in America merger decisions tend to be hammered out in the courts, establishing legal precedent.

But multinationals also have to deal with competition policy in emerging markets. China is a particular challenge. The Chinese use competition policy to achieve other ends to keep out foreign firms or attack existing foreign businesses says, one expert. Latin American countries have tended to adopt the American model of competition policy, whereas eastern Europe has followed the example. Merger authorities from different countries have set up the International Competition Network to share the experience. Such efforts may reduce the double-jeopardy problems in international mergers, if only because rules may be applied more consistently.

In the longer term, the question is whether national competition policies will prove adaptable enough to cope with a globalized economy. It may make economic sense for global companies to exploit economies of scale and bring down prices for consumers, but national governments may be reluctant to accept the loss of control involved. In air travel, for example, fares have been reduced under pressure from low-cost airlines, but these newcomers are still being held back by policies that favor flagship carriers. If regulators in rich countries were to prove more zealous than their counterparts in emerging markets in restricting the size of multinationals, Western firms might be put at a competitive disadvantage.

New concerns for competition authorities are emerging all the time. Chris Walters, the acting chief economist of Britain's Office of Fair Trading (OFT), cites the practice of pay-for-delay, whereby a firm that holds a drug patent pays a generic manufacturer not to launch a rival drug to preserve the patent-holders monopoly profits. And David Currie, the chairman of the Competition and Markets Authority (which will take over from the OFT in April), recently pointed to a vast new potential problem, which he described as the growing collection, processing, and use of consumer-transaction data for commercial ends. This is proving an increasingly important source of competitive advantage; we need to be alert to the possibility that it will be an increasing source of consumer detriment.

aquamarinemoose208

RLG210Y1 Lecture : March 14.docx

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