Buying green can sometimes license unethical behaviour
Those lyin’, cheatin’ green consumers. Just being around green products can make us behave more altruistically, a new study to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science has found. But buying those same products can have the opposite effect. Researchers found that buying green can lead people into less altruistic behaviour, and even make them more likely to steal and lie than after buying conventional products. Buying products that claim to be made with low environmental impact can set up “moral credentials” in people’s minds that give license to selfish or questionable behavior.

“This was not done to point the finger at consumers who buy green products. The message is bigger,” says Nina Mazar, a marketing professor at the Rotman School of Management and a self-admitted green consumer. “At the end of the day, if we do one moral thing, it doesn’t necessarily mean we will be morally better in other things as well.” Mazar, along with her co-author Chen-Bo Zhong, an assistant professor of organizational behaviour at the Rotman School, conducted three experiments. Click to read the full paper.

Do your children push the boundaries? It may be a sign of future leadership abilities
Children whose parents use a firm parenting style that still allows them to test the rules and learn from it are more likely to assume leadership roles as adults, according to a new study published in a recent edition of The Leadership Quarterly. Researchers used data from a long-term Minnesota study of twins, and found that children raised with an “authoritative” parenting style – where parents set clear limits and expectations while also being supportive of their children – assumed more leadership roles at work and in their communities later in life. “Some of these early examples of rule-breaking behaviour, more the modest type, don’t necessarily produce negative outcomes later in life – that was fairly intriguing,” says Maria Rotundo, a professor at the Rotman School of Management. “It doesn’t mean all children of authoritative parents are going to become leaders, but they are more likely to.” Click to read the full paper.

Do promises matter to employees? Not as much as we once thought
Years of research suggests that the promises organizations make to employees matter in establishing and maintaining a “psychological contract” between the two parties. However, new findings from Samantha Montes and co-author David Zweig, professors at the Rotman School of Management and the University of Toronto Scarborough, suggest that what an organization promises to employees (e.g., training opportunities, benefits, compensation) don’t matter nearly as much as what the organization actually delivers. In a study to be published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the authors found that the influence of promises has little effect on employee’s emotional reactions toward the organization, their intentions to stay with the organization, and intentions to engage in citizenship behaviors. Click to read the full paper.

Cuts to rewards plans unlikely to hurt credit card use
What would happen if credit card holders no longer received rewards? Not much – but it could cut consumer credit card debt, says a new study on the impact of rewards programs on credit and debit card use. The paper, co-published by the Rotman School of Management, found that removing rewards would result in only a small number of credit card customers switching to more debit card and cash transactions. “A lot of customers use credit cards or debit cards to pay because they like it. So if you take away the rewards, it’s not going to change their behaviour that much,” says Andrew Ching, a Rotman professor who co-wrote the study with Fumiko Hayashi of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. “Potentially, it could be better for everybody.”Click to read the full paper.

Most Managers are Logical Sloths
Strategic managers, lacking training in how to build their own situational models and reasoning strategies as opposed to 'implementing' blueprints and recipes, tend to choose easy problems to make sense of their predicaments and use sub-optimally simplistic methods of framing complex problems, shows new research.“Managerial problems are not given – they are co-created, by the manager and his context, and what the manager's mind does often matters more than other features of the context” says the study’s author, Mihnea Moldoveanu, who has articulated a new research field called managerial algorithmics. “This model shows managers systematically avoid certain kinds of problems (logically hard ones) in favour of others (logically simple ones) when they try to make sense of their predicaments." His model shows that by and large "managers are logical sloths, even if they are sometimes informational hogs.” Managers seem to systematically avoid 'deep thought' about the situations they face and rather seek 'data', 'stories', 'frameworks' and 'prescriptions' that stand a very good chance of being logically incompatible, he says.Click to read the full paper.

What’s in a name? For Analysts with a CFA charter it’s timelier, bolder, and more objective forecasting, Rotman study finds.
Tens of thousands of hopeful, sleep-deprived candidates around the world will soon sit through exams for the coveted designation of Certified Financial Analyst. Is it worth it? A new study shows analysts with the CFA designation issue timelier financial forecasts than those without the credential. They also tend to be bolder and more objective in those forecasts. But the study also found CFA charterholders were average in terms of their forecasting accuracy – perhaps because other analysts had the advantage of observing the forecasts issued by CFA charterholders before writing their own. “I think the results are in line with expectations,” says co-author Gus De Franco, an accounting professor at the Rotman School of Management. “The results prove that there’s value in the CFA charter and people who are taking the CFA program are being rewarded, at least in part.” Prof. De Franco also found that those who hold the CFA credential gave timelier forecasts even before obtaining the designation. Afterward, this only improved. These results are signs that CFA charterholders have a natural, innate edge on talent as well as acquire additional skills through the studying and program preparation process. Click to read the full paper.

Government transfer pricing regulation can hurt more than help, Rotman study warns.
To mitigate the competitiveness of “gray markets”, multinational corporations may adjust internal transfer prices for products transferred to foreign subsidiaries. Gray markets arise when products meant for foreign sale end up back in the local market, often at reduced consumer prices, through unauthorized distribution channels. Cars, pharmaceuticals and computer software are all popular gray-market goods. Multinationals also adjust transfer prices to shift profits from high tax to low tax jurisdictions. As a result, many governments have mandated the use of “arm’s length” transfer prices – which are higher than those the multinational would otherwise choose – between international subsidiaries. By mandating the use of arm’s length transfer prices, domestic governments are assured of a larger share of international tax revenues; but they should be careful, says a new study. Higher arm’s length transfer prices can also increase prices in the foreign markets that are the source of gray market goods. This increases the cost base of the gray market and makes the gray market a weaker competitor when it “leaks” products back to the domestic market. “Our paper shows that both the firm and the domestic economy may be better off if governments simply allow multinationals the discretion to set their own internal transfer prices,” says Francesco Bova, an assistant professor of accounting at the Rotman School of Management. Prof. Bova co-authored the study with Prof. Romana Autrey of Harvard Business School. Click to read the full paper.

Promotional tests can discourage some of the best candidates
Standardized tests are a common choice for organizations looking for an objective way of fairly evaluating who is the best person for the job. But new research looking at the use of promotional exams with Ontario police officers shows that these tests may discourage candidates from applying and create anxiety that could hurt a candidate’s performance. If this happens, the whole organization could be hurt, rather than helped by the promotions process. This groundbreaking research is forthcoming in the journal Personnel Psychology. “These data really speak to the fact that the process needs to be looked at from the perspective of the applicant,” said study co-author Julie McCarthy, an organizational behaviour professor at the Rotman School. Organizations “need to ensure that the process they are using is fair and that people are going to have positive reactions to the process, even if they do not receive a promotion,” Prof. McCarthy said.

Researchers looked at the examples of police officers writing exams through the Ontario Police College for the purpose of promotion to higher policing ranks such as sergeant or staff sergeant. “We partnered with OPC for several years. They are really committed to providing high-quality exams and considering candidates’ perceptions when planning improvements”, said McCarthy. The study found that officers who felt the process was fair were more likely to recommend it to other officers. Such positive “word of mouth” is important as police agencies and other organizations try to get their best candidates to compete for increasingly responsible positions in an era of impending retirements.

But fairness perceptions were not related to exam performance. Candidates who did better on the exams were those who were motivated to do well. The study also suggested organizations can help employees do their best in promotional processes by developing test preparation and coping tools designed to manage exam anxiety. “Anxiety is complex – it can both help and hurt exam performance.” Anxiety management techniques should teach candidates to channel their arousal into productive behaviours, such as carefully responding to exam questions, and help them to avoid negative behaviours, like mind wandering, that tend to accompany this arousal.  Prof. McCarthy co-authored this study with former Rotman colleague Coreen Hrabluik, now at Deloitte, and R. Blake Jelley from the University of Prince Edward Island’s School of Business. All three are members of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Blake Jelley also serves as Secretary of the Canadian Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

Exclusive marketing contracts best when competition is fierce, Rotman study finds.
Agencies selling marketing services are often faced with the dilemma of whether to sell a service exclusively to a single firm in a given market category or to work with more than one. Using a mathematical model, a new study by a professor from the Rotman School of Management shows that choice should depend on how different the firms and products potentially being marketed are from each other; how much of their target customer market they are already capturing and; how much more of that market a marketing service company can reach for a firm. The study was recently published In the International Journal of Research in Marketing. Study author Prof. David Soberman found that marketing companies make higher profits by selling exclusive marketing contracts in a given category when firms and products in the category are very similar to each other. Likewise, if there is a high degree of market “differentiation” between companies and products, non-exclusive contracts is the way to go. Click to read the full paper.

Sexual behaviour at work still a problem shows new study from UofT’s Rotman School.
Be careful of that raunchy joke that gets all the laughs. As funny as folks at work may find it, it’s probably hurting morale. That’s one conclusion of a groundbreaking new paper from the Journal of Applied Psychology co-authored by researchers from the Rotman School of Management and the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Management. The study’s authors looked at the effect of sexual behavior in the workplace such as sexual jokes, innuendo, discussions of sexual matters or flirtation. And in a research first, they investigated if men and women got anything positive out of the behaviour, such as enjoyment and social bonding. “We approached the study with an open mind,” said Prof. Jennifer Berdahl of the Rotman School, who co-authored the study with Prof. Karl Aquino pf the Sauder School. “We thought, ‘Maybe these behaviours are a positive thing for employees who enjoy them.’ And then we found that they weren’t.” Click to read the full paper.

Nice guys can finish first, and so can their teams
A new study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,  says that a person can influence a group to become more efficient in achieving its goals by making cooperative, collective behaviour seem acceptable and appropriate, and thereby encouraging others to act similarly. The study, authored by Rotman Professor Mark Weber and his collaborator at Northwestern University, calls such individuals “consistent contributors” – people who contribute all the time, regardless of others’ choices. Click to read the paper.

Careful contest design helps everyone win, new study shows
They win some, they lose some. Trial and error is the method most companies use to decide the prize structure for promotional sweepstakes and contests – a marketing tool poised to cost North American firms nearly $2 billion this year. But those companies have a better shot at hitting their marketing targets consistently thanks to findings in a new paper published in the Journal of Marketing Research. Knowing which type of consumers a company is trying to target – current customers or potential new ones -- is key to deciding a contest’s prize structure, says Mengze Shi, a marketing professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto who co-wrote the paper with Ajay Kalra of the Jones Graduate School of Management at Rice University. Firms should also know how much risk the targeted consumers feel they are taking by participating in a contest and how much of a chance they believe they have of winning. Click to read the paper.

Relaxed trade rules boost African development, University of Toronto study finds

Often thought to be hobbled by corruption, poor infrastructure and a weak financial system, African exporters rose to the opportunities presented by a U.S. trade liberalization policy, a recent University of Toronto study has found. The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) of 2000 dropped duty charges on thousands of products for the 42 sub-Saharan countries that qualified. The act was found to be directly responsible for a "surprisingly large," 28% increase in imports in key product categories, showed the study by U of T economists Garth Frazer and Johannes Van Biesebroeck. Apparel saw the biggest boost, with a four-fold increase in imports of products in one of the highest duty categories. The AGOA also brought more foreign investment to eligible sectors. Click to read the paper.

Cabbies show how to work out business diversification pitfalls

Even the humble taxi cab can teach business strategists a thing or two about the ways companies respond to corporate diversification. An award-winning study co-published by the Rotman School of Management shows that U.S. taxi companies responded to their industry’s diversification in the 1990s by increasing their level of owner-operated vehicles -- limiting the potential tensions that could crop up among drivers and dispatchers as a result of a different competitive landscape. “It’s not a very well-documented industry,” said co-author Prof. Timothy Simcoe. “I talked to a million cabbies – every time I got off a plane. It’s kind of a fun way to do research.” Click to read the paper.

Moderate pay great for job performance, study suggests.

Employers hoping to get the best out of employees with huge performance contingent payments may actually be helping them to do worse, suggests a new paper published by a team of researchers in behavioral economics from several universities.
“If the payments are too high, they may backfire,” says paper co-author Nina Mazar, a marketing professor at the Rotman School of Management. “I don’t think people realize that there is a threshold.” Experiments conducted in India and the United States showed that participants doing tasks requiring creative thinking, problem-solving or memory skills improved their performance when financial incentives were increased to moderate levels. But once the incentives went beyond a certain threshold, they “choked” and did not perform as well. Click here to read the paper.

Low R & D, labour mobility restrictions holding back China’s knowledge economy

Despite China’s priority to “build a creative country,” the nation is still far from becoming a knowledge economy, says a recent paper published by The Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “The Chinese have been very successful in attracting low-wage kinds of manufacturing production … and that has made China a very strong economy,” said Charlotta Mellander, one of the paper’s three co-researchers and research director at the Prosperity Institute of Scandinavia. “But this could become even stronger if they managed to take advantage of the talent they’ve got.” Mellander collaborated on the paper with Prof. Richard Florida, director of The Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School, and Haifeng Qian, a PhD. student at George Mason University. Previous research in developed countries has found that a region’s economic productivity often depends on the level of technological innovation and the area’s ability to attract a pool of well-educated and highly-skilled people. The most innovative firms also make major investments in research and development. Click to read the paper.

Cold and Lonely: Does Social Exclusion Literally Feel Cold?

When we hear somebody described as “frosty” or “cold”, we automatically picture a person who is unfriendly and antisocial. There are numerous examples in our daily language of metaphors which make a connection between cold temperatures and emotions such as loneliness, despair and sadness. We are taught at a young age that metaphors are meant to be descriptive and are not supposed to be taken literally. However, recent studies suggest that these metaphors are more than just fancy literary devices and that there is a psychological basis for linking cold with feelings of social isolation. Psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli from the Rotman School of Management wanted to test the idea that social isolation might generate a physical feeling of coldness. Click to read the paper.

National pride turning developing country firms into a seller’s dream, suggests new study

Firms in developing countries are not only spending more to buy companies in the developed world, they’ve got patriotic motivations for paying premium prices, says a new paper. The conclusions are based on a detailed examination of media reports where national pride considerations are mentioned. One example is the 2007 purchase by Indian steelmaker Tata, of Corus, which Tata chairman Ratan Tata called “a moment of great fulfillment for India,” although a newspaper article said Tata had “paid too much.”
One investigation in the study found that in a sample of 3,806 firms, companies in developing countries bid 16% higher than companies in developed countries. A separate investigation found that companies in developing countries, which displayed indicators of national pride, bid almost twice as high for firms in developed countries as companies that did not show signs of national pride. "At first glance the results appear to reflect irrationality on the part of the bidders,” said study co-author Ole-Kristian Hope, the Deloitte Professor of Accounting at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Click to read the paper .

Study Finds Fee Disclosure Policy Needed For Defined Contribution Pension Plans.
A research paper from the Rotman International Centre for Pension Management finds that a standardized international policy on fee disclosure would help pension plan participants become better informed consumers of Defined Contribution (DC) plan investment and administrative services. Each year participants in DC pension plans around the world pay billions of dollars in fees. “Many people do not understand how large an effect an apparently small difference in fees can make on account balances at retirement,” say report authors John Turner and Hazel Witte. “Greater fee disclosure should be accompanied by great information on how to interpret the importance of fees.” Taking into account the insights from behavioral economics, the study, “Fee Disclosure to Pension Participants: Establishing Minimum Requirements” proposes a standardized fee disclosure model which is used to assess the effectiveness of current disclosure requirements in Australia, Canada, Chile, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Click to read the paper.

Non-compete clauses can help drive growth when timing is right
Contracts that limit employees from taking what they’ve learned at a company and profiting from it elsewhere may actually help industries in their infancy, says a new paper from two researchers at the Rotman School of Management. But once the industry has grown, those same non-compete clauses can hamper further growth by putting the brakes on labour mobility, an important growth driver. The conclusions come in a paper by April Franco and Matthew Mitchell. The husband-and-wife team wanted to understand why the highly-successful technology region known as Massachusetts’ Route 128 was gradually eclipsed by Silicon Valley during the 1970s and 1980s. The northeastern region had laws that helped enforce non-compete clauses, while California did not. Using a theoretical model, the researchers found that non-compete clauses initially helped the northeastern region because the protection they provided encouraged companies to invent new ideas in an arena that did not yet have many. Click here to read the paper.

Study Finds Evidence of Significant Front-Running
As reported in an article on July 22 in The Wall Street Journal, evidence of significant front-running has been found by a new study by Professor Hai Lu of the Rotman School of Management. In Do Short Sellers Front-Run Insider Sales?, Lu and co-author Mozaffar Khan of MIT’s Sloan School of Management found significant increases in short sales immediately prior to large insider sales, which is consistent with information leakage and front-running. Front-running, which is trading in advance of a large trade in order to profit from the price movement that usually follows the large trade, can happen when people are tipped off about an impending large sale. A brokerage employee might tip off a favored client like a large hedge fund or a brokerage might trade on its own prior to executing a client’s large trade. Both scenarios are illegal, as the trades are not based on public information.  Click here to read the paper.

Americans Expect Business Leaders to be White, and White Leaders to Succeed. Despite decades of progress for minorities in corporate settings,  Americans still expect business leaders to be white, and they judge white leaders as more effective than their minority counterparts. This is according to research published in the July issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology. The research team, led by Ashleigh Shelby Rosette of the Fuqua School of Business and including Rotman Professor Geoffrey Leonardelli, conducted a series of experiments to determine whether race still affects people’s judgments of leader effectiveness and leader potential. “Over time, people develop implicit beliefs about the traits and behaviors of leaders and this combination of characteristics evolves into a standard called a ‘leader prototype,’” Rosette said. Previous research has shown leaders who are viewed as compatible or consistent with the prototype are evaluated more favorably than leaders who are less compatible with these sets of beliefs, even when the leaders’ performance is identical. Traditionally, research in this area has focused on leadership traits, such as intelligence, goal-orientation and charisma, or behaviors such as acting in a decisive manner. However, the researchers sought to explore whether race, specifically “being white,” was an attribute of people’s leadership prototype.  Click here to read the paper.

Frequent flyer programs help airfares gain altitude, says new study
Loyalty has its rewards. But a recent study shows that it has its costs too, with frequent flyer programs driving airfares at key hub airports up by about 5%. The cost of more expensive tickets, such as business fares, are pushed even higher, by about 9%. “With deregulation of the airline industry in the U.S. in 1978 and in Canada shortly after, people expected to see airfares drop. Yet, at some airports, airfares remained fairly high,” said the study’s author, Mara Lederman, a professor of strategic management at the Rotman School of Management. Click here to read the paper.

Benefits all around - not just losses - when top-notch inventors emigrate, says new study
Engineers, scientists and other inventors who head to new jobs in other countries create a host of economic side-benefits not only for their new organization but also for their new country -- and the organization they left behind.  That’s because the resulting expansion of these innovators’ social and professional networks brings new know-how and ideas flowing to their current organization and even back to the one they’ve left behind, as they stay in touch with old colleagues. Eventually this process broadens the knowledge base in the inventor’s new country as well. These findings are contained in a study by Alexander Oettl, a PhD student, and Ajay Agrawal, Peter Munk Professor of Entrepreneurship, both at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Click here to read the paper.

China’s collectivist work ethic changing, suggests new study from Rotman
China’s economic juggernaut may be forcing a change in attitudes around what makes a good worker, says a study by two researchers at Rotman School of Management.  The study compared how Chinese and Canadian managers defined and ranked different job performance attributes. While the researchers expected Chinese managers to put more weight on collectivist work habits, such as being cooperative, the managers instead put more importance on getting jobs done and favoured individualistic job performance qualities even more than Canadian managers. “We zoned in on China because previous research suggested that Chinese tend to differ from Canadian in work-related values and behaviour,” says Prof. Maria Rotundo, who wrote the paper with her colleague, Jia Lin Xie. But, Prof. Rotundo adds, “China is growing at such a huge pace and there is so much pressure that right now the focus is on getting the task done.” The study looked at responses from Chinese managers and professionals attending executive MBA programs at two Chinese universities. The participants were asked to identify what they saw as counterproductive work behaviours and, in a separate test, rate their importance in a job evaluation against other factors such as task completion. The study found Chinese managers put more weight on task completion than even on negative behaviours such as absenteeism or defrauding the company, although these behaviours were still important.

Relaxed disclosure rules lead to empire-building and lower profits, shows study from UofT’s Rotman School of Management
Managers put shareholder value first, right? Only when they know someone is watching, says a new study. That’s because managers, left unchecked by disclosure rules, tend to make self-interested decisions, such as aggressive sales expansion, that stretch a company thin and lead to reduced profits and firm value. Accounting disclosures, on the other hand, help shareholders and boards of directors to more closely compare and evaluate managers’ decisions to a company’s performance. The study looked at about 500 American multinationals in the wake of the 1998 adoption of the U.S. Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 131 (SFAS 131). That standard eliminates the long-standing requirement that multinationals disclose earnings for its geographic operations (e.g., net income in Mexico or net income in East Asia). The standard is also in use under other names in other countries, including Canada. Some 74% of the companies studied chose not to disclose their geographic earnings. Within four years after SFAS 131 came into effect, those companies, relative to firms that continued to disclose geographic earnings, had a significant increase in foreign sales growth and foreign fixed asset growth (i.e., “foreign empire building”) but a significant decrease in foreign profit margin, overall firm value, and stock returns. Click to read the paper.

Location of Business by Women Entrepreneurs Leads to Lost Economic Opportunities
Greater family responsibilities and feeling shut out of “the old boys’ club” can lead women entrepreneurs to locate their businesses away from a city’s economic hub and closer to home, a recent paper has found. But this phenomenon also leads to a type of business segregation similar to housing patterns for blacks and whites, resulting in lost economic opportunity. The decision to run a business closer to home because a woman wants to spend more time with her children is a reasonable choice most would defend. To locate closer to home because of exclusion from business networks "is a negative segregation process that makes the whole country poorer,” says co-author William Strange, a professor of real estate and economics at the Rotman School of Management. Click to read the paper

Humanizing products isn’t always enough
Giving products human traits so consumers can relate with them and ultimately find them appealing is a marketing trick that has been around for a long time. Product spokespeople like Tony the Tiger, Mr. Clean, and the Michelin Tire Man are all examples.  Marketers also often try to give human personalities to products they are selling, by making them ‘dependable’, ‘caring’ or even ‘aggressive’ at times. “The underlying assumption has been that when you anthropomorphize a product, it must lead to a more positive evaluation by consumers, otherwise why would you bother?” says Pankaj Aggarwal, a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. But the study’s closer examination of what happens when consumers see humanized products shows “it’s not always good to anthropomorphize.” Click for more…

Greenest Companies Disclose the Most
Trying to figure out which companies will have the biggest environmental liabilities down the road? Check out what they’re saying about their environmental practices. A new study by four business researchers says the best environmental performers are those that give out the most information about their practices in their environmental and social responsibility reports. The researchers looked at environmental and social responsibility reports for 191 companies from the top five most polluting industries in the U.S. for 2003. Using a specialized scoring system, companies deemed to be good environmental performers through such things as toxic emissions and treatment of toxic waste scored above industry norms for voluntary disclosure of their environmental efforts. Poor performers scored below industry norms. Click for more…

Hourly Wage-Earners Less Likely to Volunteer
If time is money, then people directly paid for their time are less willing to give it up for free, a new study shows. Workers paid by the hour are less likely to do volunteer work outside of their jobs, says a paper by researchers Sanford DeVoe of the Rotman School and Jeffrey Pfeffer of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. That’s because the way they are paid conditions them to think about time in money terms. The researchers found that hourly-waged workers in the U.S. spent an average of 36% less time volunteering than workers on salary. They also found even salaried workers became less willing to volunteer their time once they had calculated how much they were being paid by the hour. Click for more ...

Lower Trade Barriers Improve Productivity
A recent study on Canada’s free trade experience suggests that eliminating more trade barriers inside and outside Canada could lead to big leaps in Canadian productivity, which in turn would allow Canada to better fund its social programs. The study by economics researchers Daniel Trefler and Alla Lileeva, found that Canadian companies with low productivity levels before the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) made significant productivity gains once the FTA came into effect in 1989. Click for more...

Researchers Use Math to Cut Waiting Times
Waiting. Nobody likes it yet we’ve all experienced it, whether it’s in the hospital emergency room or waiting for that urgently needed cup of java down the street. Believe it or not, facility planners care about this too. Their dilemma is how to balance costs for building facilities with minimizing the amount of time people have to wait for a service they have traveled to get. “You can see it almost any night you go to a hospital emergency – some are going to be overflowing, some are going to be very relaxed,” says Prof. Dmitry Krass, one of three authors of a recent paper on the problem at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. “Some of it is due to changes in demand but some of it is due to the fact that facilities are not planned properly.” Click for more...

Report Suggests More Modest Role for the International Monetary Fund
As the International Monetary Fund seeks to redefine itself, it should reconsider its quest to reassert its financial influence and recognize that a more modest, focused role is its best opportunity to find global relevance and reestablish credibility going forward, says a new paper from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. The paper, The IMF: Victim of Its Own Success or Institutional Failure, by Paul Masson, an adjunct professor of economics and research fellow at the Rotman School, surveys the history of the Fund and argues that in an age where highly mobile private capital holds sway and where the IMF is regarded with suspicion in some countries it is time for the agency to ‘do better what it does best’ – provide the world with reliable data and more candid assessments as well as fewer conditions on its short-term loans. Click for more...

The Hidden Cost of China Sourcing. New Study Provides Strategies on How to Profit from Supply Chain Bottlenecks
For the past decade hundreds of North American and European businesses have ridden the Chinese sourcing wave, taking advantage of huge cost savings from China’s supply of low cost labour. But nothing is permanent and sourcing from China is starting to show its vulnerabilities. The problem is not on the factory floor in China but rests with the supply chain which is supposed to get components to assembly plants and finished goods to retail outlets on time. The failure to do so can have a significant impact on operating margins as success depends on having what is selling in stock at the right time. But a new study says that companies that manage the growing supply-chain problems with creative solutions will gain a profit from this challenge. Click for more...