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Description
Since the global financial crisis of 2007-8, interest in worker-cooperatives and alternative forms of organization has surged. Mondragon, located in the Basque region of Spain, represents the largest federation of worker-cooperatives around the world, consisting of 98 cooperatives and 143 subsidiaries, which earned a total revenue of $14.5 billion in 2019. While previous attempts to establish a similar model have historically reached limited success, Mondragon has achieved a unique balance of remaining economically viable, on the one hand, and staying true to its founding principles of democratic governance, on the other. This paper sets out to analyze the democratic structure and the cooperative culture at the heart of the Mondragon model, as well as the new type of human relationship that it fosters. In particular, this relationship is one in which individual well-being is bound up with communal well-being that avoids the antagonistic clash between the capital and labor.
ContributorsSvejda, Sam (Author) / Simhony, Avital (Thesis director) / McNamara, Peter (Committee member) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
The current model of revenue generation for some free to play video games is preventing the companies controlling them from growing, but with a few changes in approach these issues could be alleviated. A new style of video games, called a MOBA (Massive Online Battle Arena) has emerged in the past few years bringing with it a new style of generating wealth. Contrary to past gaming models, where users must either purchase the game outright, view advertisements, or purchase items to gain a competitive advantage, MOBAs require no payment of any kind. These are free to play computer games that provides users with all the tools necessary to compete with anyone free of charge; no advantages can be purchased in this game. This leaves the only way for users to provide money to the company through optional purchases of purely aesthetic items, only to be purchased if the buyer wishes to see their character in a different set of attire. The genre’s best in show—called League of Legends, or LOL—has spearheaded this method of revenue-generation. Fortunately for LOL, its level of popularity has reached levels never seen in video games: the world championships had more viewers than game 7 of the NBA Finals (Dorsey). The player base alone is enough to keep the company afloat currently, but the fact that they only convert 3.75% of the players into revenue is alarming. Each player brings the company an average of $1.32, or 30% of what some other free to play games earn per user (Comparing MMO). It is this low per player income that has caused Riot Games, the developer of LOL, to state that their e-sports division is not currently profitable. To resolve this issue, LOL must take on a more aggressive marketing plan. Advertisements for the NBA Finals cost $460,000 for 30 seconds, and LOL should aim for ads in this range (Lombardo). With an average of 3 million people logged on at any time, 90% of the players being male and 85% being between the ages of 16 and 30, advertising via this game would appeal to many companies, making a deal easy to strike (LOL infographic 2012). The idea also appeals to players: 81% of players surveyed said that an advertisement on the client that allows for the option to place an order would improve or not impact their experience. Moving forward with this, the gaming client would be updated to contain both an option to order pizza and an advertisement for Mountain Dew. This type of advertising was determined based on community responses through a sequence of survey questions. These small adjustments to the game would allow LOL to generate enough income for Riot Games to expand into other areas of the e-sports industry.
ContributorsSeip, Patrick (Co-author) / Zhao, BoNing (Co-author) / Kashiwagi, Dean (Thesis director) / Kashiwagi, Jacob (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law (Contributor) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Thesis Abstract: Cygnal The healthcare market plays a vital role in how our team worked with innovation space to design a product that fit user needs and could be a sustainable business. Whatever product we design is going to be dictated based off of how the insurance market will pay for it and how much we can charge for our product and services. In fact, the healthcare market is so incredibly unclear with outdated regulations that all of these fraud schemes and inflammatory prices are bound to happen. Stronger government involvement in this instance, I believe would help the issue. In reality, there are so many people taking advantage of the system that you cannot put the blame on anyone exploiting the system. What is clear though, is that they are taking advantage of a system that looks like it was set up to allow them to do so, and in that sense, Medicare is responsible for allowing this market to become warped. The healthcare industry played a vital role in our team for Innovation Space is completing our project. If we do not have a firm understanding on how the insurance market works, how much wheelchair companies are pricing chair components for, and how easily customers can see a financial benefit in switching to our product, it will not survive in the market place. That is why I as the business student am dedicating a lot of time in the final months of our project to make sure that our pricing is accurate, and feasible. The health insurance market, even if it is dysfunctional, will be ultimately paying for our product, and in business if you do not truly know your customer, you are bound to lose him. This paper uncovers why this market is warped and how to do business within it.
ContributorsMefford, Michael James (Author) / Peck, Sidnee (Thesis director) / Boradkar, Prasad (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Objective: To assess and quantify the effect of state’s price transparency regulations (hereafter, PTR) on healthcare pricing.
Data Sources: I use the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project’s Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) from 2000 to 2011. The NIS is a 20% sample of all inpatient claims. The Manhattan Institute supplied data on the availability of health savings accounts in each state. State PTR implementation dates were gathered by Hans Christensen, Eric Floyd, and Mark Maffett of University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business by contacting the health department, hospital association, or website controller in each state.
Study Design: The NIS data was collapsed by procedure, hospital, and year providing averages for the dependent variable, Cost, and a host of covariates. Cost is a product of Total Charges within the NIS and the hospital’s Cost to Charge ratio. A new binary variable, PTR, was defined as ‘0’ if the year was strictly less than the disclosure website’s implementation date, ‘1’ for afterwards, and missing for the year of implementation. Then, using multivariate OLS regression with fixed effect modeling, the change in cost from before to after the year of implementation is estimated.
Principal Findings: The analysis estimates the effect of PTR to decrease the average cost per procedure by 7%. Specifications identify within state, within hospital, and within procedure variation, and reports that 78% of the cost decrease is due to within-hospital, within-procedure price discounts. An additional model includes the interaction of PTR with the prevalence of health savings accounts (hereafter, HSAs) and procedure electivity. The results show that PTR lowers costs by an additional 3 percent with each additional 10 percentage point increase in the availability of HSAs. In contrast, the cost reductions from PTR were much smaller for procedures more frequently coded as elective.
Conclusions: The study concludes price transparency regulations can lead to a decrease in a procedure’s costs on average, primarily through price discounts and slightly through lower cost procedures, but not due to patients moving to cheaper hospitals. This implies that hospitals are taking initiative and lowering prices as the competition’s prices become publically available suggesting that hospitals – not patients – are the biggest users of price transparency websites. Hospitals are also finding some ways to provide cheaper alternatives to more expensive procedures. State regulators should evaluate if a better metric other than charge prices, such as expected out-of-pocket payments, would evoke greater patient participation. Furthermore, states with higher prevalence of HSAs experience greater effects of PTR as expected since patients with HSAs have greater incentives to lower their costs. Patients should expect a shift towards plans that offer these types of savings accounts since they’ve shown to have a reduction of health costs on average per procedure in states with higher prevalence of HSAs.
Data Sources: I use the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project’s Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) from 2000 to 2011. The NIS is a 20% sample of all inpatient claims. The Manhattan Institute supplied data on the availability of health savings accounts in each state. State PTR implementation dates were gathered by Hans Christensen, Eric Floyd, and Mark Maffett of University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business by contacting the health department, hospital association, or website controller in each state.
Study Design: The NIS data was collapsed by procedure, hospital, and year providing averages for the dependent variable, Cost, and a host of covariates. Cost is a product of Total Charges within the NIS and the hospital’s Cost to Charge ratio. A new binary variable, PTR, was defined as ‘0’ if the year was strictly less than the disclosure website’s implementation date, ‘1’ for afterwards, and missing for the year of implementation. Then, using multivariate OLS regression with fixed effect modeling, the change in cost from before to after the year of implementation is estimated.
Principal Findings: The analysis estimates the effect of PTR to decrease the average cost per procedure by 7%. Specifications identify within state, within hospital, and within procedure variation, and reports that 78% of the cost decrease is due to within-hospital, within-procedure price discounts. An additional model includes the interaction of PTR with the prevalence of health savings accounts (hereafter, HSAs) and procedure electivity. The results show that PTR lowers costs by an additional 3 percent with each additional 10 percentage point increase in the availability of HSAs. In contrast, the cost reductions from PTR were much smaller for procedures more frequently coded as elective.
Conclusions: The study concludes price transparency regulations can lead to a decrease in a procedure’s costs on average, primarily through price discounts and slightly through lower cost procedures, but not due to patients moving to cheaper hospitals. This implies that hospitals are taking initiative and lowering prices as the competition’s prices become publically available suggesting that hospitals – not patients – are the biggest users of price transparency websites. Hospitals are also finding some ways to provide cheaper alternatives to more expensive procedures. State regulators should evaluate if a better metric other than charge prices, such as expected out-of-pocket payments, would evoke greater patient participation. Furthermore, states with higher prevalence of HSAs experience greater effects of PTR as expected since patients with HSAs have greater incentives to lower their costs. Patients should expect a shift towards plans that offer these types of savings accounts since they’ve shown to have a reduction of health costs on average per procedure in states with higher prevalence of HSAs.
ContributorsSabol, Joshua Lawrence (Author) / Reiser, Mark (Thesis director) / Ketcham, Jonathan (Committee member) / Dassanayake, Maduranga (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Agent based models allow for complex results from simple parameters. The mobile agents in my model, the firms, are allocated an amount of capital, while the static agents, the workers, are allocated a range of wages. The firms are then allowed to move around and compete until they match with a worker that maximizes their production. It was found from the simulation that as competition increases so do wages. It was also found that when firms stay in the environment for longer that a higher wage is possible as a result of a larger window for drawn out competition. The different parameters result in a range of equilibriums that take variable amounts of time to reach. These results are interesting because they demonstrate that the mean wage is strongly dependent upon the window of time that firms are able to compete within. This type of model was useful because it demonstrated that there is a variation in the time dependence of the equilibrium. It also demonstrated that when there is very little entry and exiting of the market, that wage levels out at an equilibrium that is the same, regardless of the ratio between the number of firms and the number of workers. Further work to be done on this model includes the addition of a Matching Function so that firms and workers have a more fair agreement. I will also be adding parameters that allow for firms to see the workers around them so that firms are able to interact with multiple workers at the same time. Both of these alteration should improve the overall accuracy of the model.
ContributorsElledge, Jacob Morris (Author) / Veramendi, Gregory (Thesis director) / Murphy, Alvin (Committee member) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / Department of Physics (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
This paper explores the history of sovereign debt default in developing economies and attempts to highlight the mistakes and accomplishments toward achieving debt sustainability. In the past century, developing economies have received considerable investment due to higher returns and a degree of disregard for the risks accompanying these investments. As the former Citibank chairman, Walter Wriston articulated, "Countries don't go bust" (This Time is Different, 51). Still, unexpected negative externalities have shattered this idea as the majority of developing economies follow a cyclical pattern of default. As coined by Reinhart and Rogoff, sovereign governments that fall into this continuous cycle have become known as serial defaulters. Most developed markets have not defaulted since World War II, thus escaping this persistent trap. Still, there have been developing economies that have been able to transition out of serial defaulting. These economies are able to leverage debt to compound growth without incurring the protracted consequences of a default. Although the cases are few, we argue that developing markets such as Chile, Mexico, Russia, and Uruguay have been able to escape this vicious cycle. Thus, our research indicates that collaborative debt restructurings coupled with long term economic policies are imperative to transitioning out of debt intolerance and into a sustainable debt position. Successful economies are able to leverage debt to create strong foundational growth rather than gambling with debt in the hopes of achieving rapid catch- up growth.
ContributorsPitt, Ryan (Co-author) / Martinez, Nick (Co-author) / Choueiri, Robert (Co-author) / Goegan, Brian (Thesis director) / Silverman, Daniel (Committee member) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
This article summarizes exploratory research conducted on private and public hospital systems in Australia and Costa Rica analyzing the trends observed within supply chain procurement. Physician preferences and a general lack of available comparative effectiveness research—both of which are challenges unique to the health care industry—were found to be barriers to effective supply chain performance in both systems. Among other insights, the ability of policy to catalyze improved procurement performance in public hospital systems was also was observed. The role of centralization was also found to be fundamental to the success of the systems examined, allowing hospitals to focus on strategic rather than operational decisions and conduct value-streaming activities to generate increased cost savings.
ContributorsBudgett, Alexander Jay (Author) / Schneller, Eugene (Thesis director) / Gopalakrishnan, Mohan (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
The healthcare industry is currently facing significant changes. One of the changes in the industry is a movement towards patient-focused care, which considers the patient as a person and the impact of care on the person. Patient experience is part of patient-focused care, and has similarities to the marketing term customer experience, which contributes to happier customers and long-term financial growth and success for businesses. This thesis defines current issues in patient experience as it relates to hospital manager decision making. Through secondary research, this thesis demonstrates what patient experience is, the role it plays in healthcare and hospital settings, the pressures on hospitals to increase patient experience performance, how patient experience performance is measured, and what strategies or action drive improvements under current performance measurements. Many studies and articles exist examining each of these issues individually. However, these sources do not comprehensively define patient experience in hospitals with perspective on how this influences hospital strategy and decision-making. Previous works on patient experience from the perspective of hospital strategy do not include considerations for recent industry shifts, most notably the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The collected definitions in this thesis provide guidance of relevant concerns hospital managers consider when formulating organization-wide strategy related to patient experience. This thesis explains how patient experience contributes to the success of hospitals in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term and how patient experience may shift its focus over time. Short-term concerns include specific regulations and definitions from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, responsible for over half of all payments to hospitals. Conforming to CMS standards is a matter of survival for most hospitals in the short-term. Hospitals are adjusting to rules and payment models not in existence just two years ago. First, hospitals will adapt, and then hospitals will strive to optimize under new standards as well as respond to adjustments in the rules over the next several years. After patient experience standards are well established, certain aspects of patient experience will be part of long-term differentiation and success for hospitals. Responding comprehensively to the shift towards improving patient experience is a critical aspect for hospitals to weather the many changes in the healthcare industry. Patient experience will provide better care to patients and better financial health to the hospitals that perform above patient experience standards.
ContributorsWilton, Kara Alexandra (Author) / Ketcham, Jonathan (Thesis director) / Ostrom, Amy (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor) / Department of Marketing (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Economists, political philosophers, and others have often characterized social preferences regarding inequality by imagining a hypothetical choice of distributions behind "a veil of ignorance". Recent behavioral economics work has shown that subjects care about equality of outcomes, and are willing to sacrifice, in experimental contexts, some amount of personal gain in order to achieve greater equality. We review some of this literature and then conduct an experiment of our own, comparing subjects' choices in two risky situations, one being a choice for a purely individualized lottery for themselves, and the other a choice among possible distributions to members of a randomly selected group. We find that choosing in the group situation makes subjects significantly more risk averse than when choosing an individual lottery. This supports the hypothesis that an additional preference for equality exists alongside ordinary risk aversion, and that in a hypothetical "veil of ignorance" scenario, such preferences may make subjects significantly more averse to unequal distributions of rewards than can be explained by risk aversion alone.
ContributorsTheisen, Alexander Scott (Co-author) / McMullin, Caitlin (Co-author) / Li, Marilyn (Co-author) / DeSerpa, Allan (Thesis director) / Schlee, Edward (Committee member) / Baldwin, Marjorie (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
In a season that spans 162 games over the course of six months, MLB teams that travel more face additional fatigue and jetlag from travel. This factor could negatively impact them on the field. To explore this issue, I tested the significance of different variables by creating four models, which compared travel with a team's ability to win games as well as its ability to hit home runs. Based on these models, it appears as though changing time zones does not affect the outcome of games. However, these results did indicate that visiting teams with a greater time zone advantage over their opponent are less likely to hit a home run in a game.
ContributorsAronson, Sean Matthew (Author) / MacFie, Brian (Thesis director) / Eaton, John (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / WPC Graduate Programs (Contributor) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor)
Created2014-05