Appointment Policies Research Articles

Does regulator designation of auditors improve independence?

PurposeThe practice of management having control over auditor appointment and compensation is believed to be a fundamental cause for the lack of auditor independence. While researchers propose alternative auditor appointment procedures to improve auditor independence, there are a few settings that allow researchers to examine alternative auditor appointment procedures such as regulator designation of auditors. This research aims to investigate the effects of regulator designation of auditors and litigation risk on auditor independence in a Chinese settingDesign/methodology/approachThis study adopts a 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design. A total of 110 surveys were sent out and 81 were collected from eastern China.FindingsThe results of an experiment with 81 Chinese auditors indicate that regulator designation of auditors improves auditor independence. In particular, auditors designated by the regulator feel less pressure from the audited company, perceive themselves to be more independent and are more willing to challenge the audited company’s aggressive financial reporting compared with those directly hired by the company. In addition, litigation risk moderates the effect of regulator designation of auditors on auditor independence such that regulator designation of auditors has a stronger impact on auditor independence when the litigation risk is low.Research limitations/implicationsThis study is also subject to limitations. First, regulator designation of auditors in China was examined. While regulator designation of auditors seems to improve auditor independence in the Chinese context, it is unclear if the same results will be observed in other economies, as China is a unique setting. For example, the majority of listed companies in China are under the control of government-related agencies. Consequently, the government has significant power in influencing auditor appointment policy. In contrast, the majority of other economies are more market-oriented with less government influence. Future studies in other markets will further enrich the understanding on regulator designation of auditors. Second, only regulator designation of auditors for state-owned enterprises was examined. It is unclear how regulator designation of auditors would affect non-state-owned enterprises. Moreover, future research could investigate the designation of auditors in other forms such as the designation of auditors by investors. Third, auditor appointment procedure may affect perceived risk of loss of client which in turn influences auditor independence. Future research could further investigate the mechanism through which regulator designation of auditors affect auditor independence.Originality/valueResults of an experiment with 81 Chinese auditors show that regulator designation of auditors can improve auditor independence. In a decision context where auditors must provide judgments relating to a proposed audit adjustment that is quantitatively material and will affect the client’s ability to meet debt covenants, auditors designated by the State-Owned Assets Management Bureaus are more resistant to management pressure and are less willing to accept the management’s aggressive financial reporting practice than those directly hired by the company.

Joint Optimization of Preventive Maintenance and Spare Parts Inventory with Appointment Policy

Under the background of the wide application of condition‐based maintenance (CBM) in maintenance practice, the joint optimization of maintenance and spare parts inventory is becoming a hot research to take full advantage of CBM and reduce the operational cost. In order to avoid both the high inventory level and the shortage of spare parts, an appointment policy of spare parts is first proposed based on the prediction of remaining useful lifetime, and then a corresponding joint optimization model of preventive maintenance and spare parts inventory is established. Due to the complexity of the model, the combination method of genetic algorithm and Monte Carlo is presented to get the optimal maximum inventory level, safety inventory level, potential failure threshold, and appointment threshold to minimize the cost rate. Finally, the proposed model is studied through a case study and compared with both the separate optimization and the joint optimization without appointment policy, and the results show that the proposed model is more effective. In addition, the sensitivity analysis shows that the proposed model is consistent with the actual situation of maintenance practices and inventory management.

Ein Kaiser geht auf Distanz: die Rompolitik Constans’ I.

Constans I, emperor of Rome from 337 to 350, never visited Rome. This paper proposes to identify Constans’ absence from Rome as a conscious political strategy to maintain a functional relationship with Rome without submitting himself to the demands of the traditions of Rome and of Christian emperorship. The paper opens with a discussion of Constans’ rapport with the senators in Rome as reflected in appointment policies. I argue against modern assumptions that pagan senators from Rome served as praetorian or urban prefects or in comitiva at court throughout his reign. This leads me to reinvestigate Constans’ policies towards the religions of Rome, pagan cults (e.g. CTh XVI 10.2) but also Christian affairs. I show that his collaboration with Rome was made possible by the emperor’s avoidance to associate himself too closely with religious issues and by his support the public amenities in the city. Prohaeresius’ visit to Rome then highlights the role of Greek learning as a neutral space of communication between emperor and Rome. Following a brief discussion of the the impact of imperial absence on reforms of the urban prefecture, the final section comments on Constans’ failure to use references to Rome in his imperial representation.

The Consequences of Appointment Policies for Court Legitimacy in Benin: A Network Analysis Approach

The paper seeks to explain how courts in new and vulnerable democracies acquire legitimacy and thus become credible actors able to facilitate or even foster the consolidation of democracy. It analyses the case of the Constitutional Court of Benin (CCB), demonstrating that governmental appointment policies have had an important impact on the court’s legitimacy. This West African country is considered to have been continuously democratic since 1991, and the court was established by consensus during the transition. The findings suggest that perceptions of fair representation on the bench matter more for credibility than professional qualifications and the quality of adjudication. And contrary to the widespread narrative that African politics is basically shaped by ethnicity, short-term political affiliations appear to matter more than communalistic representation. Network analysis using original social data on the major politicians and all 25 CCB judges since the court’s creation in 1993 provides the evidence for this argument. The paper ultimately argues that the appointment-policy-driven delegitimisation of an established and largely credible political arbiter can put democratic consolidation at risk. Ruling elites therefore play a major role in maintaining or eroding this consolidation.

Peking University's Personnel Reforms

In 2004, Peking University planned a radical overhaul of its faculty appointment and promotion policies. The reform program went far beyond the sphere of personnel itself and received a strong response not only on campus but throughout the country. The developments have vividly portrayed the difficulties and obstacles in China's new policies for universities in a context of globalization and helped to identify further directions and dynamics.

Strategies for Appointment Policy Design with Patient Unpunctuality

ABSTRACTAppointment policy design is complicated by patients who arrive earlier or later than their scheduled appointment time. This article considers the design of scheduling rules in the presence of patient unpunctuality and how they are impacted by various environmental factors. A simulation optimization framework is used to determine how to improve performance by adjusting the schedule of appointments. Prior studies (that did not include patient unpunctuality) have found that a scheduling policy with relatively consistent appointment interval lengths in the form of a dome or plateau dome rule to perform well in a variety of clinic environments. These rules still perform reasonably well here, but it is shown that a combination of variable‐length intervals and block scheduling are better at mitigating the effects of patient unpunctuality. In addition, performance improves if the use of this policy increases toward the end of the scheduling session. Survey and observational data collected at multiple outpatient clinics are used to add realism to the input parameters and develop practical guidelines for appointment policy decision making.

Improving immunization rates of underserved children: a historical study of 10 health departments.

Despite high immunization rates, hundreds of thousands of poor and underserved children continue to lack their necessary immunizations and are at risk of acquiring a vaccine-preventable disease. Local Health Departments (LHDs) and public health clinicians figure prominently in efforts to address this problem. This exploratory research compared ten (10) North Carolina LHDs with respect to immunization delivery factors. The study sample was identified based on urban designation as well as county demographic and socio-economic indicators that identified predicted "pockets" of underimmunization. Survey instruments were used to identify specific LHD immunization delivery factors. It was found that hours of operation, appointment policies, use and type of tracking systems, and wait times influence a health department's ability to immunize underserved children. This exploratory research is of particular importance, because it suggests that the implementation of specific policy interventions may reduce the morbidity and mortality related to vaccine-preventable diseases in poor and underserved children. This research also highlights the significance of the nurses' role in the policy making process in this important area of community health assurance. To improve childhood immunization rates, policy-makers should encourage adequate and appropriate funding for LHDs to adopt service delivery factors that are associated with higher-performing local health departments. LHDs should study the population they serve to further refine service delivery factors to meet the population's needs.

Appointment Scheduling Under Patient No-Shows and Service Interruptions

We consider an appointment-based service system (e.g., an outpatient clinic) for which appointments need to be scheduled before the service session starts. Patients with scheduled appointments may or may not show up for their appointments. The service of scheduled patients can be interrupted by emergency requests that have a higher priority. We develop a framework that can be utilized in determining the optimal appointment policies under different assumptions regarding rewards, costs, and decision variables. We propose two methods to evaluate the objective function for a given appointment schedule. We specifically consider two different formulations, both of which aim to balance the trade-off between the patient waiting times and server utilization and carry out a numerical study to provide insights into optimal policies. We find that policies that ignore interruptions perform quite badly, especially when the number of appointments to be scheduled is also a decision variable. We also find that policies that require equally spaced appointments perform reasonably well when the interruption rate is constant. However, their performance worsens significantly when the interruption rate is time dependent.

예약기반 서비스 시스템에서의 고객 도착 프로세스 분석

Delivery of a good quality of service in an efficient manner requires matching the supply of capacity with customer demand. Much research has employed queueing models that analyzed the service system on the basis of independent and stationary customer arrivals. However, the appointment system, which is widely used to facilitate customer access to service in many industries including healthcare, has significant influence on the customer arrival process so that the independent and stationary assumption does not hold in an appointment-based service system. In this regard, this paper aims to propose a model for accurate illustration of the appointment-based customer arrival process. The use of the proposed model allows us to evaluate the overall system performance such as mean waiting time and service level under various appointment policies instead of conducting simulation studies.

두 단계 서비스 시스템에서 교차예약정책의 평가

The appointment system is widely used to facilitate customer access to service in many industries including healthcare and others. Because of its importance, much research has investigated how to build an effective appointment policy under various environments. However, most research has considered a single-server service system. The objective of this work is to evaluate several appointment policies in a two-stage service system in which multiple servers are available and build separate appointments at the second-stage. In such a system, we propose and evaluate the staggering appointment policy. Simulation experiments indicate that the proposed staggering appointment policy outperforms other traditional appointment policies in terms of customer waiting time, server idle time, and the number of customers who are later to scheduled appointments.

The Effect of Integrated Scheduling and Capacity Policies on Clinical Efficiency

In outpatient healthcare clinics, capacity, patient flow, and scheduling are rarely managed in an integrated fashion, so a question of interest is whether clinic performance can be improved if the policies that guide these decisions are set jointly. Despite the potential importance of this issue, we find surprisingly few studies that look at how the allocation of capacity, paired with various appointment scheduling policies and different patient flow configurations, affects patient flow and clinical efficiency. In this paper, we develop an empirically based discrete‐event simulation to examine the interactions between patient appointment policies and capacity allocation policies (i.e., the number of available examination rooms) and how they jointly affect various performance measures, such as resource utilization and patient waiting time. Findings suggest that scheduling lower‐variance, shorter appointments earlier in the clinic (and, conversely, higher‐variance, longer appointments later) results in less overall patient waiting without reducing physician utilization or increasing clinic duration. Additionally, exam rooms exhibited classic bottleneck behavior: there was no effect on physician utilization by adding exam rooms beyond a certain threshold, but too few exam rooms were devastating to clinic throughput. Some significant interactions between these variables were observed, but were not influential to the level of managerial concern. Clinicians' intuition about managing capacity in healthcare settings may differ substantially from best policies.

Power and Status. Administration, Appointment Policies and Social Hierarchies in the Roman Empire, AD 193-284

This study defines changing power and status relations between the highest ranking representatives of Roman imperial power at the central level, particularly in a period when the central level came under tremendous pressure, AD 193-284. Prosopography has been used as the principal method for analyzing the Empire’s administration, appointment policies and socio-political hierarchies. Hereby, it was possible to trace the political elite of the Empire, consisting of the third-century emperors, the senatorial elite and high-ranking equestrians who served as senior military officers in the army and as senior civil administrators. The examination of these groups, via their status profiles and four power dimensions (in Robert Dahl’s terms, base, scope, domain and amount), shows how the various power and status structures changed in different ways. By integrating prosopographical explorations into an analytical approach and asking sociological questions, this thesis does not aim to analyze each individual senator or eques, but more broadly surveys changes in power and status at the top level in the Roman Empire in the third century. The focus on the third century has been valuable because the difficulties of the era at different levels have revealed changes in power and status relations more visibly. The period under discussion is one for which data are minimal. Yet, exactly such a sociological analysis of power and status relations through prosopography has made it possible to describe and contextualize broader processes. Finally, this dissertation has aimed to demonstrate the advantages of a methodology based on an analysis and comparison of prosopographical data covering a considerable part of the political elite for a period of about a century. This method yielded not only confirmation of various notions put forward in previous studies but also new insights on the diachronic development of imperial administration and social hierarchies.

Physician office vs retail clinic: patient preferences in care seeking for minor illnesses.

Retail clinics are a relatively new phenomenon in the United States, offering cheaper and convenient alternatives to physician offices for minor illness and wellness care. The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of cost of care and appointment wait time on care-seeking decisions at retail clinics or physician offices. As part of a statewide random-digit-dial survey of households, adult residents of Georgia were interviewed to conduct a discrete choice experiment with 2 levels each of 4 attributes: price ($59; $75), appointment wait time (same day; 1 day or longer), care setting-clinician combination (nurse practitioner in retail clinic; physician in private office), and acute illness (urinary tract infection [UTI]; influenza). The respondents indicated whether they would seek care under each of the 16 resulting choice scenarios. A cooperation rate of 33.1% yielded 493 completed telephone interviews. The respondents preferred to seek care for both conditions; were less likely to seek care for UTI (beta = -0.149; P = .008); preferred to seek care from a physician (beta = 1.067; P < .001) and receive same day care (beta = -2.789; P < .001). All else equal, cost savings of $31.42 would be required for them to seek care at a retail clinic and $82.12 to wait 1 day or more. Time and cost savings offered by retail clinics are attractive to patients, and they are likely to seek care there given sufficient cost savings. Appointment wait time is the most important factor in care-seeking decisions and should be considered carefully in setting appointment policies in primary care practices.

The Need for Faculty Status and Uniform Tenure Requirements for Law Librarians

This article examines tenure requirements currently in use in academic law libraries in the United States. It is one of two articles examining the effect of tenure opportunities on rank-and-file academic law librarians, their law libraries, and the profession of law librarianship. Its intended audience is library directors and other leaders within the profession of academic law librarianship. article reports data gathered in an August 2009 survey of law libraries that currently provide tenure or continuous appointment opportunities for academic law librarians. To provide context, this article revisits faculty status and how it can naturally lead to law librarians having opportunities to attain tenured status. article also considers the ideal of tenured status - what benefits are gained by the tenure system and what is meant by the concept of academic freedom which underpins justification of tenure generally. It identifies various tenure tracks for librarians and the standards for performance under which law librarians are currently reviewed, promoted to progressively higher rank, and awarded tenure. Finally, it recommends that library directors and other leaders within the profession make a concerted effort to encourage law libraries to employ more uniform and consistently rigorous standards for assessing law librarian performance for tenure or continuous appointment, and to develop more robust programs for encouraging librarian scholarship. Failing to do so can only weaken arguments that law librarians should continue to hold faculty status, and be able to attain tenured status, well into the future. An earlier draft of this article entitled, The Need for More Uniform and Consistently Rigorous Standards for Assessing Law Librarian Performance in Tenure and Continuous Appointment Policies, received the American Association of Law Libraries' LexisNexis® Call for Papers, Open Division award for 2010. A companion piece, “Challenges Associated with Providing Tenure and Continuous Appointment Opportunities for Academic Law Librarians,” may be found at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1490113.

Regional Proportion and Balance in the Appointment Policy of Korean Administrations

Regional Proportion and Balance in the Appointment Policy of Korean Administrations

Busy Boards in a Two-Tier System: Old-Boys Network or Efficient Monitoring Technology?

With respect to monitoring of a firms management there are two competing systems known: the one-tier system grounded in the Anglo-Saxon tradition or the two-tier system stemming from the German tradition. Due to the recent series of corporate scandals a heated discussion emerged about whether one system dominates the other. We contribute to this discussion by examining the effect of busy boards in Germany, a paradigm of the two-tier system. The fundamental difference between the one-tier and two-tier system is the strict separation of management (executive board) and control (supervisory board) in the two-tier system. Accordingly, one might assume that the time load for a member of the supervisory board is much lower than the one of its one-tier equivalent, the outside director. Thus, one would expect a lower impact of the busyness of supervisory board member on firm performance in the German case. We examine this hypothesis based on a hand-collected panel data-set consisting of some 1,110 firm year observations between 2004 and 2007 containing more than 5,600 supervisory board members with characteristics like their number of additional directorships and their background. However, using pooled-OLS, random effect and firm fixed effects models we find - similar to the one-tier evidence - a strong negative relation between busyness of the supervisory board members and firm performance. In challenging our findings we observe that it is neither board members' background nor the appointment policy of firms that drives this result. We conclude that the negative performance relation is not only caused by the timely overloading of the board member, but also by the negative network effects, the Deutschland AG (Germany's Inc.), that Germany is famous for.

Understanding access to genitourinary medicine services.

In this study we describe waiting times in genitourinary medicine clinics (England, Wales, Northern Ireland), describe patterns of clinic attendance over time, and explore the association between waiting times and attendance patterns. A postal survey of clinicians in October 2002 explored waiting times and appointment policy. Clinic attendance data were linked to survey responses, and attendance trends described in relation to national sexually transmitted infection (STI) data. Waiting times were reported, and associations between attendance patterns and appointment policy explored. Mean waiting times were 11.2 days for males and 12.5 days for females. An association between longer waiting time and new males' non-attendance rates was shown. From 1996 to 2002 there was no overall increase in attendances in English clinics, while the proportion of all patients who were new or had a new problem increased from 0.37 to 0.44, and the ratio of new STI diagnoses to new attenders increased from 0.2 to 0.31. Major acute STIs diagnosed in England increased from 114,380 to 185,247 cases.

Raising the Bar: An Approach to Reviewing and Revising Standards for Professional Achievement for Library Faculty

The committee revising the retention, promotion, and continued appointment policy in the Virginia Tech libraries took a broad view of its task in articulating its goal, gathering information from internal and external sources, allocating drafting responsibilities, and winning support. The committee’s work revealed an unexpected need and led to an explicit affirmation of professional obligations of librarians to one another. Thus, adoption of the new policy and the principles it embodied became a lever for changes in the organizational culture.

Tenure in transition: trends in basic science faculty appointment policies at U.S. medical schools.

This article-based on a 2002 survey of 125 U.S. allopathic medical schools, reviews of institutional policy documents, and interviews with medical school leaders-explores and analyzes three trends in appointment and tenure policies for basic science faculty at U.S. medical schools. First, the percentage of full-time, nontenure track basic science faculty has increased, from 12% in 1980 to 20% in 2000. More dramatically, by the late 1990s, the percentage of new basic science faculty hired on a nontenure track surpassed the percentage hired on a traditional tenure-track line. This development stems from the tendency of some schools to appoint faculty to nontenure-eligible "research scientists" faculty tracks, to hire junior faculty on 100% grant funding, and to allow nontenure-track faculty to switch to the tenure track as their research career progresses. The second trend is an alteration to the tenure financial guarantee. Historically, at most medical schools, it was assumed that tenure guaranteed total institutional salary for basic scientists. Schools have begun to redefine that commitment to less than full salary to protect against financial vulnerabilities and to provide a means to reduce faculty salaries, if warranted. The third trend is increased flexibility to pretenure policies. Schools have lengthened probationary periods, revised up-or-out provisions, instituted stopping-the-tenure-clock policies and less-than-full-time appointments, and permitted faculty to switch between the tenure and nontenure tracks. These policy modifications recognize the increased professional and personal demands on faculty time.

APPOINTMENT POLICIES IN SERVICE OPERATIONS: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE ECONOMIC FRAMEWORK

In this paper we review the literature on appointment policies, specifically in terms of the objective function commonly used and the assumptions made about the behavior of demand. First, we provide an economic framework to analyze the problem. Based on this framework we make a critical analysis of the objective functions used in the literature. We also question the validity of the assumption made throughout the literature that demand is exogenous and independent of customers' waiting times. We conclude that the objective functions used in the literature are appropriate only in the case of a central planner facing a demand that is unresponsive to waiting time. For other scenarios, such as a private server facing a demand that does react to waiting time, these objective functions are only shortcuts for the real objective functions that must be used. A more general model is then proposed that fits these scenarios well. Finally, we determine the impact of using the literature's objective functions on optimal appointment policies.