Management Problems Research Articles

Evaluation of Managerial Economics Applications Strategy using the SPSS Method

Managerial Economics is an economy branch is, this economic theory and size using methods solve real-world managerial problems. It helps businesses and organizations make informed decisions by using economic analysis. Here are some common applications of managerial economics: Demand Analysis and Forecasting: Businesses use managerial economics to understand consumer behavior and forecast future demand for their products or services. This involves studying factors that affect demand, such as price, income levels, and consumer preferences. Production and Cost Analysis: Managerial economics helps businesses optimize production processes and minimize costs. It involves analyzing production functions, cost structures, and economies of scale to determine the most efficient way to produce goods or services. Pricing Strategies: A product or the right price for the service It is up to a company to decide Crucial to profitability. Managerial economics helps businesses set prices by considering factors like production costs, competition, and consumer willingness to pay. Market Structure Analysis: Understanding the type of market, a company operates in (e.g., perfect competition, monopoly, oligopoly) is essential for making strategic decisions. Managerial economics helps analyses market structures and determine appropriate strategies for each. Risk and Uncertainty Analysis: Businesses often face uncertainty in various aspects, such as demand fluctuations, production costs, and market conditions. Managerial economics provides tools to assess and manage risks, including techniques like decision tree analysis and expected value calculations. Capital Budgeting and Investment Analysis: Managerial economics assists in evaluating investment opportunities and capital projects. It involves methods Payback period analysis of investments. Regulatory and Government Policy Analysis: Managerial economics helps businesses understand and navigate government regulations and policies that affect their operations. This can include areas like taxation, environmental regulations, and trade policies. Strategic Planning: Using economic analysis, businesses can develop long-term strategies for growth and sustainability. This may involve assessing market trends, competitive dynamics, and potential expansion opportunities. Game Theory and Competitive Strategy: Managerial economics incorporates game theory to analyze strategic interactions between competitors. It helps businesses formulate optimal strategies in competitive environments. Resource Allocation: Efficient allocation of resources, including labor, capital, and technology, is crucial for a company's success. Managerial economics provides tools to distribute funds in a manner that optimisesoverall productivity and profitability. Demand Analysis and Forecasting, Production and Cost Analysis, Pricing Strategies, Market Structure Analysis, Risk and Uncertainty Analysis, Capital Budgeting and Investment Analysis and Regulatory and Government Policy Analysis. The Cranach’s Alpha Reliability result. The overall Cranach’s Alpha value for the model is .744 which indicates 74% reliability. From the literature review, the above 50% Cranach’s Alpha value model can be considered for analysis.

The Effects of Governance-Related Regulatory Reform: Ownership Structure and Earnings Management in Vietnamese Listed Firms

The purpose of this study is to examine how the influence of the internal corporate governance mechanism, namely ownership structure, on firms’ earnings management (EM) practices and insider choices between accrual-based and real EM changed after regulatory reform in Vietnam. The author considers the role of three ownership types, managerial, state and foreign, and assess how the relation between ownership structure and EM was affected by the Code of Corporate Governance reform. The study relies on a comprehensive sample of 4,408 firm-year observations of 596 firms listed on either the HOSE or HNX between 2008 and 2016. The study finds a significant effect of the reform on the relation between ownership structure and EM. Thus, the reform mitigated agency problems of managers and foreign investors in Vietnamese listed firms. The study contributes to the literature as it provides a more complete picture of the effects of managerial, state and foreign ownership on EM where the protection of minority investors is generally weak and legal enforcement is low in a developing economy.

Promoting Turf Recovery Following a Hurricane

Devastation from hurricanes can cause multiple problems for turfgrass managers, sod producers, and homeowners. Damage may include visible factors such as prolonged periods of standing water, uprooted trees, shading and obstruction from demolished structures, deposition of silt or mud, and damage to irrigation systems. Less visible problems may include damage to root systems resulting from compacted soil from heavy equipment used during cleanup and recovery, reduced drainage, and injury resulting from effects of saltwater intrusion. Suggested guidelines for correcting these problems are included in the text.

The dual economics in the labour process: managerial contradictions and indirect control

One of the greatest impacts of Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital is the discovery of a ‘control imperative’ within the capitalist production process. Whereas his equation of capitalist domination and Taylorism has been heavily criticized early on, the capabilities of the expanded use of digital technologies at the workplace have raised the question of whether a Taylorist mode of control is on the advance once again. The article challenges this perspective by addressing managerial problems that go beyond the problem to transform labour power into actual labour. Taking up Sohn-Rethel’s theory of ‘dual economics’, we argue that the necessity to reconcile contradictory requirements of the ‘economics of the market’ and the ‘economics of production’ poses an equally crucial challenge for management. Whereas that ‘problem of reconciliation’ remained latent in the Fordist era, tensions between the two logics of economics have now increasingly become a problem to solve within the course of controlling the labour process. Drawing on our own research on ‘the inner marketization of the firm’ over the last 15 years, we discuss ‘indirect control’ as a mode of control that precisely addresses the problem of reconciliation and considers recent changes in the course of digitalization. On the basis of our empirical findings, we describe the contradictory forms of activating and restricting subjectivity in the digital workplace and its implications for the legitimation of managerial power and capitalist domination.

Evaluation of IT Governance at Credit Union XYZ Financial Institutions Using COBIT 5 Framework

Since 2002, Credit Union XYZ has been utilizing information technology in its lending operations. However, the utilization of IT governance has not been optimal due to various weaknesses, obstacles, and issues such as server problems, downtime for maintenance, system change requests, human resources, and recurring IT-related problems. This research aims to assess the current IT governance capabilities at Credit Union XYZ. The method used is the COBIT 5 standard with a focus on the APO and DSS domains tailored to the existing issues. Data were collected through questionnaires distributed to the IT team and relevant stakeholders. The selected COBIT 5 processes include APO06 (Manage budget and costs), APO07 (Manage human resources), DSS01 (Manage operations), DSS02 (Manage service requests and incidents), and DSS03 (Manage problems). The eval_uation reveals a 1 level gap in IT governance capabilities, with the current level at level 2 in Credit Union XYZ, while the target is level 3 in the future. The researcher's recommendation to Credit Union XYZ is to align IT processes with the standards and regulations established by COBIT 5.

Diverting ileostomy in benign colorectal surgery: the real clinical cost analysis.

There are three types of complications stoma related: ones related to its construction, ones related to its function and related to closure. The aim of this study was to assess the risk of complications related to the stoma presence and to identificate variables related to complications. We conducted a retrospective study of patients who underwent sphincter-preserving elective surgery for benign condition between January 2013 and December 2020 at IRCCS Sacro Cuore Don Calabria Hospital in Negrar, Verona. Data were collected regarding demographics and complications associated with primary surgery, stoma closure and the interval period. Univariable and multivariable analysIs were conducted. A total of 446 (12.2%) diverting loop ileostomies were performed. At index procedure, 76 (17%) patients had complications and 34 patients had complications related to ileostomy creation. Twenty patients (4.4%) were re admitted before stoma closure for dehydration. One hundred and eighty-seven patients (41.9%) suffered from ileostomy management's problems. At univariate analysis, complications of having stoma are more frequent in elder patients (p = 0.013), ASA score > 2 (p = 0.02), IBD diagnosis (p = < 0.001) and patients who had ileostomy creation complications (p = 0.04). At stoma closure, 55 (12.3%) patients had complications. Forty-seven patients (10.5%) presented incisional hernia in the stoma closure site. Ileostomy closure complications are more common with ASA score > 2 (p = 0.01) and IBD diagnosis (p < 0.001). IBD was found an independent factor of poor outcome at the time of ileostomy creation and closure. Developing complications at the time of ileostomy creation is statistically related to develop complications during ileostomy maintenance at multivariable analysis A loop ileostomy is usually created to limit the potentially life-threatening consequenceS of anastomotic leakage, but it is not able to decrease the leak-related mortality, wound sepsis, postoperative bleeding and small bowel obstruction. Debate rises not only for its uncertain efficacy but also because of the significant morbidity related to stoma. The surgeon could use these data in order to tailor his surgical strategy to the patients and their disease.

Assessment of a geomorphological-based design for coastal protection: The case of a wave-cut platform on the Bogliasco coast (Liguria Region, NW Italy)

Coastal erosion processes and the associated risks pose a significant challenge for coastal urban settlement administrations. Coastal managers are often seeking new approaches and solutions for coastal protection. Introducing protective structures such as breakwaters and groins often poses problems for management, e.g. modification of the natural panorama, changes within the local coastal dynamics and associated implications with regard to coastal hazards and risks. This paper describes a geomorphological-based approach to coastal structure design, taking as its study case the Bogliasco coast in the region of Liguria, near the eastern border of the municipality of Genova (Northwest Italy). Bogliasco is a stretch of rocky coast exposed to the most intense storms of the Liguria Sea and where the urban settlement reaches the edge of the cliff. To prevent cliff collapse and coastal flooding (and mitigate the associated risks), this study proposes an approach based on the structural recovery of an ancient wave-cut platform currently consumed by erosion. The recovered structure dissipates incoming waves, helping to mitigate both the erosive phenomena at the foot of the cliff and the risk of coastal flooding. The performance of the coastal protection project was evaluated by comparing the results of the XBeach model simulations for ante-operam and post-operam scenarios. The results indicate that the adopted solution contributes to a reduction of wave impact on the coast and the mitigation of flood hazards and risks. A geomorphological-based approach is therefore seen as a winning approach from both an engineering and management viewpoint.

Reflections on urban E-bike governance: lessons from the Guangzhou case

ABSTRACT E-bikes have become one of the main modes of travel for urban residents in China; they provide convenient travel services but also present some problems for urban traffic safety and management. In view of the social concerns caused by restrictions of e-bikes in Guangzhou, this study discusses how to improve e-bike development while considering traffic management and travel. This paper analyses the comment data from Weibo and WeChat Mini Software and discusses the opinions of netizens. In addition, Weibo and WeChat comment data were reclassified into three different views. This study revealed that proponents and opponents share the same consensus that e-bike management should be strengthened. Additionally, with respect to understanding traffic restriction policy, conservative views suggest that policy implementation is for safety purposes and should be supported. The radical view is that restricting e-bikes is a one size fits all policy, which ignores the travel demand of e-bike riders, and that the government is strengthening the central position of motor vehicles. Finally, in terms of management, respondents believed that planning and legal construction should be strengthened and e-bikes should be managed with reference to motorized management policies and regulations to protect the rights and interests of all parties.

Inventory pricing model under different carbon emission policies

Considering carbon emission in inventory management model is a hot topic in current academic circles. Studying inventory pricing can provide managers with better managerial insights. Economic order quantity model mainly solves the inventory management problem of demand determination. However, due to the complex market environment in real life, it is difficult to meet the conditions of constant demand. In addition, with the enhancement of low-carbon awareness of enterprises, the study of pricing model based on low-carbon policies has also attracted the attention of a large number of scholars. The robust optimization theory is applied, the inventory pricing model of demand fluctuation under carbon cap, carbon tax and carbon cap-and-trade policies is considered, the robust equivalence form of the problem is studied. The profit comparison under different policies is given. Numerical experiments show that the carbon cap-and-trade policy can better control the carbon emission of enterprises.

Captive birds exhibit greater foraging efficiency and vigilance after anti-predator training

Abstract Rearing animals in captivity for conservation translocation is a complex undertaking that demands interdisciplinary management tactics. The maladapted behaviors that captive animals can develop create unique problems for wildlife managers seeking to release these animals into the wild. Often, released captive animals show decreased survival due to predation and their inability to display appropriate anti-predator, vigilance, and risk-analysis behaviors. Additionally, released animals may have poor foraging skills, further increasing their vulnerability to predation. Often conservation translocation programs use anti-predator training to ameliorate these maladapted behaviors before release but find mixed results in behavioral responses. The behavioral scope of analyzing the effect of anti-predator trainings is frequently narrow; the effect of this training on an animal’s risk-analysis competency, or ability to assess the predation risk of a foraging patch and subsequently adjust its behavior, remains unstudied. Using a captive-reared passerine species, the American robin (Turdus migratorius) (46 individuals), we applied an experimental giving up density test (GUD) to analyze the effect of anti-predator training on the robins’ vigilance/risk-analysis behaviors, patch choice, and the GUD of food left behind after one foraging session. Robins moved and foraged freely between 3 foraging patches of differing predation risk before and after a hawk silhouette was presented for 1 min. Results indicate that after anti-predator training, robins displayed increased vigilance across most foraging patches and better foraging efficiency (higher vigilance and latency to forage with simultaneous lower GUD) in the safest patch. These results can have positive survival implications post-release, however, more research on this training is needed because anti-predator training has the potential to elicit indiscriminate increased vigilance to the detriment of foraging gains. Further research is required to standardize GUD’s application in translocation programs with multigenerational captive-bred animals to fully comprehend its effectiveness in identifying and correcting maladaptive behaviors. GUD tests combined with behavioral analysis should be used by conservation translocation managers to examine the need for anti-predator and foraging trainings, the effects of trainings, and a group’s suitability for release.

Assessing tourism impact on cultural landscapes using mobile phone data: the case of Las Médulas (Spain).

Cultural landscapes often pose problems for planning and management because of insufficient information regarding visitor movements, interests and infrastructure burden. Traditionally visitor surveys have helped to fill this gap, albeit limited to their incomplete and occasional nature. This paper presents a methodology for using cellular antenna metadata for understanding tourism flows. This information is collected systematically by the mobile phone network but only recently has its big data potential begun to be exploited for understanding socio-economic phenomena. The present case study of the Roman gold mine of Las Médulas (León, Spain) provides a model for tourism impact analysis using anonymized data from cell phone towers.

Urban development and the loss of natural streams leads to increased flooding

Developing countries with hard pressed economies and a rapidly growing population have a myriad of issues to face. Karachi is one of the largest cities of Pakistan and is rapidly growing. The city has been hit by floods in the year 2016, 2018, 2019 and 2020, recently. Since the early 1990s Karachi has seen a rapid spike in development and in the process many natural streams have been built over. This has led reduced space for rainwater runoff and has created problems for urban flood managers. To ascertain this, topographic records of 1940s and 1980s and Landsat imagery of 2000, 2008, 2015 and 2020 were used to map historical urban extent. Sentinel—1, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery was used to extract flooded areas during 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2020 floods. In the year 2020, 64.3 km2 of area was flooded which was the highest. There has been a growth of 286% in urban area observed between 1980 and 2000. The city was built with several natural flood water carrying streams, north and west of it. It was found that that out of 3600 km of these streams, 870 km of streams have either been blocked or removed and a 100% in core urban area. DEM of difference (DOD) prepared by subtracting 1945 DEM from SRTM DEM indicated that most of embankments along these streams were in the areas that show erosion in DOD surface, thus explaining the expansion of built areas along historical stream channels. Forcing floods to enter these built areas.

РАСШИРЕНИЕ АССОРТИМЕНТНОЙ ПОЛИТИКИ КАК ФАКТОР ПРОДВИЖЕНИЯ ПРЕДПРИЯТИЙ РАЗМЕЩЕНИЯ

The article is devoted to the consideration of the problem of assortment policy manage-ment as part of the overall strategy of devel-opment of accommodation enterprises. The authors consider the key aspects of deter-mining strategies, formation and selection of assortment, development of additional ser-vices. It is noted that during the formation of assortment policy the management of enter-prises is forced to optimize the complete-ness of the assortment, as well as to search for profitable markets for sales. The practi-cal significance of the article lies in determin-ing the directions of expanding the assort-ment policy and planning the range of addi-tional services of the accommodation enter-prise taking into account the needs of cus-tomers.

Lean Production as Mechanism of Enterprise Management

Maintenance of lean production is a system that consists of tools (methods) aimed at creating and incrementing values, struggle with losses, optimization of enterprise work, cutting prime cost and raising quality of products, development of responsible attitude of personnel to changes. For any industrial enterprise it is important how to minimize losses and increase value of products. Today lean production is not only a managerial practice but also a subject of academic research. In spite of a long history lean production due to its modification capacity is considered an innovation concept. The article characterized lean production as a managerial mechanism of the enterprise, showed reasons for managerial problem arising and provided ways of their resolving. Special attention is paid to methodology of lean enterprise mechanism and principles of maintaining its work. The authors showed stages of starting-up the mechanism of lean production at the enterprise. According to the authors, problems of raising quality and cutting prime cost of products can be solved with lean production as a managerial mechanism. The present research can help elaborate the program of maintaining the work of lean production mechanism and use the algorithm at the enterprise.

The Current Managerial Problems Faced by Garment Factories in Bengaluru

The main objective of garment factories in Bengaluru was to increase production, sales, expenditure outlays and in short achieve the organizational goals of the company. The point to be mentioned is whether the garments have evolved from tailoring shops to modern textile mills? They have transitioned from private to public sector. The research gap tries to find out whether this transition has made the managerial goals align with the company goals. What were the difficulties faced by these managers in increasing production, maintaining capital funds, profit retention ratio, debt equity ratio, keeping shareholder’s owners&amp; management happy, assurance of job security, maintenance of machines and other capital equipment, implementing various labour laws, discourage groupism and unionism, undertaking social security measures, prevent company takeovers but what was the result? Were organizational goals achieved? The research methodology followed was both primary and secondary data was collected and used for analysis. The findings showed that most of the garments are still privately owned and they have implemented most of the labor laws but still have enshrined their main goals-profit, sales and growth maximization. Labor absenteeism was not tolerated at all.

Deep Learning-Assisted Online Task Offloading for Latency Minimization in Heterogeneous Mobile Edge

With the proliferation of smart devices in recent years, many applications requiring high computing capability and low latency have emerged. Edge computing is one of the promising paradigms to support such applications. Due to the high volatility of edge environments, e.g., frequent movements of mobile devices, varying task sizes, and time-variant channel conditions, we have to make the offloading and resource management decisions on the fly. This paper formulates and studies the problem of online task offloading and resource management in heterogeneous mobile edge environments. The goal of the problem is to minimize the overall system latency. We prove that the problem is NP-hard. Moreover, traditional algorithms needing long decision-making times are insufficient to support applications with high volatility. This paper proposes a deep learning-assisted online algorithm that can make fast decisions. In particular, we design an offline solver for the proposed problem and use a deep neural network to emulate the solver. We conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the proposed approach. Results show that the proposed approach is around <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$50,000\times$</tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$500\times$</tex-math></inline-formula> faster than the commercial Gurobi solver for the optimal solution and the proposed offline approximation solver, respectively. Moreover, the overall latency under the proposed approach is near-optimal.

Federated Multiagent Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach via Physics-Informed Reward for Multimicrogrid Energy Management.

The utilization of large-scale distributed renewable energy (RE) promotes the development of the multimicrogrid (MMG), which raises the need of developing an effective energy management method to minimize economic costs and keep self energy sufficiency. The multiagent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) has been widely used for the energy management problem because of its real-time scheduling ability. However, its training requires massive energy operation data of microgrids (MGs), while gathering these data from different MGs would threaten their privacy and data security. Therefore, this article tackles this practical yet challenging issue by proposing a federated MADRL (F-MADRL) algorithm via the physics-informed reward. In this algorithm, the federated learning (FL) mechanism is introduced to train the F-MADRL algorithm, thus ensures the privacy and the security of data. In addition, a decentralized MMG model is built, and the energy of each participated MG is managed by an agent, which aims to minimize economic costs and keep self energy sufficiency according to the physics-informed reward. At first, MGs individually execute the self-training based on local energy operation data to train their local agent models. Then, these local models are periodically uploaded to a server and their parameters are aggregated to build a global agent, which will be broadcasted to MGs and replace their local agents. In this way, the experience of each MG agent can be shared and the energy operation data are not explicitly transmitted, thus protecting the privacy and ensuring data security. Finally, experiments are conducted on Oak Ridge National Laboratory distributed energy control communication laboratory MG (ORNL-MG) test system, and the comparisons are carried out to verify the effectiveness of introducing the FL mechanism and the outperformance of our proposed F-MADRL.

Farmers’ Perception on Contribution of Community-Based Breeding Program to Sheep Flock Performance and Income of Producers in Hula and Dara Districts, Southern Ethiopia

Community-based breeding programs (CBBP) have been viewed as attractive breeding strategies, resulting in significant improvements in the performance of small ruminants and the income of producers in many parts of the world. As part of these interventions, a community-based breeding program was implemented on Abera sheep mostly reared in the region since 2013. An interview was conducted with 188 sheep producers (91 CBBP members) and 97 non-CBBP members) to know the contribution of CBBP in terms of sheep flock performance improvement and income of sheep producers in the Hula and Dara districts of Sidama region. Focused group discussions with 6–8 individuals in each breeder cooperative were separately made to complement the survey results. CBBP households owned significantly (p&lt;0.05) larger sheep heads (7.28 versus 4.99) than non-CBBP members. CBBP households further had more market participation, sold significantly (p&lt;0.05) higher average sheep (2.4 versus 1.3), and consequently earned significantly (p&lt;0.05) higher annual income (ETB 3877) than non-participating (ETB 2007) households. The majority of CBBP households (85%) observed a better twining rate for their sheep flocks since they joined the breeding program. The average age of 8.63 months of a lambing interval, 7.9 months of ram maturity for breeding, and 10.42 months needed for a ram to achieve market age before implementation of the breeding program were significantly (p&lt;0.05) reduced to 7.31 months, 6.2 months, and 7.69 months, respectively, after sheep producers started a selective breeding program. Low market integration (0.28), sheep mortality (0.21), feed shortage (0.20), low institutional support and coordination (0.17), and managerial problems of the committee (0.13) were major problems with the ranking index in parenthesis. Despite the significant contribution of the breeding program to sheep producers, the current study found weak and unsustainable institutional support for proper breeding ..........

A Model Proposal for Developing a Solution and Determining the Administrative Problems of Hospitals in Turkey: The BUY Model.

Background and Purpose: This study was conducted in line with the request of the senior management of a hospital. The objective of the current research is to identify managerial problems through the relationship between health employees' perceptions of organizational justice, trust in the manager and the organization, and job satisfaction; develop a solution proposal over the relationships between these variables and motivation variables; and present a model proposal (BUY Model) as a result. Methods: The study sample is comprised of 673 employees. The study data were collected online using a questionnaire consisting of five scales. The data were analyzed by descriptive statistical methods, correlation analysis, and regression analysis. Results: The findings obtained from the study showed that the participants' perceptions of organizational justice, trust in the manager and the organization, job satisfaction and motivation were generally at a moderate level. The study also determined that trust in the manager and the organization had a partial mediation effect on the effect of organizational justice on job satisfaction and the variables of trust in the organization, organizational justice, and trust in the manager, respectively, and especially, the job satisfaction variable also affected motivation. Conclusion: The BUY model was developed to identify problems related to the management of healthcare human resources and solve these problems. Considering the importance of the concepts of job satisfaction and motivation in terms of employee performance, health service quality, and patient satisfaction, it is thought that the developed model will benefit managers of health institutions in increasing the job satisfaction and motivation levels of health employees.

Principles of Algorithmic Management

Our title harks back to Frederick W. Taylor’s influential book. But our identification of the principles of algorithmic management is certainly not advocacy. Our task in this essay is to develop a theory of algorithmic management in relation to fundamental changes in the shape and structure of organization in the 21st century that are reconfiguring boundaries, roles, and relations among managers, workers, engineers, professionals, consumers, and other user categories. In particular, such a theory must be attentive to transformations in the topology of organization. Today, many of the most valuable actors, assets, and activities are not located within the firm but involve a complex entanglement of information flows, practices, and users. This topology gives rise to a distinctive challenge: how to manage when the most valuable assets and activities are not in the firm. Whereas actors in hierarchies command, in markets they contract, and in networks collaborate, on platforms they are co-opted. The co-optation of actors, assets, and activities is undertaken by algorithmic management. To grasp the distinctive principles of algorithmic management, we compare and contrast the features of its ideology and practices with those of scientific management and the more recent collaborative management. Algorithmic management, we argue, operates within a different organizational form, articulates a different ideology, and addresses different managerial problems with different governance principles along different lines of accountability.