Marketplace Forces Research Articles

Laboratory testing of sunscreens on the US market finds lower in vitro SPF values than on labels and even less UVA protection.

BackgroundNew research has attributed increased significance to the causal link between ultraviolet A (UVA) radiation and immunosuppression and carcinogenesis. In the United States, sunscreens are labeled with only their sun protection factor (SPF) and an imprecise term “broad‐spectrum protection.” Sunscreen marketing and efficacy evaluations continue to be based primarily on skin redness (sunburn) or erythema. We sought to evaluate the ultraviolet (UV) protection offered by common sunscreen products on the US market using laboratory‐measured UV‐absorption testing and comparing with computer‐modeled protection and the labeled SPF values. This approach enables an investigation of the relationship between the labeled SPF and measured UVA protection, a factor that is ignored in current regulations.MethodsFifty‐one sunscreen products for sale in the United States with SPF values from 15 to 110 and labeled as providing broad‐spectrum protection were tested using a commercial laboratory. All products were evaluated using the ISO 24443:2012 method for sunscreen effectiveness. The final absorbance spectra were used for analysis of in vitro UV protection.ResultsIn vitro SPF values from laboratory‐measured UV absorption and computer modeling were on average just 59 and 42 percent of the labeled SPF. The majority of products provided significantly lower UVA protection with the average unweighted UVA protection factor just 24 percent of the labeled SPF.ConclusionRegulations and marketplace forces promote sunscreens that reduce sunburn instead of products that provide better, more broad‐spectrum UV protection. The production and use of products with broad spectrum UV protection should be incentivized, removing the emphasis on sunburn protection and ending testing on people.

Strategies to Assure Optimal Trade-Offs Among Competing Objectives for the Genetic Improvement of Soybean.

Plant breeding is a decision-making discipline based on understanding project objectives. Genetic improvement projects can have two competing objectives: maximize the rate of genetic improvement and minimize the loss of useful genetic variance. For commercial plant breeders, competition in the marketplace forces greater emphasis on maximizing immediate genetic improvements. In contrast, public plant breeders have an opportunity, perhaps an obligation, to place greater emphasis on minimizing the loss of useful genetic variance while realizing genetic improvements. Considerable research indicates that short-term genetic gains from genomic selection are much greater than phenotypic selection, while phenotypic selection provides better long-term genetic gains because it retains useful genetic diversity during the early cycles of selection. With limited resources, must a soybean breeder choose between the two extreme responses provided by genomic selection or phenotypic selection? Or is it possible to develop novel breeding strategies that will provide a desirable compromise between the competing objectives? To address these questions, we decomposed breeding strategies into decisions about selection methods, mating designs, and whether the breeding population should be organized as family islands. For breeding populations organized into islands, decisions about possible migration rules among family islands were included. From among 60 possible strategies, genetic improvement is maximized for the first five to 10 cycles using genomic selection and a hub network mating design, where the hub parents with the largest selection metric make large parental contributions. It also requires that the breeding populations be organized as fully connected family islands, where every island is connected to every other island, and migration rules allow the exchange of two lines among islands every other cycle of selection. If the objectives are to maximize both short-term and long-term gains, then the best compromise strategy is similar except that the mating design could be hub network, chain rule, or a multi-objective optimization method-based mating design. Weighted genomic selection applied to centralized populations also resulted in the realization of the greatest proportion of the genetic potential of the founders but required more cycles than the best compromise strategy.

Bennett’s Archive I: Lydia Sigourney

Bennett’s Archive I: Lydia Sigourney Elizabeth Petrino Nineteenth-century American women’s poetry has recently come of age. With the arrival of new anthologies and critical volumes, critics have built on Paula Bennett’s pioneering archival work.1 In fact, her landmark Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology (1998) both predates the newly-reconstructed standard American literature anthologies and underscores the aesthetic achievement of many once popular writers, among them a key nineteenth-century woman poet: Lydia Sigourney. Responding to the views of early critics, such as Fred Lewis Pattee in The Feminine Fifties (1940), who disparaged women writers as hack sentimentalists, Bennett’s scholarship also establishes a new way of reading their poetry that emphasizes their legacy within a broad cultural framework. This essay will explore the many ways that Bennett’s anthology and her monograph Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (2003) advanced the critical conversation. Based on her extensive archival research, Bennett’s essays on Sigourney’s poetic achievement and generic experimentation have inaugurated a full reassessment of her influence. [End Page 234] Countering an earlier essay by Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson, Bennett’s 2007 article, “Was Sigourney a Poetess? The Aesthetics of Victorian Plenitude in Lydia Sigourney’s Poetry,” takes issue with the newly recovered term Poetess and asks whether it should be applied so widely to American women’s poetry.2 Prins and Jackson’s “Lyrical Studies” responded to various projects recuperating and interpreting transatlantic Victorian women writers, Bennett’s among them.3 They claim that the Poetess occupied a role constructed around well-understood aesthetic conventions. By resurrecting the term, Prins and Jackson seek to dislodge the feminist orthodoxy that the lyrical self embodied in the speaking subject or “I” might be read wholly as the poet’s personal self. Rather, they question the degree to which female authors might be able to identify with the emotion traditionally expressed by speakers within the lyric and argue that the Poetess instead comprises “not a speaker, not an ‘I,’ not a consciousness, not a subjectivity, not a voice, not a persona, not a self.” Unlike Bennett, Prins and Jackson define the theory of women’s writing as “lyrical,” rather than focusing on the “lyric” genre, in order to question the limits to which the Poetess must subscribe but which also doom her to obscurity.4 They claim that British women poets, such as Christina Rossetti, L. E. L., Caroline Norton, George Eliot, Michael Field, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning invoke Sappho, both as harbinger of a female literary tradition rooted in a classical past and as a figure of disappointed love and spendthrift emotion. In doing so, British women poets initiated a Poetess tradition of what Bennett terms “succinctly, self-enclosed poems aestheticizing woman’s pain” that proved both highly popular among readers and effective at reducing the poets themselves to empty ciphers.5 In contrast, Bennett claims that American female poets not only resisted the term Poetess, but that they wrote other types of socially relevant poems.6 In America, editors and publishers, rather than aesthetes and literary historians, [End Page 235] shaped publication history by responding to the literary market, thus creating a more competitive environment for poetry than existed in Britain. Perhaps women in America wrote Poetess poetry, Bennett insists, but so did American men, and their poetic production far exceeded this one type.7 Indeed, while in Britain female poets referred to themselves more often as poetesses, in America, female poets eschewed this term—as they largely also eschewed the Sappho figure—in favor of viewing themselves as working professionals without pretensions to literary aestheticism—as Sigourney describes herself, “a schoolmistress and a literary woman.”8 Unlike in Britain, where women poets responded to aesthetic views, in America the reigning model emphasized literary production and the marketplace forces that made poets, among them Sigourney, household names.9 Given Sigourney’s widespread notoriety and public renown, for instance, the publisher of Godey’s Lady’s Book paid the poet $500 per year simply to list her name on the masthead, capitalizing on her reputation.10 And if male editors and critics in...

Health decision making

AbstractHealth decision making has become a fundamental part of everyday consumer life. In the relatively simple course of making a meal choice, planning a trip to the gym, or forgetting to pick up a prescription, consumers’ routine choices will cumulatively define their health. In this article, we will explore the marketplace forces that shape health decisions by drawing on classic and contemporary research from marketing, psychology, and health.

Youth and surveillance in the Facebook era: Policy interventions and social implications

Facebook’s meteoric rise—from a small Harvard-based website that began in 2004, to a global digital platform with a membership of 1.2 billion people a decade later—has made it one of the most profitable and high-profile corporations in today’s contemporary digital culture. Its aggressive marketing and data collection practices, however, have placed Facebook at the center of public policy debates over consumer privacy in the Big Data era. This paper explores those controversial practices, focusing especially on their effects on youth.More than 80% of teens use social media, which have become an essential arena for personal and social development, and which may well be altering some of young peoples’ behavior patterns. But except for a handful of studies (mostly published in marketing journals) the growing body of academic literature on social media and youth has ignored the role of marketplace forces. Yet economic imperatives and powerful e-commerce business models are fueling the growth of these new platforms, shaping their structures and operations, and both responding to and influencing user behaviors.The driving force behind the growth of social media—and, indeed, all digital media—is a complex set of data collection, tracking, and targeting systems that monitor and monetize individual users’ behaviors as well as their interactions with friends and acquaintances. Facebook’s marketing, data collection, tracking, and targeting operations are specially attuned to key aspects of adolescent development, both tapping into young peoples’ needs and taking advantage of their unique vulnerabilities. Because of adolescents’ emotional volatility and their tendency to act impulsively, they are more vulnerable than adults to such techniques as real-time bidding, location targeting (especially when the user is near a point of purchase), and “dynamic creative” ads tailored to their individual profile and behavioral patterns.Given the unique role that digital media play in the lives of young people, new strategies will be required to ensure that their privacy is enshrined as a fundamental right. One way to accomplish this is to develop a set of “Fair Information and Marketing Principles for Children and Teens,” drawn from the long-established and well-recognized Fair Information Privacy Practices. These principles should take into account the unique needs and vulnerabilities of youth, and be designed to balance the ability of young people to participate fully in the contemporary media culture—as producers, consumers, and citizens—with the governmental and industry obligation to ensure they are not subjected to unfair, manipulative, and deceptive data collection and marketing practices. In order to achieve these goals, advocacy organizations, educators, parents, scholars, and youth need to work together as part of a broad, social movement, making privacy for children and youth part of the larger policy agenda on behalf of all consumers and citizens.

Evolution of Consumption: An Insight into Consumer Derivatives and Marketing Implications

Consumers in the market search for a product/brand or something else? The concept of marketing involves identifying and satisfying customer needs and wants. As the dynamics of marketplace and environmental forces show a swift change, customer needs get redefined. The new marketing paradigm aims at comprehending the evolving customer needs and responds by providing a set of experiences to satisfy customers. Marketers strategize the elements of marketing mix in the realm of remarkable experiences where customers are involved at the cognitive as well as emotional level. The customer derives satisfaction out of the holistic experience and this contentment leads to customer loyalty. In the light of the marketing metamorphosis, the present paper seeks to understand the transformation of consumption into experiences.

Understanding poverty and promoting poverty alleviation through transformative consumer research

Consumer research holds potential for expanding society's understanding of how people experience poverty and mechanisms for poverty alleviation. Capitalizing on this potential, however, will require more exploration of how consumption experiences shape individual and collective well-being among the poor. This article proposes a framework for transformative consumer research focused on felt deprivation and power within the lived experience of poverty. The framework points to consumer choice, product/service experiences, consumer culture, marketplace forces, and consumption capabilities as research streams with potential to help alleviate poverty. Future research in these areas will expand pathways for transforming the lives of the poor by alleviating stress, engaging marketplace institutions, fulfilling life aspirations, leveraging trust and social capital, and facilitating creativity and adaptation.

Identifying Best Practices in Financing Next Generation Networks

Governments throughout the world have determined that next generation network (“NGN”) development serves the national interest. The strategies used to achieve progress vary greatly as does the extent to which governments perceive the need to get actively involved through direct ownership and subsidization of carriers. At the macro-level such widely different tactics stem from political and philosophical differences over the extent to which governments should augment or replace marketplace forces. At the micro-level national governments differ in the determination of what policies, strategies and tactics will achieve the greatest positive impact taking into consideration the specific characteristics of their individual countries. No government has unlimited funds to invest in new networks, or to subsidize private ventures promising to improve access to essential services at affordable rates. Accordingly nations must determine whether and how to use limited taxpayer funds to expedite the access to inexpensive and ubiquitous wired and wireless broadband networks. Baseline factors such as geography, income, demographics and market penetration of existing networks have a significant impact on what works best. However, nations with similar physical and economic characteristics have pursued significantly different strategies. This paper will identify best practices in NGN development using both case studies and a review of the current literature assessing government strategies. On the supply-side nations have sought to stimulate NGN rollout by direct investment, public private partnerships and subsidization of private ventures. Universal service policies typically use financial stimulus, often poorly calibrated or vulnerable to manipulation and abuse. On the demand-side some nations have identified many ways to stimulate interest in broadband services by promoting digital literacy and the widely shared view that broadband services are essential. The paper concludes that a variety of strategies, policies and tactics qualify as best practices based on current NGN market penetration, network performance and subscribership as well as the impact of a nation’s geography and the education, wealth and interest in broadband of residents. Nations that develop and revise a clear vision and strategy can achieve greater progress than ones content with the pace of private initiatives, or reliant solely on government efforts. Promoting digital literacy constitutes an underappreciated, low cost stimulus tool for generating interest in NGNs and the ability to exploit digital networks. Other successful strategies include creating incentives for private investment, promoting competition, reallocating spectrum, offering electronic government services and establishing safeguards to promote a high level of trust and consumer protection. The paper will provide a toolkit of confirmed best practices.

Assessing the Merits of Network Neutrality Obligations at Low, Medium and High Network Layers

The often contentious network neutrality debate typically cleaves along an absolute for or against dichotomy based largely on one’s philosophy about the Internet’s past and future direction, the ability of marketplace forces to promote self-regulation, and the degree of confidence in governments’ ability to remedy acute problems. Such a macroscopic perspective promotes a large difference of opinion with plenty of opportunities to disparage the opposition. Thoughtful scholarly literature, which can examine nuances in the debate, can become subordinate to sponsored research designed to influence policymakers with a preconceived point of view. A “big picture” analysis ironically leads to viewpoints at polar opposites and advocacy that finds no middle ground.The issue of whether the Internet requires some degree of government oversight, dispute resolution and stewardship requires serious consideration rather than sloganeering and dueling web pages. An essential element for such analysis breaks down the Internet into at least three layers having different characteristics that can affect the arguments for or against the application of network neutrality rules. A physical layer provides the infrastructure needed to establish a basic communications link between two or more parties. Ridding on top of this basic bitstream transmission conduit are communications protocols and standards like the Transmission Control Protocol that manage the routers that select networks to carry traffic and the Internet Protocol that establishes a globally used addressing system. Farther atop the physical layer and the layers that set up and process transmissions lay the content, applications and software that provide various services.This paper will consider the network neutrality debate in the context of these three different layered components of the Internet. The paper will show that compelling arguments for enforceable network neutrality rules are strongest at the low layer, contestible at the middle layer and unnecessary at the high layer. Such a nuanced view of network neutrality explains that the need for government involvement depends on which part of the Internet’s networking infrastructure one examines. For one comfortable with government involvement and network neutrality rules, the paper will challenge the need for such oversight in the competitive marketplace for Internet-mediated content, applications and software. For others uncomfortable with any government involvement, the paper will identify instances where market failure or the lack of competition necessitates fair dealing by a limited number of operators providing Internet access. In the middle layers, where Internet Service Providers use protocols and technologies to manage their networks, but possibly also to favor corporate affiliates and certain third party providers of content, the paper suggests the need for a government referee authorized to resolve disputes and to examine causes of congestion and service interruptions.

The ETRF, Robust Hope and Teacher Education: Making practical reforms to the senior phase of learning

Robust hope aims to contribute to educational praxis. In Australia, what counts as teacher education is currently determined at the individual State and Territory level. Yet the demand side of teacher education is determined by responses to the effects of global marketplace forces that impact on changes to local communities. This article investigates the utility of robust hope as a means of analysing one Australian State Government's reforms to the senior phase of education and training; and as a way of conceptualising future teacher education possibilities. Recent research into Queensland's “education and training reforms” (ETRF) for the senior phase of learning (Years 10–12) identifies the positioning of schools as brokers of socio‐economically aligned learning and earning for young people. These changes to young people's senior phase of learning present significant implications for capacity building of the teaching workforce.

Using radio frequency identification technology in distribution management: a case study on third-party logistics

In the past two decades, the highly competitive marketplace forces many manufacturing firms in Hong Kong moving their production lines to the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region where the labour cost is low. The changes not only bring ample business opportunity to these firms, but also trigger a structural transformation in distribution logistics. Therefore, new methods are required for local logistics service providers to cope with these changes. In this study, a logistics information system called Integrated Logistics Information Management System (ILIMS) is proposed to simplify the distribution process with the help of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. A case study is discussed in applying ILIMS to solve distribution management problems of International Logistics Solutions Limited (ILSL), a medium-sized logistics service company operating in Hong Kong and the PRD region. By using this RFID-enabled system, the overall distribution performance of the company is greatly improved.

Monster at the Foot of the Bed: Surviving the Challenge of Marketplace Forces on Higher Education

The impact of technology on society has caused a paradigm shift in the basic support for higher education. Where higher education was traditionally supported as a function of government, the knowledge explosion and global economy resulting from the impact of computer and other technologies is moving the underlying support of higher education to the marketplace. There is evidence that traditional academic strategies and practices that were successful under the old paradigm may no longer be working. Twelve suggestions are offered for revolutionary changes that the academy must make in order to survive, even thrive, in the new paradigm.

Monster at the Foot of the Bed: Surviving the Challenge of Marketplace Forces on Higher Education

Monster at the Foot of the Bed: Surviving the Challenge of Marketplace Forces on Higher Education

The changing face of managed care.

Managed care plans--pressured by a variety of marketplace forces that have been intensifying over the past two years--are making important shifts in their overall business strategy. Plans are moving to offer less restrictive managed care products and product features that respond to consumers' and purchasers' demands for more choice and flexibility. In addition, because consumers and purchasers prefer broad and stable networks that require plans to include rather than exclude providers, plans are seeking less contentious contractual relationships with physicians and hospitals. Finally, to the extent that these changes erode their ability to control costs, plans are shifting from an emphasis only on increasing market share to a renewed emphasis on protecting profitability. Consequently, purchasers and consumers face escalating health care costs under these changing conditions.

Demand-Side Carbon Reduction Strategies in an Era of Electric Industry Competition

With the national debate on the need for intensified research and development, supply-side mandates, and carbon taxes likely to continue for some time, the authors propose a five-point, integrated demand-side plan that is compatible with marketplace forces and can be implemented now.

The future of medical schools and teaching hospitals in the era of managed care.

At the 125 U.S. medical schools and their affiliated teaching hospitals, most of the nation's basic and clinical research advances are made, and these translate into topflight medical care and great reductions in health care costs (e.g., $30 billion a year for polio). But these medical schools and teaching hospitals and their capacities to provide critical education and research are threatened by escalating erosion of their infrastructure, the declining academic workforce, the diminishing of quality and access as a result of growing marketplace forces, and shrinking funds. The author provides details about the forces threatening academic medical centers (i.e., medical schools and their affiliated teaching hospitals) and then presents a variety of strategies that individual academic medical centers can carry out to more efficiently use their resources. But sufficient resources ae still needed if centers are to function as they should. What is to save them? The author indicates that centers should not overly depend on managed care, the pharmaceutical industry, or foundations to provide the necessary support, and that centers' internal strategies can go only so far. He proposes that the importance of centers and the dangers they face must be communicated convincingly to the nation's citizens, business leaders, government representatives, and purchasers of health care. The message must be repeated frequently so it will sink in, and must be given in terms that are relevant to individuals and their families. He also advises that certain types of partnerships may be helpful. But most critical is the need to persuade the government to mandate separate revenue streams for research, education, and care for the underserved. As hard as this will be to achieve, there are many allies of academic medicine, from the president to numerous legislators; the author discusses what they have said and done to help. He concludes by urging everyone in academic medicine to do their parts to make a powerful case for the value of academic medical centers to society, and affirms his belief that American society will sustain these centers.

The Science Behind the American Public Health Association/American Academy of Pediatrics National Health and Safety Guidelines for Child-Care Programs

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE APHA/AAP STANDARDS In 1992, the American Public Health Association (APHA) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published the long-awaited Caring for Our Children—National Health and Safety Performance Standards: Guidelines for Out-of-Home Child Care Programs.1 This publication was the product of a 4-year effort involving many experts in child health and safety and day-care providers. The standards document provides a national consensus on approaches to reducing diseases and injury and promoting prevention among children and providers in group-care settings. Consumer protection initiatives are needed because market-place forces are inadequate to ensure a health environment for children in child care. Over the past two decades, a growing number of investigators have documented the increased occurrence of infectious diseases2-4 and injuries,5-7 and missed opportunities for health protection and promotion in child care.8 Despite the tendency to focus on reports of negative health outcomes, children and families thrive in early childhood programs that provide safe, nurturing care and developmentally appropriate education. Day-to-day excellence in child care depends on committed, well-educated care givers who work in a child-friendly and staff-friendly environment. In the US, good child care is limited. Few parents can afford the full cost of care. Most lack the knowledge, skills, or objectivity to critically evaluate the care they choose for their children. Convenience, availability, and affordability motivate parents when they choose child care. Parents are pressured to meet occupational expectations, and tend to overlook significant risks in their children's child-care arrangements. Even parents who are pediatricians (who are expected to be well-versed in child development, health, and safety) ignore hazards and poor quality when rating convenient and available child-care arrangements (Aronson S, unpublished data).

Improving Health Through Health System Reform

Although the nation has been consumed by the issue of health system reform for the last 2 years, the focus has been relatively limited, concentrating on policies at the federal level and on the problems of accessibility and financing of insurance for personal medical services. But reform of the US health system is a considerably broader issue. Despite congressional inaction this year, profound changes are taking place through state legislative reform, the regulatory process (such as Medicaid waivers), and marketplace forces. And some policymakers in the federal government and the states are approaching health system reform not only from the vantage point of access and cost containment, but with the added goals of protecting and improving the population's health. See also pp 1276 and 1292. Two articles in this issue ofThe Journal, by Baker et al¹and by Fielding and Halfon,²make a strong case for taking

Does Consortium Research Belong in My Business Strategy?

Distinguished Author Series Summary We are seeing a revolution in the way that R&D affects the strategic plans of businesses and governments. Business and government leaders are acutely aware that the future belongs to those who can capture the benefits of rapidly advancing technology. Yet for many companies, the cost of developing and commercializing advanced technology is becoming prohibitive. While the complexity and risk of developing advanced technology are escalating, the time cycle for successful market introduction is shrinking. To manage corporate costs, more private organizations are downsizing their R&D functions. Concurrently, there is an increasing need for technological contributions to current business problems and new business opportunities. These marketplace forces have spurred the growth of collaborative research among corporations, including the establishment of consortium research organizations. This paper addresses some of the most important issues associated with consortium research. Why is collaborative research so attractive today to business and government leaders? What are the downsides? What should one expect from successful consortium research? Introduction In the last 50 years, technological innovation has created a world vastly different from that of the World War II generation. Then, owning a television set was rare, and those who did received only a few live black-and-white programs over a limited broadcasting schedule. Now, it is common to have several color televisions per household, each receiving 24-hour broadcasts of scores of programs through cable technology. The family doctor who used to make house calls armed with only medical training, simple medications, and few diagnostic tools has segued into a complex medical industry in which organ transplants are routine and sophisticated diagnostic equipment challenges our financial resources. The pace of technology advances must be maintained to meet worldwide expectations of an increasing standard of living. However, technology innovation itself has become more complex, more costly, and riskier from a business perspective. One way that organizations are responding to these challenges is by collaboratively supporting research through consortia. Early consortia in the U.S. were generally liaisons established between government and academia to pursue a vital national objective, such as national defense or improved health care. Similarly, the early consortia in the private sector were liaisons between industry and academia. Their efforts were directed primarily at fundamental research that did not affect the near-term business prospects of the corporation. The scientific results from this precompetitive R&D were considered an industry-wide resource. Individual corporations were challenged to convert the basic research results into their competitive advantage. Corporations maintained adequate R&D staff and funding to capitalize on the public results and to conduct independent research to improve their competitive edge. In the face of increasing business pressures and with the advent of federal regulations that allow the formation of consortia without violating antitrust regulations, industries recently created "stand-alone" consortium research organizations. These consortia range from loose alliances, such as a temporary R&D sponsor pool with research directed at a specific issue, to the more formal and enduring relationship, represented by an industry R&Dinstitute. Table 1 lists several types of consortia. Each model provides industry with a unique and flexible mechanism to achieve its business goals. Successful industry R&D institutes include the Electric Power Research Inst. (EPRI) for the electric power industry, Sem-atech for the semiconductor industry, Bellcore for the communications industry, and the Gas Research Inst.(GRI) for the natural gas industry. Because these organizations represent different industries, they have different supporter needs. Consequently, the philosophy and mission of these R&D institutes vary considerably. For example, a highly competitive industry like the computer industry would tend to support fundamental (precompetitive) research cooperatively. The companies anticipate that their own corporate R&D functions will make more effective (i.e., profitable) use of the scientific research results than other cosponsors. In contrast, a completely regulated industry would more likely support consortia that both develop and deploy advanced technologies to maintain industry competitiveness, perhaps against foreign encroachment (imports) or a domestic competing industry. Thus, the nature of a particular consortium, its operating characteristics, and its sponsors' expectations will depend, not only on the type of consortium, but also on the industry it serves. Even so, much can be learned about R&D consortia in general by examining the characteristics of a specific consortium. For this reason (and because of personal experience), I use GRI here as a focal point for discussing both the advantages and difficulties encountered in conducting consortium-based research. P. 531^

Victorian public hospitals: taking a sledgehammer … ?

Until relatively recently, there have been few attempts to introduce strong forms of competition into publicly funded hospital systems, whether in Australia or elsewhere. The Victorian government has done so by implementing a casemix funding formula from July 1993 and in the process has foreshadowed that the least efficient hospitals will close. While it is of vital importance to improve the efficiency of Australian hospitals, and a key factor is to use casemix funding to achieve microeconomic reform, it is not appropriate to use competition to close hospitals. Arguments against using marketplace forces to determine the fate of hospitals include: the difficulties that could ensue with an inappropriate distribution of hospitals in Victoria; the necessity to provide hospital services for the public good; whether reducing the public sector is actually economically beneficial; and the conclusion reached by many in the United States, that health care should not be treated as a commodity. I argue for the development of a more sophisticated policy than one which uses the principles of laissezfaire and relative efficiency to close public hospitals.