Improving bioethical decision-making with a little help from legal argumentation

The most appropriate method for clinical decision-making is deliberation. The deliberative procedure aims to achieve wise and prudent decisions about health care taking into account facts, values and norms. Since deliberative reasoning is shared by healthcare professions, ethics and law, this paper introduces the structure and features of the bioethical deliberative procedure and suggests to improve it with some contributions from legal science and theories of argumentation.El método más adecuado para la toma de decisiones biomédicas es la deliberación. El procedimiento deliberativo pretende alcanzar decisiones prudentes y razonables tras tomar en consideración hechos, valores y normas. Al ser la racionalidad deliberativa un rasgo compartido por las profesiones asistenciales, la ética y el derecho, el presente artículo expone la estructura y las características del método bioético deliberativo y propone mejorarla mediante algunas contribuciones de la ciencia jurídica y las teorías de la argumentación

Determinants of tourism destination competitiveness in the countries most visited by international tourists: Proposal of a synthetic index

Tourism destination competitiveness is a multidimensional concept that is widely studied in the academic literature, but multiple factors make its measurement a difficult task. In this article, we design a synthetic index to rank the 80 countries that attract the majority of international tourists by level of tourism competitiveness. In order to do this, we use all of the simple variables included in the 2017 Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index, proposing a new methodology for the construction of this synthetic index, which it solves the problems of aggregation of variables expressed in different measures, arbitrary weighting and duplicity of information; issues that remain unresolved by the TTCI. Likewise, we analyse the most influential dimensions in tourism competitiveness. Air transport infrastructures, cultural resources and ICT readiness are the key dimensions that explain the main disparities.Funding Agency Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness State Research Agency (SRA) European Union (EU) ECO2017-86822-Rinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Impact of the Operations Manager's dual role on inventory policy

In modern corporations, the Operations Manager’s role in defining of firm’s strategy is becoming more important. In this paper we describe how firms can use this tendency for Operations Managers to make strategic decisions as a mechanism to prevent inventory mismanagement. These managers have incentives to speculate with inventory cost reductions, thereby avoiding sharp reductions in a single period, because it would hinder further reductions in the future. Remarkably, firms may prevent such behavior by stimulating the Operations Managers’ strategic orientation, without losing sight of inventory-efficient management

Managerial turnover and worker turnover

We study the influence of the manager's degree of consolidation within the firm over the firm's labor policy. We argue that non-consolidated (recently-appointed) managers are more worried about short-term results than consolidated managers are. This feature leads the former to bias the labor contracting favoring short-term contracts. This has two main consequences. First, a higher variation in the number of workers hired in each period. And second, a lower increase in unitary labor costs. To contrast these results, we use a database of 1.054 Spanish companies during the period (1994-98), and analyze their managerial turnover as well as their corresponding variation in the number of workers and in unitary labor costs. The theoretical results are confirmed, especially for highly-productive R and D-intensive firms