Price Sensitivity in Employee Health Care Choices: The Utility of Out-Of-Pocket Costs and Risk Aversion

Using data from both company records and an insurance provider, the authors develop a direct measure of out-of-pocket costs incurred by employees choosing a health care plan. Previous studies have used characteristics of medical plans and demographic variables as proxies for OPC. By better specifying the consequences of the health care choice, the authors show how the demand for health plans is kinked in a manner consistent with risk aversion. The results suggest that using the proposed OPC measure can help practitioners and researchers better understand and predict the pattern of employee health care benefit choices

Out-of-Pocket Costs and the Flexible Benefits Decision: Do Employees Make Effective Health Care Choices?

This study analyzes employees\u27 ability to select health insurance benefits that fit their needs.The study analyzes both the actual choices and the implications of those choices for employees, measured as out-of-pocket costs (OPC). By introducing OPC as a measure of decision quality, this study demonstrates its advantages over measuring only employee choice. Results from a sample of manufacturing employees suggest that most employees made cost-optimizing decisions, out-performing recommendations from a linear model. Employees also were financially better off overall with choice than they would have been had they all been placed into either medical plan option available to them. This study supports the value of choice, but does not support the assertion that employees always make benefits decisions that best fit their needs

Closed-loop Dynamics of In-core Thermionic Reactor Systems

Using a point model of an in-core thermionic converter, alternative schemes for providing closed loop reactor control were investigated. It was found that schemes based on variable gain power regulation buffers which use the reactor current as the control variable provide complete protection from thermionic burnout and also provide a virtually constant voltage to the user. A side benefit is that the emitter temperature transients are small-even for a complete electric load drop the emitter temperature transient is less than 100 deg K. The current regulation scheme was selected for further study with a distributed parameter model which was developed to account for variations in thermionic and heat transfer properties along the length of a cylindrical converter. It was found that even though the emitter temperature distribution is about 200 deg K along the converter length, the dynamic properties are unchanged when using the current control scheme

Why Do Employees Keep Choosing the Expensive Health Care Plan? An Investigation of the Quality and Logic of Employee Health Care Plan Selections

In 1991, The Dannon Company provided 287 of its employees with a choice of healthcare plans. The new plan was less expensive and designed to fit employees\u27 needs better. Contrary to managerial expectation, three-quarters of employees continued to choose the more expensive plan. To study why this was occurring and to determine if these choices reflected employee mistakes, a cooperative effort was begun between The Dannon Company and Cornell University. This cooperative effort allowed us to investigate this problem using actual employee medical claims. Analysis revealed employees strive not only to minimize costs, but also to avoid risk in their health care plan decisions. Overall, employees with the most significant cost difference chose the plan with the lowest total costs. This effect translated into financial savings for the employees. Employees were better off as a group with the freedom to make their own selections than they would have been if they had been forced into either of the two available health care options. Thus, this study demonstrated that choice is valuable to employees. Implications for Dannon and for future research are discussed

The Effects of JIT on the Development of Productivity Norms

Low inventory, or just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing systems, enjoy increasing application worldwide, yet the behavioral effects of such systems remain largely unexplored. Operations Research (OR) models of low inventory systems typically make a simplifying assumption that individual worker processing times are independent random variables. This leads to predictions that low-inventory systems will exhibit production interruptions. Yet empirical results suggest that low-inventory systems do not exhibit the predicted productivity losses. This paper develops a model integrating feedback, goal-setting, group cohesiveness, task norms, and peer pressure to predict how individual behavior may adjust to alleviate production interruptions in low-inventory systems. In doing so we integrate previous research on the development of task norms. Findings suggest that low-inventory systems induce individual and group responses that cause behavioral changes that mitigate production interruptions

Addressing business agility challenges with enterprise systems

It is clear that systems agility (i.e., having a responsive IT infrastructure that can be changed quickly to meet changing business needs) has become a critical component of organizational agility. However, skeptics continue to suggest that, despite the benefits enterprise system packages provide, they are constraining choices for firms faced with agility challenges. The reason for this skepticism is that the tight integration between different parts of the business that enables many enterprise systems\u27 benefits also increases the systems\u27 complexity, and this increased complexity, say the skeptics, increases the difficulty of changing systems when business needs change. These persistent concerns motivated us to conduct a series of interviews with business and IT managers in 15 firms to identify how they addressed, in total, 57 different business agility challenges. Our analysis suggests that when the challenges involved an enterprise system, firms were able to address a high percentage of their challenges with four options that avoid the difficulties associated with changing the complex core system: capabilities already built-in to the package but not previously used, leveraging globally consistent integrated data already available, using add-on systems available on the market that easily interfaced with the existing enterprise system, and vendor provided patches that automatically updated the code. These findings have important implications for organizations with and without enterprise system architectures

Traces matérielles et culturelles de l’apostolat du missionnaire Sigogne

La place du renommé missionnaire français, Jean-Mandé Sigogne, est remise dans le contexte du patrimoine religieux en Acadie, tant à partir des traces matérielles qui en subsistent (paroisses fondées qui se sont transformées, églises et autres monuments) qu’à partir des attitudes culturelles que son enseignement a contribué à modifier chez le peuple acadien ou, au contraire, de celles qu’il n’a jamais pu changer. L’auteur fait aussi le point sur les traces de ses écrits, qui sont malencontreusement dispersés alors qu’ils appartenaient au patrimoine acadien du sud-ouest de la Nouvelle-Écosse

Is It Worth It To Win The Talent War? Evaluating the Utility of Performance-Based Pay

While the business press suggests that “winning the talent war,” the attraction and retention of key talent, is increasingly pivotal to organization success, executives often report that their organizations do not fare well on this dimension. We demonstrate how, through integrating turnover and compensation research, the Boudreau and Berger (1985) staffing utility framework can be used by industrial/organizational (I/O) psychologists and other human resource (HR) professionals to address this issue. Employing a step-by-step process that combines organization-specific information about pay and performance with research on the pay-turnover linkage, we estimate the effects of incentive pay on employee separation patterns at various performance levels. We then use the utility framework to evaluate the financial consequences of incentive pay as an employee retention vehicle. The demonstration illustrates the limitations of standard accounting and behavioral cost-based approaches and the importance of considering both the costs and benefits associated with pay-for-performance plans. Our results suggest that traditional accounting or behavioral cost-based approaches, used alone, would have supported rejecting a potentially lucrative pay-for-performance investment. Additionally, our approach should enable HR professionals to use research findings and their own data to estimate the retention patterns and subsequent financial consequences of their existing, and potential, company-specific performance-based pay policies

« On ma dit qu’on avoient ouit dire » – Anthropologie historique d’un exorcisme populaire en Acadie

Des lettres conservées dans les archives de l’abbé Sigogne nous décrivent avec une rare précision un rite populaire d’exorcisme, explicitement présenté comme transmis par la tradition orale : « je me suis informé au voisins de ce qu’il faudroient faire; on ma dit qu’on avoient ouit dire que du tems de la cadi on avoient un recéde ». Après une présentation rapide de la structure de ce rite, cet article se propose d’en rechercher des antécédents et des parallèles en France et en Nouvelle-France

« Du tems de la cadi » : Possessions diaboliques et exorcismes populaires en Acadie au début du XIXe siècle

Les archives de l’abbé Jean Mandé Sigogne, missionnaire français auprès des Acadiens du Sud-Ouest de la Nouvelle-Écosse de 1799 à 1844, contiennent des lettres inédites sur une affaire inhabituelle. En 1810, deux jeunes filles de Bas-de-Tousquet (aujourd’hui Wedgeport, N.-É.), semblaient possédées par le démon. Ne sachant quoi faire devant ce drame, les parents et les voisins des deux filles avaient eu recours à des rites folkloriques de conjuration et d’exorcisme, avant que le curé n’intervienne avec les moyens officiels de la religion. Notre article publie d’abord ces documents, qui s’avèrent d’un grand intérêt pour l’histoire de la religion et de la culture populaires en Amérique française. Nous faisons suivre l’édition des documents par un large commentaire historique, qui interprète ces croyances et ces rites à la lumière de l’anthropologie et de l’ethno-histoire.The French missionary Father Jean Mandé Sigogne worked among the Acadians of south-western Nova Scotia from 1799 to 1844. His archives contain three unpublished letters concerning an unusual event. In 1810, two young girls from Bas-de-Tousquet (present-day Wedgeport, NS) were seemingly possessed by the devil. Bewildered by this dramatic turn of events, the girls’ parents and neighbours resorted to traditional folk rites of sorcery and exorcism, that is until the parish priest took control of the situation using official Church-sanctioned methods. First of all, our article provides an opportunity to publish documents of great interest to history of religion and popular culture in French America. Furthermore, the letters themselves are followed by an extensive historical commentary which analyses the beliefs and rites they discuss from the perspective of anthropology and ethnohistory