"Silver" product design: Product innovation for older people

Aging populations challenge companies across different countries and industries to respond to the changing needs, demands and expectations of their growing shares of older customers. This opens room for improving or developing innovations - products as well as services - that correspond to the diverse expectations. New product development for older customers or 'Silver' product design is one way to approach the 'silver' market - without explicitly excluding younger customers. Research in this field is still in its infancy. Silver product design focuses on individual autonomy, representing an elementary aspect of good life, disappearing in a more or less continuous manner over the life cycle of a human being. Offering solutions that will allow people to maintain or recover autonomy and to use products and services in an independent manner therefore seems to be a promising avenue for companies innovating across different industries. The general concept of autonomy can be perceived as a boundary-spanning argument and a common denominator for starting development initiatives leading to innovations targeting the silver market. Cross-case analysis based on four different product innovations addressing typical needs of older people are used to present how firms in different industrial contexts and user-settings address such needs, which have their roots in a need to stay autonomous and independent. Technological, marketing and strategy-related observations as well as communalities and differences of the cases are being discussed and very first implications for managing the front end of silver product development sketched. --Demographic change,aging,older users,silver market,innovation management,silver product design,individual autonomy

Learning Counterfactual Representations for Estimating Individual Dose-Response Curves

Estimating what would be an individual's potential response to varying levels of exposure to a treatment is of high practical relevance for several important fields, such as healthcare, economics and public policy. However, existing methods for learning to estimate counterfactual outcomes from observational data are either focused on estimating average dose-response curves, or limited to settings with only two treatments that do not have an associated dosage parameter. Here, we present a novel machine-learning approach towards learning counterfactual representations for estimating individual dose-response curves for any number of treatments with continuous dosage parameters with neural networks. Building on the established potential outcomes framework, we introduce performance metrics, model selection criteria, model architectures, and open benchmarks for estimating individual dose-response curves. Our experiments show that the methods developed in this work set a new state-of-the-art in estimating individual dose-response

Sheepskin Effects in Japan

Using data for the 1990’s, this paper examines the role of sheepskin effects in the returns to education for Japan. Our estimation results indicate that sheepskin effects explain about 50% of the total returns to schooling. We further find that sheepskin effect are only important for workers in small firms with the size of these effects being similar to comparable estimates for the US. Finally, the estimated sheepskin effects are decreasing with firm tenure, in particular for small firms. These results could be explained by the particular recruitment system of large firms in Japan, which makes university diploma as a screening device unimportant for large firms.Returns to Education, Sheepskin Effects, Japan

The Growing Complexity of Internet Interconnection

End-to-End (E2E) packet delivery in the Internet is achieved through a system of interconnections between heterogeneous entities called Autonomous Systems (ASes). The initial pattern of AS interconnection in the Internet was relatively simple, involving mainly ISPs with a balanced mixture of inbound and outbound traffic. Changing market conditions and industrial organization of the Internet have jointly forced interconnections and associated contracts to become significantly more diverse and complex. The diversity of interconnection contracts is significant because efficient allocation of costs and revenues across the Internet value chain impacts the profitability of the industry. Not surprisingly, the challenges of recovering the fixed and usage-sensitive costs of network transport give rise to more complex settlements mechanisms than the simple bifurcated (transit and peering) model described in many earlier analyses of Internet interconnection (see BESEN et al., 2001; GREENSTEIN, 2005; or LAFFONT et al., 2003). In the following, we provide insight into recent operational developments, explaining why interconnection in the Internet has become more complex, the nature of interconnection bargaining processes, the implications for cost/revenue allocation and hence interconnection incentives, and what this means for public policy. This paper offers an abbreviated version of the original paper (see FARATIN et al., 2007b).internet interconnection, economics, public policy, routing, peering.

(1) 54/07/10 4:15pm, Sam Sheppard

Questioning and statement by Sam Sheppard to the Cuyahoga County Sheriff\u27s office

(1) 54/07/10 4:15pm, Sam Sheppard

Questioning and statement by Sam Sheppard to the Cuyahoga County Sheriff\u27s office

Student Perceptions of Online Learning: An Analysis of Online Course Evaluations

Student evaluations of teaching provide a wealth of information about students’ experiences in higher education. Colleges and universities, though, as a whole, need to spend more time mining these evaluations to better understand student perceptions of their college coursework. These evaluations are especially helpful to better understand students’ experiences in online courses, which, despite continued growth, are still relatively new for most faculty and students. The analysis of seven years of student evaluations at a metropolitan research university is presented in the following article. The purpose of the analysis was to better discern students’ experiences online as well as to address commonly held assumptions about online learning (e.g., that teaching evaluations are lower for online courses). Results indicate that students in this sample actually do rate online courses lower than face-to-face courses. The article concludes with situating these results in the larger student evaluation literature as well as addressing larger implications of these results for practice

Income inequality and the absence of a Tawney moment in the mass media

In this paper we address the paradox of increasing income inequality and the absence of public mobilization around the issue. As the mass media are our most important source of information on wider economic affairs, we examine the salience and framing of income inequality within major UK and US newspapers over the period 1990 – 2015. Despite an initial surge in media attention and again towards the end of the period, the issues-attention cycle of inequality resembles a hype-cycle that is more common with arcane academic or techno-scientific topics than with social mobilisation. The dominant frames present income inequality as the seemingly inevitable result of globalization, market forces and technological change. No new radical frames of economic injustice have emerged, neither have any new actors, and so policy solutions fall back onto existing left-right approaches