Learning: Does Organization Ownership Matter? Structure and Performance in For-profit, Nonprofit and Local Government Nursing Homes*

We compare the structure and performance of for-profit (FP), nonprofit (NP) and local government (LG) organizations. These organizations differ in their ownership structure, objectives and agency relations. We conjecture that, compared to NP and LG, FP firms (a) delegate less decision-making power to employees, (b) provide more incentives and fewer fringe benefits, (c) monitor less, and (d) rely less on social networks to recruit employees. We also hypothesize that, relative to NP and LG, FP firms (i) are more efficient, (ii) provide similar levels of service elements that observable to their customers, (iii) provide lower levels of less-well observable elements, and (iv) provide less of the relational elements. Differences in structure and performance are likely to be tempered by regulation, market competition and institutional pressures for similarity. We study detailed performance outcomes for all the 369 Minnesota nursing homes included in federal and state datasets, and organization structure for a subsample of 105 homes that responded to our survey. Our empirical investigation generally supports our hypotheses. In particular, we find that FP homes serve more residents than NP and LG, after controlling for quality differences. However, FP homes provide lower quality services on a large array of attributes, especially those that are less observable by nursing home residents and their families. The differences among different types of organization are small, but significant.

Law of large numbers for branching symmetric Hunt processes with measure-valued branching rates

We establish weak and strong law of large numbers for a class of branching symmetric Hunt processes with the branching rate being a smooth measure with respect to the underlying Hunt process, and the branching mechanism being general and state-dependent. Our work is motivated by recent work on strong law of large numbers for branching symmetric Markov processes by Chen-Shiozawa [J. Funct. Anal., 250, 374--399, 2007] and for branching diffusions by Engl\"ander-Harris-Kyprianou [Ann. Inst. Henri Poincar\'e Probab. Stat., 46, 279--298, 2010]. Our results can be applied to some interesting examples that are covered by neither of these papers

Lavish Returns on Cheap Talk: Non-binding Communication in a Trust Experiment

We let subjects interact with anonymous partners in trust (investment) games with and without one of two kinds of pre-play communication: numerical (tabular) only, and verbal and numerical. We find that either kind of pre-play communication increases trusting, trustworthiness, or both, in inter-subject comparisons, but that the inclusions of verbal communication generates both a larger effect and one that is robust across both inter-subject and intra-subject comparisons. In all conditions, trustors earn more when they invest more of their endowment, trustors and trustees gravitate to "fair and efficient" interactions, and the majority of trustees adhere to their commitments, whether explicit or implicit. Finally, we study trusting and trustworthiness in the sense of adhering to agreements, and we find that both are enhanced when the parties can use words, and especially when an agreement is reached with words and not only with the exchange of numerical proposals.

Effect of unitary impurities in non-STM-types of tunneling in high-T_c superconductors

Based on an extended Hubbard model, we present calculations of both the local (i.e., single-site) and spatially-averaged differential tunneling conductance in d-wave superconductors containing nonmagnetic impurities in the unitary limit. Our results show that a random distribution of unitary impurities of any concentration can at most give rise to a finite zero-bias conductance (with no peak there) in spatially-averaged non-STM type of tunneling, in spite of the fact that local tunneling in the immediate vicinity of an isolated impurity does show a conductance peak at zero bias, whereas to give rise to even a small zero-bias conductance peak in the former type of tunneling the impurities must form dimers, trimers, etc. along the [110] directions. In addition, we find that the most-recently-observed novel pattern of the tunneling conductance around a single impurity by Pan et al. [Nature (London) 403,746 (2000)] can be explained in terms of a realistic model of the tunneling configuration which gives rise to the experimental results reported there. The key feature in this model is the blocking effect of the BiO and SrO layers which exist between the tunneling tip and the CuO_2 layer being probed.Comment: 9 pages, 7 ps-figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. B (Sep. 1, 2000); typos corrected, references added, figure 6 changed to expand the explanation on recent experimental measurements by S.H. Pan et al. [Nature (London) 403, 746 (2000)