Nicole Adler, Alfred Shalom Hakkert, Jonathan Kornbluth and Mali Sher
The purpose of this paper is to study the traffic‐police enforcement process and develop models to improve enforcement effectiveness given substantial budgetary and resource…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to study the traffic‐police enforcement process and develop models to improve enforcement effectiveness given substantial budgetary and resource constraints.
Design/methodology/approach
The formulation crosses the concepts of lean manufacturing and linear programming. Traffic police officers, automated machines and the back‐office are modeled in a similar manner to that of a manufacturing plant, working together to achieve ticket production as a function of quantity and quality, based on a preferential ranking of offence types.
Findings
Using data from the Israeli traffic police over a six‐year period, the case study shows that given available resources, it is possible to retain ticket quantity whilst significantly improving ticket quality as defined in the road safety literature. The case study shows a 24 per cent increase in quality ticket processing whilst taking into account the court summons constraint and maintaining throughput levels. This draws from changes in the method of ticket‐production, production of warnings rather than tickets in certain cases and the application of new technologies.
Research limitations/implications
The results are limited by the current lack of data and require a cost‐benefit analysis in order to further develop certain parameters.
Practical implications
The application of the approach improves the holistic planning of traffic enforcement activities as well as providing specific details, such as the number and distribution of ticket production.
Originality/value
This research merges three disciplines; operations research, road safety and operations management, generating a methodology for the planning and control of traffic police ticket issuance, which has not been analyzed in the literature to date.
Details
Keywords
Capital budgeting has been a major topic of the finance literature since Joel Dean's book was published in 1951. Since then, several books and dozens of articles have been…
Abstract
Capital budgeting has been a major topic of the finance literature since Joel Dean's book was published in 1951. Since then, several books and dozens of articles have been published about every aspect of this finance function. So many surveys of capital budgeting techniques used by companies have been administered by researchers that even the surveys have been evaluated.
This paper reports the results of an empirical study of the determinants of capital structure of large Latin American companies. Variations with regard to the country, industry…
Abstract
This paper reports the results of an empirical study of the determinants of capital structure of large Latin American companies. Variations with regard to the country, industry, and size of a company are examined for a sample of two hundred and thirty large companies located in twentytwo Latin American countries. This study is the first to examine the capital structures of this large set of Latin American companies. The results of this study indicate that while size does not seem to be significant, both country and industry are significant determinants of capital structure in Latin America not only in bivariate tests but also in multivariate statistical tests. Multinational and diversified companies, therefore, cannot assume uniformity of capital structure across countries and industries in Latin America and, they must take these differences into account in developing and setting capital structure, financing, evaluation, and management policies for their subsidiaries.
Anne E. Zald and Cathy Seitz Whitaker
Despite the title of this bibliography, there was not a truly underground press in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. The phrase is amisnomer, reputedly coined on the…
Abstract
Despite the title of this bibliography, there was not a truly underground press in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. The phrase is amisnomer, reputedly coined on the spur of the moment in 1966 by Thomas Forcade when asked to describe the newly established news service, Underground Press Syndicate, of which he was an active member. The papers mentioned in this bibliography, except for the publications of the Weather Underground, were not published by secretive, covert organizations. Freedom of the press and of expression is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution, although often only symbolically as the experience of the undergrounds will show, and most of the publications that fall into the “underground” described herein maintained public offices, contracted with commercial printers, and often used the U.S. Postal Service to distribute their publications.
The literary world is an elitist enclave, where anti‐marketing rhetoric is regularly encountered. This paper aims to show that the book trade has always been hard‐nosed and…
Abstract
Purpose
The literary world is an elitist enclave, where anti‐marketing rhetoric is regularly encountered. This paper aims to show that the book trade has always been hard‐nosed and commercially driven.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is less a review of the literature, or a theoretical treatise, than a selective revelation of the commercial realities of the book business.
Findings
The paper shows that the cultural industries in general and the book business in particular were crucibles of marketing practice long before learned scholars started taking notice. It highlights the importance of luck, perseverance and, not least, marketing nous in the “manufacture” of international bestsellers.
Research limitations/implications
By highlighting humankind's deep‐seated love of narrative – its clear preference for fiction over fact – this paper suggests that marketing scholars should reconsider their preferred mode of research representation. Hard facts are all very well, but they are less palatable than good stories, well told.
Originality/value
The paper makes no claim to originality. It recovers what we already know but appear to have forgotten in our non‐stop pursuit of scientific respectability.