Economics Insights @ CBS

In October 2013, the Affordable Care Act introduced a new insurance market — state and federal exchanges where people can purchase health insurance for themselves or their families. Although the rollout of the exchanges was disastrous, around-the-clock efforts fixed many of the biggest technical problems, and nearly 7 million people purchased insurance in the new market.

Functional accounts of hierarchy propose that hierarchy increases group coordination and reduces conflict. In contrast, dysfunctional accounts claim that hierarchy impairs performance by preventing low-ranking team members from voicing their potentially valuable perspectives and insights. The current research presents evidence for both the functional and dysfunctional accounts of hierarchy within the same dataset. Specifically, we offer empirical evidence that hierarchical cultural values affect the outcomes of teams in high-stakes environments through group processes.

This symposium will introduce and discuss how scholars can improve upon the Null Hypothesis Significance Tests (NHSTs), which are currently constraining the production of knowledge in management science. The extensive use of NHST in quantitative research has led to the accumulation of statistically significant results that are both too small to be practically relevant and so small that they are unlikely to replicate. In a field that aspires to provide useful advice to managers, we need to focus on practically important effects that are robust across a wide variety of settings.

This work examines the process of admission to a hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU). ICUs currently lack systematic admission criteria, largely because the impact of ICU admission on patient outcomes has not been well quantified. This makes evaluating the performance of candidate admission strategies difficult. Using a large patient-level data set of more than 190,000 hospitalizations across 15 hospitals, we first quantify the cost of denied ICU admission for a number of patient outcomes.