Research

Obesity, a major health concern in the United States, has driven some consumers to become more health conscious and led to several public policy interventions affecting consumer trends, the food supply and marketing. At the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Özgür Araz, department chair and Ron and Carol Cope professor of supply chain management and analytics, and S. Sajeesh, Nathan J Gold Distinguished Professor of Marketing and associate professor of marketing, recently collaborated to publish interdisciplinary research which examines how food-producing firms should respond and adapt to the evolving consumer trends and policies.

The phrase “stay in your lane” is commonly used to affirm the importance of doing your assigned tasks and only your assigned tasks. If you see an important task that needs to be done that isn’t your responsibility, should you do it? Before you decide whether to switch lanes, consider the authors’ research, based on observations and recordings of first responders completing mass-casualty incident simulations. They’ve identified three essential lessons to consider. First, be mindful of the environment. Second, beware of crossing team boundaries. Finally, remember to update your team and leaders. You don’t necessarily need to stay in your lane — just be sure to merge both out of your lane and back in appropriately.

Yingchao Lan, associate professor of supply chain management and analytics, and her co-authors explored the use of multisiting physicians, who practice at more than one hospital, and their impact in reducing costs, such as lab-based diagnostics, radiology-based imaging procedures and prescriptions. Their findings indicated considerable savings passed onto patients, some as high as $9,348 per hospital visit.

Dr. Liying Wang, assistant professor of finance at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln College of Business, examines how the corporate bond offering price evolves in the primary market, where securities are created, before underwriters, who determine risk levels on transactions, allocate the bonds to investors. While a popular view is that corporate bonds are easy to price so that underwriters know all information they need, her research suggests this is not the case.

Gender pay information affects retail investors’ perceived fairness of a company’s compensation policies, which leads investors to anticipate economic consequences to the company. Retail investors are more willing to invest in a company with gender pay equity and retail investors do not appear to punish a company that disclose a typical gender pay gap. Moreover, retail investors attribute about half of the actual U.S. pay gap to gender discrimination.

Public correctional facilities play an important role in operational execution of several public health programs, including screening and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. However, because of lack of capacity and resources, public health programs using correctional facilities are questioned by policy-makers in terms of their costs and benefits. We developed a computational epidemiology model to support public health policy making, and used data from Douglas County, Nebraska, to investigate and evaluate the effects of potential universal screening within the jail system. This study contributes to the computational epidemiology literature by presenting an analytical framework to guide effective simulation experimentation for policy decision making. The presented methodology can be applied to other complex policy and public health problems.