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This paper aims to explore the role of line-item budgeting in film production in an effort to illustrate the positive effects that budgetary constraints can have on creativity.

Using Elster’s (2000) constraint theory as a basis for the research, this paper conducted a case study on the making of a Danish adventure film and analysed the role budgeting plays from the film director’s point of view.

This paper suggests that the constraints of the line-item budget imposed on the director had positive effects in terms of the pre-commitments entailed, which aided in protecting the director against the negative aspects of passion (e.g. distorted thought processes, myopia and weakness of will) in the creative process and in terms of the ability of the constraints to channel creativity in certain directions, thus preventing the availability of too many options from hampering the creative process.

The paper contributes to management control research in two ways. By addressing calls to provide more insight into the positive effects management control constraints might have on creativity, this study explores somewhat ignored aspects of line-item budgeting, adding greater insight into the interrelations between creativity and control. By exploring the ways in which line-item budgeting might take on the role of pre-commitment advice and devices in the creative process, this paper further exposes the links between accounting constraints and self-control.

Regional differences in crop insurance uptake have persisted over time. To partly explain this phenomenon, the purpose of this paper is to propose and evaluate a budget constraint (heuristic) effect within the standard expected utility theory (EUT) framework through simulation methods.

Within the EUT framework, a standard simulation model is used to gain insights into farm insurance decisions when a budget constraint is in effect. The budget constraint is modeled as it has been revealed through the data on farmers’ insurance expenditures. In the simulation analysis, certainty equivalent values are used to rank farm options subject to the revealed budget constraint.

A budget constraint effect within the EUT framework stands out in explaining the observed regional differences. The proposed explanation is consistent with the historical trends on the ratio of crop insurance expenditure to expected crop value, higher premium rates in regions with lower crop insurance uptake, and the limited turnout for the 2014 Farm Bill’s supplemental area-based crop insurance products. Farmers’ crop insurance choices are found to be mostly constrained-optimal.

This appears to be the first study taking the revealed preferences approach to farmers’ crop insurance choices in a simulation analysis. Some policy implications are drawn and future research avenues are suggested. The findings should be of considerable value to policymakers, academics, bankers, and producers in regard to the design and use of risk management tools.

Empirical evidence indicates that effective management of resources to implement strategy in a balanced scorecard (BSC) system is essential. We present a mathematical model for allocating limited resources in the BSC strategy implementation process.

The proposed facilitated negotiation model provides a systematic approach to prioritizing strategic initiatives in the design and implementation of a BSC.

Our joint decision model prioritizes strategic initiatives and concurrently calculates the optimal (or approximately optimal) set of BSC targets and weights, given multiyear resource restrictions.

The model assumes full, open, and truthful exchange of information between the parties; an assumption that may exclude many organizations.

We address an important gap in the BSC literature on how organizations can effectively link strategy to the potential constraint of resource budgets.

Quantitative models are being used in practice for allocating resources, but we are not aware of their use by organizations for allocating resources in a BSC application.

The Ministry of Communications (MOC) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has taken an aggressive approach to optimize the condition of its highway infrastructure. This includes pavement, bridges, culverts, tunnels, rest areas, and the multitude of related highway elements that comprise the transportation network. By maximizing quality given the available resources, the Ministry ensures that the focus is global and does not result in suboptimal maintenance decisions within the various subsystems comprising this elaborate network. The MOC had the insight to realize that a quality management system was needed to address the maintenance aspects of the Kingdom globally. Describes selected aspects of that system. This system integrates many diverse components to best address attaining global or system‐wide quality.

An exciting opportunity that many advanced industrial democracies faced in the late 1990s was the movement from budgetary deficit to surplus. This came after years of persistent deficits. Traditional decisionmaking theories such as budgetary incrementalism failed to explain this longrun relationship, since it has been inherently a short-run theory. This paper uses rational expectations theory to demonstrate its relationship to budgetary decision-making reforms and the deficit (surplus) for Canada, the UK and the United States. The results demonstrated that there was an intertemporal budget constraint in operation in the three countries, and decision-makers at the macro level used rational expectations in the formulation of their annual budget. In the theory, budget actors strived to balance their budget, but did so over the longrun as opposed to the short-run incrementalist interpretation.

This study aims to provide evidence of how budget officers use non-financial and accrual-based cost information in the budgeting process and how the usage of this information is influenced by financial constraints.

A randomized survey-based field experiment investigating budget officers in 546 Japanese local governments (LGs) was conducted. This allowed us to identify the budget officers' decision-making in the public sector budgeting process by creating and analyzing primary data with regression models.

We found that budget officers suppress budget amounts based on non-financial information of good performances. Under fiscal constraints, officers further reduce budget amounts using information on high accrual-based costs and poor non-financial performance.

Our survey-based field experiment allowed us to obtain primary data from officers making budget decisions. To the best of our knowledge, this study provides the first evidence that non-financial good and poor performance information and accrual-based cost information affect budget officers' decision-making under financial constrain.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for the necessity of regulating European club football financially, in order to create a fair structure of sporting competition.

By deploying the soft budget constraint approach – originally developed by Hungarian Economist János Kornai in order to understand (public) business behavior in socialist and post‐socialist economies – and combining it with empirical analysis, the paper develops an understanding of why the majority of European top league clubs are loss‐makers and why regulation is needed. The paper rests on its application of the soft budget constraint approach to build its argument and uses existing empirical research in order to support it within the field of European professional football.

The paper finds substantial evidence of soft budget constraints in professional football clubs, and argues that softness punishes the few financially well‐managed clubs in sporting terms for balancing their books.

From a theoretical point of view, the new perspective of soft budget constraints takes political, cultural and emotional aspects into account in order to understand economic behavior among professional team sports clubs. This gives promising new insights into the discipline of sports economics and sports management.

The paper's findings demand action to be taken to secure financial fair play in order to deal with issues of equal sporting competition. It argues that this must be done through a central regulation scheme covering all European leagues, thus endorsing the new UEFA financial fair play program. At the same time, however, the paper recognizes the problems in implementing the program efficiently.

The originality and value of the paper is its application of a new theoretical approach that clarifies the problems of European professional football and the reasons why regulatory solutions are necessary to harden the budget constraints.

This paper aims to address a distributed assembly permutation flow-shop scheduling problem (DAPFSP) considering budget constraints and factory eligibility. The first stage of the considered production system is composed of several non-identical factories with different technology levels and so the factories' performance is different in terms of processing time and cost. The second stage is an assembly stage wherein there are some parallel work stations to assemble the ready parts into the products. The objective function is to minimize the maximum completion time of products (makespan).

First, the problem is formulated as mixed-integer linear programing (MIP) model. In view of the nondeterministic polynomial (NP)-hard nature, three approximate algorithms are adopted based on variable neighborhood search (VNS) and the Johnsons' rule to solve the problem on the practical scales. The proposed algorithms are applied to solve some test instances in different sizes.

Comparison result to mathematical model validates the performance accuracy and efficiency of three proposed methods. In addition, the result demonstrated that the proposed two-level self-adaptive variable neighborhood search (TLSAVNS) algorithm outperforms the other two proposed methods. Moreover, the proposed model highlighted the effects of budget constraints and factory eligibility on the makespan. Supplementary analysis was presented by adjusting different amounts of the budget for controlling the makespan and total expected costs. The proposed solution approach can provide proper alternatives for managers to make a trade-off in different various situations.

The problem of distributed assembly permutation flow-shop scheduling is traditionally studied considering identical factories. However, processing factories as an important element in the supply chain use different technology levels in the real world. The current paper is the first study that investigates that problem under non-identical factories condition. In addition, the impact of different technology levels is investigated in terms of operational costs, quality levels and processing times.

This paper aims to propose guidelines for public sector managers in assessing the impact of outsourcing on business continuity (BC) strategies. This paper evaluated how public managers from the state of Pernambuco, Brazil, perceive outsourcing, considering BC and how it relates to the outsourcing of services and activities.

Theoretical lenses of outsourcing and BC were used to derive the study hypotheses. A questionnaire was drawn up to collect information to test the hypotheses. To test the proposed hypotheses, binary logistic regression was used through an empirical analysis of a sample of 51 Brazilian public managers.

This study found that when the public sector suffers from negative impacts of financial restrictions, outsourced services are the first ones to receive the negative impacts. This has had an adverse impact on BC in the public sphere. On the other hand, the authors verified that the public sphere’s capacity for resilience and the existence of specific methodologies to support public managers in outsourcing decision-making can contribute to BC.

This study assists public organizations to take advantage of internal outsourced services in the best possible way, making better use of public resources, gaining social legitimacy and legitimacy also in the provision of public services. However, each public sector can present different risks of non-continuity, and this aspect could not be considered in this research as well.

This study is a pioneer in highlighting the relationships between outsourcing strategies and BC in public services in Brazil. Through the guidelines discussed in this study, public managers could develop a more effective response to the implications of post-outsourcing budget constraints. In addition, the findings of this paper add to an understanding of the importance of business strategies for public services continuity and seek to help reduce uncertainties and better inform the government decision-making process.

Asset maintenance activities need to be prioritised as budget and planned outage time is often limited for all maintenance work to be carried out. The purpose of this paper is to develop a technique for prioritising maintenance work that maximises the return on investment under the constraints of budget and time.

Three indices are proposed to be used as indicators for prioritising maintenance. These indices are termed: maintenance investment index (MII), time index (TI) and budgetary index (BI). These indices permit prioritisation of asset maintenance based on the required emphasis on return on maintenance investment, time and budget respectively.

It is found that approaches to prioritising maintenance which integrate the critical dimensions in the decision making process are lacking in the literature. There is a need for such an approach to assist decision makers to ensure enterprise's objectives and targets are maximised with given budget and planned shutdown time.

The proposed techniques will assist engineers and mangers to develop their maintenance plan according to the enterprise needs and constraints and allowing management to make a better informed decision in maintenance.

This paper provides a new technique for ranking maintenance that maximises return on investment.