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An emerging management trend is to use the “wisdom of the crowd” to make decisions traditionally made by the top management alone. Research on this phenomenon has focused mainly on the capacity of crowds to generate ideas, but much less is known about a crowd’s capacity to select ideas. To study crowd-based idea selection in firms, this chapter develops a mathematical model of a crowd that makes decisions by majority voting. The model takes into account contingencies that are of particular importance to firms, namely: the size of the population from which the crowd is drawn, the distribution of accuracy among members of the population, and the firm’s ability to recruit the population’s most accurate individuals. The results show that: (1) under relatively common conditions, increasing the size of the crowd may actually reduce performance; (2) near-optimal performance can usually be achieved by a much smaller crowd than the one required to achieve optimal performance; (3) determining the best crowd size depends critically on the firm’s ability to recruit “accurate” individuals; and (4) good performance does not require large crowds unless all population members exhibit low levels of accuracy.

This paper proposes an organizational change process to prepare physicians and other health professionals for their new roles in patient-centered medical homes (PCMHs). It provides physician-centered tools, models, concepts, and the language to implement transformational patient-centered medical care.

To improve care delivery, quality, and patient engagement, a systems approach to care is required. This paper examines a systems approach to patient care where all inputs that influence patient interactions and participation are considered in the design of health care delivery and follow-up treatment plans. Applying systems thinking, organizational change models, and team-building, we have examined the continuum of this change process from ideation through the diffusion of new methods and behaviors.

PCMHs make compelling business sense. Studies have shown that the PCMH improves patient satisfaction, clinical outcomes and reduces underuse and overuse of medical services. Patient-centered care necessitates transitioning from an adversarial to a collaborative culture. It is a transformation process predicated on strong leadership able to align an organization toward a vision of patient-centered care, creating a collaborative culture committed to health-goal achievement.

This paper proposes that the PCMH is a rigorous team-building transformational organizational change, a radical departure from the current hierarchical, silo-oriented, medical practice model. It requires that participants within and across health care organizations learn new skills and behaviors to achieve the anticipated quality and efficiency improvements. It is an innovative health care organization model of the future whose success is premised on teams supplanting the individual as the building block and unit of health care performance.

In the highly competitive professional sports industry, managers of a newly established competition face many challenges, including “converting” or gaining the allegiance of new groups of consumers (fans, spectators) to their colors. One critical aspect in the converting process relates to the “ideal” game-day experience as perceived by would-be consumers. Gaining knowledge about this area could be critical to professional sport marketers in enhancing the perceived quality of sport events. This study examines the ideal football experience among 1,412 fans of an Australian A-League football (soccer) club. The importance of a lively atmosphere, that of high turnouts of spectators and the opportunity to watch quality and attacking football are highlighted in most comments, even relegating the game’s final score (winning) to a more marginal level of importance. Some of the implications of the findings for professional football marketers and avenues for future research are presented and discussed.

COVID-19 has changed the landscape within which we travel. Working from Home (WFH) in many countries has increased significantly, and while it was often forced on a society it has delivered some unintended positive consequences associated in particular with the levels of congestion on the roads and crowding on public transport. With a likelihood of some amount of WFH continuing as we move out of the active COVID-19 period, the question being asked is whether the post-COVID-19 period will return the pre-COVID-19 levels of traffic congestion and crowding. In many jurisdictions, there is a desire to avoid this circumstance and to use WFH as a policy lever that has appeal to employees, employers and government planning agencies in order to find ways of better managing future levels of congestion and crowding. This chapter uses the ongoing research and surveys we have been undertaking in Australia since March 2020 to track behavioural responses that impact on commuting and non-commuting travel, and to examine what the evidence tells us about opportunities into the future in many geographical settings to better manage congestion and crowding. This is linked to a desire by employers to maintain WFH where it makes sense as a way of not only supporting sustainability charters but also the growing interest in a commitment to a broader social licence. We discuss ways in which WFH can contribute to flattening peaks in travel; but also the plans that some public transport authorities are putting in place to ensure that crowding on public transport is mitigated as people increasingly return to using public transport. Whereas we might have thought that we now have plenty of public transport capacity, this may not be the case if we want to control crowding, and more capacity may be needed which could be a challenge for trains more than buses given track capacity limits. We conclude the chapter by summarising some of the positive benefits associated with WFH, and the implications not just for transport but for society more widely.

Since tourism is viewed as being a fast-growing industry, researchers are keen to investigate the negative impacts brought by an increasing number of visitors. As one of the derived social impacts, crowding has been proven to have a negative effect on tourists’ visiting experience. Thus, this study aims to understand tourists’ perception of crowding and its subsequent effect on their loyalty. A theme park in China called China Dinosaur Land, located in Jiangsu Province, is selected as the research site and 296 valid questionnaires are collected from the visitors. The results illustrate that psychological states, such as perceived crowding, emotional response, and coping behavior are much more complex than the study initially proposes; therefore, the hypotheses of the study are amended according to the research results.

This chapter is devoted to fiscal policy theory and to how its evolution influenced the policy principles implemented from the end of the World War II to the present. It shows how the theoretical foundations evolved, from the Keynesian theory according to which public expenditure was conceived as an instrument to sustain aggregate demand and achieve full employment, to the present theoretical framework in which, following the intertemporal approach, it has been downgraded to an external shock. The public debt issue is examined with the aim of explaining why sound public finance represents a primary policy objective in the Eurozone.

Since waiting in a queue may induce both negative and positive effects on customers’ quality perceptions of which the queue is formed, an optimal queuing wait which is long enough but not too long to have positive effects on the pursued service is critical for successful queuing management. This study examined the existence of an optimal queuing wait at theme parks by merging the interpretative approach of institutional norms with the measuring application of the adapted Return Potential Model from crowding studies. Using quota and systematic sampling techniques, survey data were collected from 1,440 visitors to five leading theme parks in Taiwan. An optimal queuing wait represented by an institutional norm among visitors with moderate consensus for the longest acceptable waiting time (LAWT) was revealed in this study. As a critical reversal point of visitors’ quality perception, significant ascent of visitors’ crowding perception did occur when their actual waiting times exceeded their LAWT.

After its adhesion to the EU in 1986 Portuguese agriculture benefitted from a continuous flow of European funds aimed at the modernization of the sector in order that it might face the shock of competition with more developed agricultures.

However, enough evidence exists to show that the crowding out of Portuguese capitals was counterproductive to the political objectives. In fact, despite the EU transfers, in only two of the years from 1980 to 2009 did agricultural investment attain identical levels to those prior to integration.

If one considers investment as being the best indicator to explain the poor results of Portuguese agriculture over the last three decades, my argument is that this evolution needs a retrospective analysis focusing on the concept of financialization of the economy induced by EU and national policies. Therefore, this chapter is an explanatory attempt to open a broad discussion on the role of financialization in agriculture and rural development issues.