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SO YOU MISSED YOUR RIDE HOME BECAUSE THE HOSPITAL SCREWED UP your outpatient appointment? Don't worry. Chances are a smiling hospital employee will give you cab fare home. Miss a hospital meal because you got stuck down in radiology? No problem. You might get your own special meal to make up for it. Unhappy with your stay? In all likelihood, your case was the exception. The hospital is sorry, and they might just say it with flowers.

IN 1910, S. DUNCAN BLACK AND ALONZO G. DECKER INVENTED THE PISTOL grip, trigger‐operated power drill that helped make Black & Decker synonymous with do‐it‐yourself home improvement. The company was such a pervasive powerhouse here and abroad that the English and Germans spoke of “Black & Deckering” their homes.

IT WASN'T SOMEONE'S IDEA OF A PRANK WHEN GTE GAVE THE SENIOR executives of its Telephone Operations new shaving kits a few years back. These were no chintzy Christmas gifts from a company that could afford to be more lavish; they were new, state‐of‐the‐art shaving systems with a message.

IN 1991, GENERAL ELECTRICS AIRCRAFT ENGINES PLANT IN LYNN, Massachussets, needed new protective shields for its grinding machines. No problem, right? Find some outside vendor to do the job and pay the price.

By diversifying its business to the global commercial market from domestic defense, Newport News Shipbuilding is repositioning for long‐term growth.

In business, flashy risk takers often get more attention than companies that quietly stick to their knitting. But as Gannett's results show, unswerving focus on core competencies and fiscal conservatism are more likely to pay off year after year.

Purpose: The aim of the study is to consider the use of the Internet as a potential facilitator of positive health-related perceptions. Specifically, we propose that online health information seeking fosters positive perceptions of health. Using path modeling, we theorized several mechanisms through which information seeking could be conducive to positive health perceptions, which we conceptualized into the following four dimensions: (1) sense of empowerment in managing health, (2) self-reported ability to take better care of health, (3) sense of improved health-related quality of life, and (4) self-reported improvement of health.

Methodology: Our sample consisted of respondents who have used the Internet as a resource for health information (n = 710), drawn from the largest national probability-based online research panel. Our comparison subsample consisted of older respondents (age ≥ 60; n = 194). We used Internet-specific measures and employed structural equation models (SEM) to estimate the direct, indirect, and total effects of health-related use of the Internet on subjective health perceptions. Based on our review of the literature, competent health communication with healthcare providers and sense of empowerment in managing personal health were modeled as mediator variables. We assessed whether the proposed mediational relationships, if significant, differed across our indicators of positive health perceptions and whether any differential associations were observed among older adults. We run parallel models for each indicator of positive health perception.

Findings: Provider-patient communication informed by the Internet resources were perceived to impart a greater sense of empowerment to manage health among our respondents, which in turn, was associated with perceived contributions to better self-reported ability to provide self-care, increased health-related quality of life, and improvement in self-reported health. The SEM results revealed a good fit with our full sample and subsample.

Research Implications: Conceptualization of the multidimensional aspects of online health information seeking with separate multi-indicator analyses of the outcome variable is important to further our understanding of how technology may impact the pathways involved in influencing health perceptions and as a result health outcomes.

Since the 1980s the economic development of countries in East Asia has had a marked impact on the world port community, particularly in container transport. This paper analyses changes in the competitive environment of the world container port sector using some standard tools of market concentration. Initially, this paper reviews the competitive position of world container port system and then examines the East Asian economic environment. Both ordinal and cardinal measures of port system inequality are used to demonstrate both the rankings and levels of container throughput have been diverging in the world's major economic blocs. Conversely, East Asian countries during the 1990s have shown a trend towards convergence. Measures of dispersion suggest that ports in East Asian countries have become more competitive in their levels of container throughput.