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The task of the financial manager of a library is a formidable one. Wacht defines a financial manager as a person who manages the resources of an economic entity for the purposes of influencing the future outcome of its operations. The financial manager plays the major role in planning and measuring the organization's needs for funds, raising the necessary funds, and making certain that the funds acquired are properly employed. A financial manager must also estimate the future cash flow associated with individual projects, in addition to the funds necessary for the total operation of a library. Other duties include the evaluation of prospective new investments and programs on the organization's operations.

This essay describes a methodology that enables dialogue, decision-making, and transformational leadership in complicated and contentious situations. It is founded on thirty years of research and development. A hallmark of the methodology is the formalization of its scientific foundations, its use of technology, and its constant empirical testing in the arena of practice. The essay presents guiding principles for conducting dialogue in complex situations and their implications in terms of requisite laws of Variety, Parsimony, Saliency, Meaning, the Evolution of Observations, and Autonomy in Distinction-Making. The embodiment of these six laws within a technology-supported disciplined approach to dialogue, called “technologue,” enables collaborative interaction amongst stakeholders, contributing to the emergence of a situation-specific, socially-constructed, consensual linguistic domain that enables participants to forge a social contract for designing their future.

Studies of women's employment have pointed to the availability of part‐time work as a major factor in their employment. For many women, the disruptions of their work for family commitments has led to a decrease in their earning power and the status of their work [1]. Professional work is relatively well paid, opportunities for part‐time work are good in many areas and recruitment is restricted to qualified people only. This is particularly true of optometry where there is also little or no evidence of unemployment, providing optimal conditions for the employment of women. Leaving aside factors such as social class, a study of the working patterns of women optometrists might well point out the work potential of to‐day's women. Women's employment.

The authors investigated the impacts of differentiated transformational leadership (TFL), including team-focused TFL and individual-focused TFL, on team creativity through the mediating effect of team conflict, consisting of task conflict and relationship conflict.

The authors designed and conducted a close-to-reality experiment, enrolling 180 students and six professors from a large Chinese university. Student participants worked on a real marketing project and professor participants imitated the behaviors of transformational leaders. Using the computed values of team-focused TFL, individual-focused TFL, team creativity, task conflict and relationship conflict, the authors assessed the relationship among differentiated TFL, team creativity and team conflict.

Team-focused TFL has a significantly positive impact on team creativity through the mediating effect of task conflict, whereas individual-focused TFL has a significantly negative impact on team creativity through the mediating effect of relationship conflict.

From a new perspective of team conflict, the authors revealed the “black box” of the differentiated TFL–team creativity relationship. Moreover, other determinants were well controlled in the experiment, and thus, the authors effectively clarified the intervening mechanism of differentiated TFL on team creativity through the mediating effect of team conflict.

This paper aims to study the post-patent ethical drug market and simulate the impact of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) on individuals, health-care providers and pharmaceutical firms. US policymakers have been looking at various ways to curb rising health-care costs in USA, including ways to promote the use of generic drugs in lieu of brand drugs. In this broader context, the implementation of ACA in December 2013 will introduce major changes in the pharmaceutical market.

To fully understand the impact of such policy changes, we develop a structural model to study consumers’ buying behavior and firm competition in the post-patent ethical drug markets. We use the estimated model parameters to conduct four policy simulations to illustrate the effect of Obamacare on increasing the relative size of price-insensitive segment, reducing price sensitivity in the price-sensitive segment, providing brand price discount to Medicare patients previously in the “donut hole” and the effect of change in people’s attitude toward generics.

Our model estimation reveals two classes of consumers with different price sensitivities. This heterogeneity explains the increase in the brand price after generic entry. We identify consumers’ switching costs between generic and brand drugs, as well as among different generics. From the policy simulation, we find that except the closure of Medicare donut hole, all other policy changes lead to increased usage of the focal molecule, and the efforts to increase insurance coverage and reduce the out of pocket payment for prescription drugs lead to increase in firm profit.

This paper is the first to illustrate the potential policy effect of Obamacare through a structural model on post-patent ethical drug market.