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Two-dimensional warranty policies exist for certain consumer products, such as automobiles. Here, warranty is specified in terms of the time since the sale of the product as well as mileage incurred during that period. Thus, at the time of purchasing the product, the manufacturer may offer a warranty of three years or 30,000 miles, whichever occurs first. Failures in the product within this specified period of time or mileage will be covered by the manufacturer.

In this chapter, we consider the scenario of enterprise warranty programs, where customers are given the option of extending the original warranty. Thus, the buyer could be given an option to purchase a five year—50,000 mile warranty, whichever occurs first. Of course, the buyer will be expected to pay a premium to purchase this extended warranty. Such enterprise warranty programs are also found in other consumer durables, such as refrigerators, washers, dryers, and cooking ranges.

This chapter explores determination of the decision variables, such as product price, warranty time, and usage limit under the original conditions and further, for the enterprise warranty, that is, the extended warranty time and extended usage limit, as well as the premium to be charged to the buyer who selects the extended warranty. Mathematical models are developed based on maximizing the expected unit profit by selecting an enterprise warranty program. Additionally, some other objectives are also considered based on the proportional increase in the expected unit profit due to the increased market share attained through the offering of an enterprise warranty program. Some results are obtained through consideration of various goal values of the chosen objectives.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.

Various types of warranty programs are offered for consumer products. The two most common are a linear pro-rata warranty or a lump-sum warranty, if product failure occurs prior to the specified warranty time. In this chapter we consider additional types of warranty programs that allow the consumer to purchase a one-time extended warranty in the event of no failure within the initial warranty period. For the extended period, warranty may be linearly pro-rated, starting at an amount that is lower than the initial purchase price. Alternatively, for the extended period, warranty may be a lump-sum amount, that is less than the initial warranty amount. Expressions for the expected costs under each of the programs are derived. Guidelines are provided for determining the parameters of each warranty program under relevant constraints. Sensitivity analysis is also conducted to determine the effect of the problem parameters on the expected warranty costs.

With 43.2 million coronavirus cases and 525,000 deaths in 2022, India ranked second worldwide, after the United States (84.6 million cases and 1 million deaths), according to the latest available June 2022 COVID-19 impact data.

Amid people’s growing mistrust in the government, India’s news media enhanced the nation’s distinguished designation as the world’s largest and most populous democracy. India’s news media inform, educate, empower, and entertain a surging population of 1.4 billion people, which is roughly one-sixth of the world’s people.

Drawing upon the media agendamelding theoretical framework, we conducted a case study research into interplay between two prominent democratic institutions, the media and the government, to analyze the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in redefining India’s networked society.

India’s COVID-19 pandemic aggravated internecine tensions between media and government relating to four key freedom issues: (1) world’s largest COVID-19 lockdown affecting 1.3 billion Indians from March 25, 2020 to August 2020 with extensions and five-phased re-openings, to restrict the spread of COVID-19; (2) Internet shutdowns; (3) media censorship during the 1975–1977 “Emergency”; and (4) unabated murders of journalists in India.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused deleterious problems debilitating the tensions between the media and the government, India’s journalists thrived by speaking truth to power. This study delineates key aspects of India’s media agendamelding that explicates how the people of India form their media agendas. India’s news audiences meld media messages from newspapers, television, and social media to form a picture of the issues, insights, and ideas that define their lives and times in the 21st century digital age.

The search for more effective policies, choice of optimal implementation strategies for achieving defined policy targets (e.g., cost-containment, improved access, and quality healthcare outcomes), and selection among the metrics relevant for assessing health system policy change performance simultaneously pose continuing healthcare sector challenges for many countries of the world. Meanwhile, research on the core drivers of healthcare costs across the health systems of the many countries continues to gain increased momentum as these countries learn among themselves. Consequently, cross-country comparison studies largely focus their interests on the relationship among health expenditures (HCE), GDP, aging demographics, and technology. Using more recent 1980–2014 annual data panel on 34 OECD countries and the panel ARDL (Autoregressive Distributed Lag) framework, this study investigates the long- and short-run relationships among aggregate healthcare expenditure, income (GDP per capita or per capita GDP^_HCE), age dependency ratio, and “international co-operation patents” (for capturing the technology effects). Results from the panel ARDL approach and Granger causality tests suggest a long-run relationship among healthcare expenditure and the three major determinants. Findings from the Westerlund test with bootstrapping further corroborate the existence of a long-run relationship among healthcare expenditure and the three core determinants. Interestingly, GDP less health expenditure (GDP^_HCE) is the only short-run driver of HCE. The income elasticity estimates, falling in the 1.16–1.46 range, suggest that the behavior of aggregate healthcare in the 34 OECD countries tends toward those for luxury goods. Finally, through cross-country technology spillover effects, these OECD countries benefit significantly from international investments through technology cooperations resulting in jointly owned patents.

The paper provides an overview of research published in the innovation and operations management (IOM) literature on 15 methods for cost management in new product development, and it provides a comparison to an earlier review of the management accounting (MA) literature (Wouters & Morales, 2014).

This structured literature search covers papers published in 23 journals in IOM in the period 1990–2014.

The search yielded a sample of 208 unique papers with 275 results (one paper could refer to multiple cost management methods). The top 3 methods are modular design, component commonality, and product platforms, with 115 results (42%) together. In the MA literature, these three methods accounted for 29%, but target costing was the most researched cost management method by far (26%). Simulation is the most frequently used research method in the IOM literature, whereas this was averagely used in the MA literature; qualitative studies were the most frequently used research method in the MA literature, whereas this was averagely used in the IOM literature. We found a lot of papers presenting practical approaches or decision models as a further development of a particular cost management method, which is a clear difference from the MA literature.

This review focused on the same cost management methods, and future research could also consider other cost management methods which are likely to be more important in the IOM literature compared to the MA literature. Future research could also investigate innovative cost management practices in more detail through longitudinal case studies.

This review of research on methods for cost management published outside the MA literature provides an overview for MA researchers. It highlights key differences between both literatures in their research of the same cost management methods.