The "Diet Problem" originated in the 1940s when researchers were tasked with determining the lowest-cost subsistence diet for a U.S. soldier. Originally, the task was accomplished through basic heuristics, but later the problem was solved using the simplex algorithm-the basis for modern linear programming. Enhancements to computing technology enabled further constraint consideration, including environmental and palatability constraints. In late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic began to sweep the planet, resulting in the unavailability of staple food products in the United States, coupled with stay-at-home requirements. This study aimed to add scarcity constraints (food availability and time) to the Diet Problem to demonstrate that, even during a pandemic, healthy eating can be maintained, visits to the supermarket can be limited to reduce exposure, and this can be done relatively inexpensively. A diversified meal plan for a hypothetical family of four was identified at a total monthly cost of $641.51. This study not only demonstrates that healthy eating can be cost-effectively maintained by consumers during a global pandemic but also that shopping trips can be limited to reduce exposure and maintain social distance. Additionally, linear programming-not normally considered by academic researchers-is showcased as a methodology that can be used by other researchers to solve novel problems.
This study extends the literature on education economics and student retention by examining social capital as a predictor of college graduation rates, student debt levels, and student loan default rates. Coleman’s social capital theory is employed to understand how social influences can impact students through external social support (i.e., social capital). The study uses school-level data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and two social capital measures. Results suggest that social capital, at both the state and the community level, significantly influences graduation rates, student debt levels, and loan default rates. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Introduction In academia, many institutions use journal article publication productivity for making decisions on tenure and promotion, funding grants, and rewarding stellar scholars. Although non-alphabetical sequencing of article coauthoring by the spelling of surnames signals the extent to which a scholar has contributed to a project, many disciplines in academia follow the norm of alphabetical ordering of coauthors in journal publications. By assessing business academic publications, this study investigates the hypothesis that author alphabetical ordering disincentivizes teamwork and reduces the overall quality of scholarship. Methods To address our objectives, we accessed data from 21,353 articles published over a 20-year period across the four main business subdisciplines. The articles selected are all those published by the four highest-ranked journals (in each year) and four lower-ranked journals (in each year) for accounting, business technology, marketing, and organizational behavior. Poisson regression and binary logistic regression were utilized for hypothesis testing. Results This study finds that, although team size among business scholars is increasing over time, alphabetical ordering as a convention in journal article publishing disincentivizes author teamwork. This disincentive results in fewer authors per publication than for publications using contribution-based ordering of authors. Importantly, article authoring teamwork is related to article quality. Specifically, articles written by a single author typically are of lesser quality than articles published by coauthors, but the number of coauthors exhibits decreasing returns to scale—coauthoring teams of one to three are positively related to high-quality articles, but larger teams are not. Alphabetical ordering itself, however, is positively associated with quality even though it inhibits teamwork, but journal article coauthoring has a greater impact on article quality than does alphabetical ordering. Conclusions These findings have important implications for academia. Scholars respond to incentives, yet alphabetical ordering of journal article authors conflicts with what is beneficial for the progress of academic disciplines. Based on these findings, we recommend that, to drive the highest-quality research, teamwork should be incentivized—all fields should adopt a contribution-based journal article author-ordering convention and avoid author ordering based upon the spelling of surnames. Although this study was undertaken using articles from business journals, its findings should generalize across all academia.
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