Problem definition: It is well known that the power sector requires flexibility, especially from fossil fuel-based power-generating units, to balance demand side variability and supply side fluctuations. However, the environmental consequences related to possessing and exercising such flexibility remain relatively unexplored. In this study, we examine the environmental impact of two forms of flexibility pertinent to power generation: fuel flexibility-that is, the ability to utilize multiple fuel types, and volume flexibility- that is, the ability to alter production volumes quickly. Methodology/results: We assembled a data set that spans 1998-2016 and includes details on fuel usage, power generation, generating unit characteristics, and carbon dioxide (i.e., CO2) emissions for 3,135 fossil fuel power-generating units that account for more than 92% of the United States' fossil fuel-generating capacity. Our empirical analysis reveals that power-generating units that possess fuel flexibility or volume flexibility generate greater CO2 emissions than comparable nonflexible generating units. Additionally, when power-generating units exercise fuel flexibility (i.e., they use multiple fuel types in a period) or volume flexibility (i.e., they vary production to a greater degree in a period), they generate greater CO2 emissions. By contrast, when power-generating units exercise both fuel and volume flexibility, we find that they diminish the aggregate emissions increases expected from exercising fuel or volume flexibility alone. Managerial implications: We add to the literature by exploring how flexibility affects environmental performance and by disambiguating the effects of possessing flexibility and exercising flexibility. These results are important when considering the penetration of renewables, the adoption of utility-grade storage, and demand response as each of these paths can significantly affect the flexibility burden placed on conventional sources of power. Thus, our results are relevant to policy makers and practitioners because they crystallize the environmental tradeoffs involved with deploying flexibility in fossil fuel-based power-generating units.

Problem definition: Mobile money systems—platforms built and managed by mobile network platform operators (MMPOs) to allow money to be stored as digital currency—connect millions of poor and “unbanked” people to the formal financial system. Unfortunately, low service levels because of the suboptimal management of cash and digital currency (e-float) inventory impede the development of these ecosystems. Accordingly, we seek to answer the question of how agents should manage inventories of cash and e-float. Academic/practical relevance: This paper extends inventory theory to the mobile money context, unique in that sales of cash generate inventory of e-float and vice versa. In doing so, we address a key pain point for an emerging sector that improves lives at the base of the pyramid. Methodology: We develop an analytical heuristic to determine initial stocking levels for cash and e-float and analyze its performance on simulated and actual data. Results: By partnering with an MMPO, we tested the performance of the heuristic inventory policy with data from more than 35 million transactions. The heuristic captured 99.9998% of the optimal profit on simulated data and, on actual data, we found that following the recommendations could increase agents’ profits by an average of 15.4%. Managerial implications: We develop a pragmatic inventory policy that performs nearly optimally. We also analyze under which conditions the performance deteriorates and examine heterogeneity among agents with respect to the heuristic’s impact on their performance. Thus, we equip MMPOs with guidance as to whom to target and how. By contributing to service level and profit improvements, this work can make mobile money a more effective financial inclusion tool in the developing world as well as improve the livelihoods of agents. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2022.1175 .

Business models designed to serve those at the “base of the pyramid” are an effective means to create employment and improve quality of life. However, the effect that poverty has on the performance of such businesses is not well‐understood. We address this gap through the context of “mobile money,” an electronic currency ecosystem designed as a secure, reliable way for those at the base of the pyramid to store and transfer money. Using data from Kenya and Uganda, and instrumenting for potentially endogenous regressors, we examine the effect poverty has on operational decisions (inventory and price transparency) and market dimensions (network density and demand). Our results suggest that mobile money, as a base of the pyramid business model, is well‐positioned to serve those in poverty up to a point, with demand increasing in poverty when the concentration of poverty is sufficiently low. However, our results indicate that, where poverty is more pervasive, inventory costs increase in poverty while per agent demand and agent network density both decrease. In short, the business case for mobile money degenerates in regions where it, arguably, is needed the most. We conclude with thoughts on how to buttress mobile money's business case in these high poverty settings.

US coal‐fired generating capacity has shed nearly 25% of its footprint between 2011 and 2018. Multiple factors—regulation, natural gas prices, renewable energy adoption, and environmental activism—have each been lauded by various stakeholders for this trend. To improve our understanding of this environmental technology transition, it is important to determine the extent to which each of these factors has accelerated coal unit retirements. We do so in this study through an accelerated failure time model that utilizes data on US coal‐fired generating units from 2008 through 2016. Our findings indicate that environmental regulation, reduced natural gas price volatility, increased utilization of renewable capacity, and the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign have all accelerated coal unit retirements. We do not, however, find evidence that natural gas price levels or the penetration of renewable capacity have accelerated coal unit retirements. Among the significant drivers, we estimate that the Beyond Coal campaign has had the greatest effect per unit, reducing expected operating life by an average of 24.4 months. However, among these factors, federal regulation affected the greatest number of coal units, and thus had the greatest aggregate impact on coal retirements. In post hoc analysis, we estimate that 40% of the generation that had been provided by retired coal‐fired units spilled over to surviving coal‐fired units. However, we estimate the 60% that was displaced from the coal fleet resulted in a 103.6 to 178.2 million metric ton net reduction in [Formula: see text] emissions each year.

Whilst there have been great improvements in the management of elite and professional athletes with the formalisation of the clinical specialty of Sports and Exercise medicine, the management of facial injuries has perhaps lagged in this group. Professional athletic careers can be put in jeopardy due to unnecessarily long absences from training and competition after facial injuries. Professional and elite sports athletes can benefit from different approaches to the management of their facial injuries to reduce time away from competing but maximise their safety. On 6th December 2018, a consensus meeting of interested clinicians involved in the management of facial injuries of elite and professional athletes was held at the Royal Society of Medicine, London, UK to provide a contemporary review of the approaches to conservative, operative and recovery management of facial injuries. National experts with specialist experience of facial injuries presentation and athlete needs from a range of elite and professional sports led the day's programme and the discussions so that guidelines could be formulated. These are presented in this review paper.

The use of electronic money transfers through cellular networks (“mobile money”) is rapidly increasing in the developing world. This electronic currency ecosystem could improve the lives of about 1 billion people who live on less than $2 a day by facilitating a secure, accessible, and reliable way to store and transfer money. The success of mobile money requires a network of agents to provide high quality service in conducting transactions. We investigate how two elements of service quality—price transparency and inventory—influence demand for transactions, and the drivers of agents’ decisions on service quality. Moreover, we study the moderating role of competition and poverty on mobile money network demand and agent decision-making. Using data from Kenya and Uganda, and instrumenting for potentially endogenous regressors, we find that both price transparency and inventory increase average demand for mobile money transactions. However, the effect of inventory on demand is moderated by competition and poverty: competitive intensity decreases the effect of inventory while poverty increases it. We also find that both competition and poverty increase price transparency and inventory of cash and electronic value. Strikingly, while controlling for demand and other factors, our results indicate that agents in high poverty areas devote more capital to their cash and e-float inventory. This study not only furthers our understanding of service quality, competition and poverty, but also offers insights on how mobile-enabled financial services can advance the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and facilitate the distribution of humanitarian aid.

Problem definition: Firms providing products and services to low-income base of the pyramid (BOP) customers are increasingly utilizing independent contractor agents rather than employees in their distribution models. We empirically investigate the best way to help agents perform better. Academic/practical relevance: BOP customers represent onethird of the world's economy but make five United States dollars or less daily. Providing goods and services to these customers is difficult for traditional firms because most retail activity occurs at small-scale independent outlets. Improving agent performance can help firms reach customers in this environment. We enhance the literature on agent-based models in BOP settings, decision making, technology in developing economies, and field experiments. Methodology: In partnership with a Tanzanian mobile money operator, we perform a randomized, controlled trial with 4,771 agents to examine how differing types of guidance, and whether in-person training is offered, impact agents' inventory management. Mobile money is a platform whereby firms in developing economies provide financial services to customers via cell phones. Mobile money agents service customer withdrawals and deposits as branchless banking outlets. Every day, they decide how much money to stock to service customers' transactions, from which they earn commissions. Results: We find that those agents given only explicit recommendations (as opposed to summary statistics or both) who were invited to in-person training (as opposed to simply received an automated notification) improve their performance. Agents in other treatments showed no statistically significant change. The effect is concentrated in agents who never replenished their money at a bank and whose money inventory levels were low in the pretreatment period. Managerial implications: We show empirically how firms can better manage agents, thereby improving the value proposition of serving BOP customers. We show the utility of segmentation based on agent heterogeneity. This can improve firm performance, agent profits, and customer service.

Emissions regulation is a policy mechanism intended to address the threat of climate change. However, the stringency of emissions regulation varies across regions, raising concerns over carbon leakage-an outcome where stringent regulation in one region shifts production to regions with weaker regulation. It is believed that such leakage adversely increases global emissions. It is also believed that leakage can be eliminated by carbon tariffs, which are taxes imposed on imported goods so that they incur the same emissions cost that they would have if they had been produced in the regulated region. Results here contradict these beliefs. This paper demonstrates that carbon leakage can arise despite a carbon tariff but, when it does arise under a carbon tariff, it decreases emissions. Due in part to this clean leakage, results here indicate that a carbon tariff decreases global emissions. Domestic firm profits, on the other hand, can increase, decrease, or remain unchanged due to a carbon tariff, which suggests that carbon tariffs are not inherently protectionist as some argue. Rather, results here suggest that carbon tariffs improve the efficacy of emissions regulation, enabling it to reduce global emissions in many settings in which it would otherwise fail to do so.The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2017.0674.

Problem Definition: Mobile money systems—platforms built and managed by mobile network platform opera- tors (MMPOs) to allow money to be stored as digital currency—connect millions of poor and “unbanked” people to the formal financial system. Unfortunately, low service levels due to the sub-optimal management of cash and digital currency (e-float) inventory impede the development of these ecosystems. Accordingly, we seek to answer the question: how should agents manage inventories of cash and e-float? Academic / Practical Relevance: This paper extends inventory theory to the mobile money context, unique in that sales of cash generate inventory of e-float and vice versa. In doing so, we address a key pain point for an emerging sector that improves lives at the base of the pyramid. Methodology: We develop an analytical heuristic to determine initial stocking levels for cash and e-float, and analyze its performance on simulated and actual data. Results: By partnering with a MMPO, we tested the performance of the heuristic inventory policy with data from more than 35 million transactions. The heuristic captured 99.9998% of the optimal profit on simulated data, and on actual data, could increase agents’ profits by an average of 15.4% if they followed the recommendations. Managerial Implications: We develop a pragmatic inventory policy that performs nearly optimally. We also analyze under which conditions the performance deteriorates, and examine heterogeneity among agents with respect to the heuristic’s impact on their performance. Thus, we equip MMPOs with guidance as to whom to target and how. By contributing to service level and profit improvements, this work can make mobile money a more effective financial inclusion tool in the developing world as well as improve the livelihoods of agents.

We study the impact of emissions tax and emissions cap‐and‐trade regulation on a firm's technology choice and capacity decisions. We show that emissions price uncertainty under cap‐and‐trade results in greater expected profit than a constant emissions price under an emissions tax, which contradicts popular arguments that the greater uncertainty under cap‐and‐trade will erode value. We further show that two operational drivers underlie this result: (i) the firm's option not to operate, which effectively right‐censors the uncertain emissions price; and (ii) dispatch flexibility, which is the firm's ability to first deploy its most profitable capacity given the realized emissions price. In addition to these managerial insights, we also explore policy implications: the effect of emissions price level, and the effect of investment and production subsidies. Through an illustrative example, we show that production subsidies of higher investment and production cost technologies (such as carbon capture and storage technologies) have no effect on the firm's optimal total capacity when firms own a portfolio of both clean and dirty technologies, but that investment subsidies of these technologies increase the firm's total capacity, conditionally increasing expected emissions. A subsidy of a lower production cost technology, on the other hand, has no effect on the firm's optimal total capacity in multi‐technology portfolios, regardless of whether the subsidy is a production or investment subsidy.

A regulator's ability to incentivize environmental improvement among firms is a vital lever in achieving long-term sustainability. However, firms can and do respond to environmental regulation in a variety of ways: complying with its intent; avoiding the regulation by offshoring or by abandoning the market; or ignoring the regulation by continuing with entrenched business practices. The path a profit-maximizing firm will choose depends, in part, on the expected cost of noncompliance, which is a product of the regulator's stated penalty, the likelihood that noncompliant practices are detected, and the likelihood that detected violations are punished. The form of regulatory regime and three important cost thresholds also drive firm response. In this chapter, through examples of regulatory failures and successes, we develop a framework for understanding how these thresholds interact with the type of regulatory regime being considered and the expected cost of noncompliance to determine whether profit-maximizing firms ignore, avoid, or embrace environmental regulation.

The use of electronic money transfer through cellular networks (mobile money) is rapidly increasing in the developing world. The resulting electronic currency ecosystem could improve the lives of the estimated 2 billion people who live on less than $2 a day by facilitating more secure, accessible, and reliable ways to store and transfer money than are currently available. The development of this ecosystem requires a network of agents to conduct cash-for-electronic value transactions and vice versa. This paper examines how service quality, competition, and poverty are related to demand and inventory (of electronic credit and physical cash) where, in this setting, service quality consists of pricing transparency and agent expertise. Among our results, we find that average demand increases with both pricing transparency and agent expertise, and that agent expertise interacts positively with competitive intensity. We also find that competition is associated with higher inventory holdings of both cash and electronic value, and that agents in high-poverty areas hold greater amounts of cash but do not carry a smaller amount of electronic value indicating that they devote more capital to their inventory. These results offer insight to mobile money operators with respect to monitoring, training, and the business case for their agents. This paper furthers our understanding of service quality, competition and inventory, while developing a foundation for the exploration of mobile money by OM scholars.

It has been demonstrated that innovative business models designed to serve the population at the "base of the pyramid" are an effective means to create employment and improve quality of life. However, the effect that various levels of poverty have on the viability of these business models is not well-understood. We address this gap through the context of "mobile money," an electronic currency ecosystem designed as a secure, reliable way for those at the base of the pyramid to store and transfer money. Using data from Kenya and Uganda, and instrumenting for potentially endogenous regressors, we examine the effect poverty has on operational decisions (inventory and price transparency) and market dimensions (network density and demand). Our results suggest that mobile money, as a base of the pyramid business model, is well-positioned to serve those in poverty up to a point, with demand increasing in poverty when the concentration of poverty is sufficiently low. However, as poverty becomes more pervasive, our results suggest that its business case becomes challenged with increasing inventory costs, decreasing density of its agent-based network, and decreasing demand per agent. We conclude with thoughts on how to buttress mobile money’s business case in these extreme poverty settings.