With INFORMS launching its major new initiative to market our profession at the annual meeting in Atlanta, the society continues turning to the media to publicize the contributions of operations researchers. Recent articles in the press revisited bio-terror and examined credit card fraud, the pharmaceutical industry's practice of giving free samples to physicians, the launch of new products in Europe and game theory.

"... banks won't necessarily stop a transaction even if they suspect foul play. That's because false alarms or 'false positives' are fairly common and can prove annoying to the customer if a legitimate transaction is denied.

" 'Most models try to detect fraud in near-real time, meaning in a matter of minutes,' said Michael Alliston, managing director at Numeracy LLC, a mathematical/statistical consulting and analysis firm. 'That means the bank probably loses money in one fraudulent transaction but wants to act fast enough to ensure there's not a second one.'

"...Anti-fraud computer modeling is part of a field called 'operations research' that applies mathematics and statistics to analyze all sorts of complex problems, from airlines needing to shift crews among many flights to oil companies deciding which fuels to refine from a shipment of oil."
— Columnist Russ Wiles, Arizona Republic, June 1, 2003

"Game theory is a standard tool of analysis for professionals working in the fields of operations research, economics, finance, regulation, military, insurance, retail marketing, politics, conflict analysis, and energy, to name a few."
— Saul Gass, "Ask the Experts," ScientificAmerican.com, June 2, 2003

"Doctors are far more wary of pharmaceutical companies' aggressive marketing than generally believed and don't easily yield to pressure to switch prescriptions, according to a paper being presented at a conference of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

" 'Are physicians easy marks?' ask Natalie Mizik of Columbia University and Robert Jacobson of the University of Washington in a paper of the same name. 'To the contrary, our results show that physicians are 'tough sells' in that sales force activity has modest to very small influence on prescribing behavior.' "
— Science Blog, July 25, 2003

"The best way to introduce products in Europe may be to showcase them in Scandinavia first. According to a paper published in a 2003 issue of Marketing Science (Volume 22, Issue 2), Scandinavian consumers embrace new products an average of two years sooner than the European average."
— MIT Sloan Management Review, Aug. 4, 2003

"In a recently completed study, we looked into various emergency responses to an airborne anthrax attack and concluded that the United States is woefully unprepared. Two pounds of weapons-grade anthrax dropped on a large American city could result in more than 100,000 deaths, even if early cases were successfully diagnosed, antibiotics were distributed broadly and drug adherence was high. The reason for the catastrophic death toll: Not enough people would receive antibiotics quickly enough to prevent symptoms from developing, and those who developed symptoms would overwhelm the medical facilities. "
— Op/Ed by Lawrence Wein (editor in chief of Operations Research) and Edward Kaplan (recipient of the INFORMS Presidents Award) Washington Post, July 28, 2003

" 'Most believe that the big, lucrative markets of Britain, France and Germany are the best to launch into,' says Gerard Tellis of the University of Southern California. Most European product launches take place in these countries. 'But it could mean a manager pulls the plug on a product before it takes off,' says Mr. Tellis. Far better, he says, to use a so-called 'waterfall' strategy in Europe — pouring products first into markets where they are likely to achieve an early result, such as Sweden, then spreading sales further afield as demand picks up elsewhere.

"Mr. Tellis worked with Stefan Stremersch of Erasmus University in Holland and Eden Yin of Britain's Cambridge University, gathering data on 137 new products in 10 consumer-durable categories (refrigerators, TVs, etc.) from 16 European countries. Economics alone can only partially explain the differences, say their recently published paper, 'The International Take-off of New Products,' published by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences."
— Economist, Aug 7, 2003





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