How Scheduling Can Bias Quality Assessment: Evidence from Food Safety Inspections
How Scheduling Can Bias Quality Assessment: Evidence from Food Safety Inspections
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日程安排如何影响质量评估：食品安全检查的证据
DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.2953142
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发表时间：
2017
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
M. Toffel
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
M. Ibanez;M. Toffel
要使检查成为评估风险、质量和供应商的有效、公平和有用的工具，以及根据这些评估做出决策，准确性和一致性至关重要。我们研究了检查员计划如何引入偏差，从而通过改变检查员的严格程度来侵蚀检查质量。我们对数千次食品安全检查的分析表明，检查员受到之前被检查机构的检查结果(结果影响)的影响，理由是在他们检查了合规水平或趋势较差的机构后，违规行为更多。此外，与消极偏差一致的是，观察到遵从性恶化后的影响比改善后的效果更强。检查结果还受到检查时间的影响(每日计划的影响)：检查人员在全天花费更多时间进行检查后，以及当检查有延长其典型工作日的风险时，违规行为较少。总体而言，我们的发现表明，如果结果影响--增加审查--被更频繁地触发，如果日常日程影响--侵蚀审查--被减少，那么目前未报告的违规行为将被引用。例如，我们的估计表明，如果结果影响加倍，日常计划影响完全缓解，违规行为将增加11%，从而能够采取补救行动，大幅减少食源性疾病和住院人数。了解和解决这些检查偏差可以帮助管理人员和政策制定者不仅改善食品安全，而且还改善过程质量、环境做法、职业安全和工作条件。这篇论文被运营管理部的Serguei Netessine接受。
Accuracy and consistency are critical for inspections to be an effective, fair, and useful tool for assessing risks, quality, and suppliers—and for making decisions based on those assessments. We examine how inspector schedules could introduce bias that erodes inspection quality by altering inspector stringency. Our analysis of thousands of food-safety inspections reveals that inspectors are affected by the inspection outcomes at their prior-inspected establishment (outcome effects), citing more violations after they inspect establishments that exhibited worse compliance levels or trends. Moreover, consistent with negativity bias, the effect is stronger after observing compliance deterioration than improvement. Inspection results are also affected by when the inspection occurs within an inspector’s day (daily schedule effects): Inspectors cite fewer violations after spending more time conducting inspections throughout the day and when inspections risk prolonging their typical workday. Overall, our findings suggest that currently unreported violations would be cited if the outcome effects—which increase scrutiny—were triggered more often and if the daily schedule effects—which erode scrutiny—were reduced. For example, our estimates indicate that if outcome effects were doubled and daily schedule effects were fully mitigated, 11% more violations would be detected, enabling remedial actions that could substantially reduce foodborne illnesses and hospitalizations. Understanding and addressing these inspection biases can help managers and policymakers improve not only food safety but also process quality, environmental practices, occupational safety, and working conditions. This paper was accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management.
影响因子：
158.5
作者：
Landrigan, CP;Rothschild, JM;Czeisler, CA
通讯作者：
Czeisler, CA