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PurposeLaparoscopic surgery was previously accepted as an alternative surgical option in treatment for colorectal cancer. Nowadays, single-port laparoscopic surgery (SPLS) is introduced as a method to maximize advantages of minimally invasive surgery. However, SPLS has several limitations compared to conventional multiport laparoscopic surgery (CMLS). To overcome those limitations of SPLS, reduced port laparoscopic surgery (RPLS) was introduced. This study aimed at evaluating the short-term outcomes of RPLS.MethodsPatients who underwent CMLS and RPLS of colon cancer between August 2011 and December 2013 were included in this study. Short-term clinical and pathological outcome were compared between the 2 groups.ResultsThirty-two patients underwent RPLS and 217 patients underwent CMLS. Shorter operation time, less blood loss, and faster bowel movement were shown in RPLS group in this study. In terms of postoperative pain, numeric rating scale (NRS) of RPLS was lower than that of CMLS. Significant differences were shown in terms of tumor size, harvested lymph node, perineural invasion, and pathological stage. No significant differences were confirmed in terms of other surgical outcomes.ConclusionIn this study, RPLS was technically feasible and safe. Especially in terms of postoperative pain, RPLS was comparable to CMLS. RPLS may be a feasible alternative option in selected patients with colon cancer.

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Intense media scrutiny and public backlash stimulate consumers to be conscientious about sustainability issues from the supply chain (SC) perspective. Accordingly, our focus in this article is on joint sustainability issues in a manufacturer–supplier relationship under a contract that possibly shares sustainability‐related costs, when there exists a supplier's potentially deficient sustainability effort. We find that the manufacturer may prefer indirect (i.e., paying a higher component price to its supplier) rather than direct support (i.e., increasing subsidies for a supplier's sustainability expenditures) when consumers are sensitive to the supplier's sustainability. We further find that as consumers' sensitivity to the supplier's sustainability increases, an uncoordinated SC will gradually approach the coordinated SC. This occurs because the increased sensitivity encourages greater cooperation among SC members. Our findings will help establish a better understanding of the joint sustainability development issues in an SC.

Problem definition: This article explores the incentive issues and gaming behaviors of firms under risk-sharing partnerships in a project management setting motivated by real-life examples. Academic/practical relevance: Collaboration prevails in projects within diverse industries. The risk-sharing partnership, in which each partner pays for its own cost and shares the outcome (either reward or loss) on project completion, is one of the most popular ways to manage collaborations in practice. However, the risk-sharing partnership may lead to project failure in the forms of excessive delays and cost overruns, but the driving forces (for example, incentives) and mechanisms (for example, gaming behaviors) in project management settings are not yet fully understood. Methodology: Relative to the one-firm-does-all strategy, we studied how risk-sharing partnerships may affect firms’ incentives in project execution and thus, project metrics (duration and cost) for various project networks (serial versus parallel), risk levels (deterministic versus stochastic duration), and information status (symmetry versus asymmetry). Results: We found that risk-sharing partnerships may encourage deliberate delays and cost overruns through various mechanisms, such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Supplier’s Dilemma, and the Coauthor’s Dilemma. Counterintuitively, information asymmetry may outperform information symmetry on project metrics for both deterministic and stochastic duration, contingent on the network structure, cost parameters, and partners’ beliefs. Managerial implications: By connecting theory to practice, we provide insights into the incentive issues of some real-life projects and justifications for several mitigation strategies to avoid such gaming behaviors in practice.