project participants are becoming more aware of the high costs and risks associated with delay claims and their litigation. among delays, weather delay has an important role in projects performed in severe environmental conditions. this research is the extension of delay analysis techniques by approving analysis of weather delays using fuzzy logic. at the presented technique, first using a fuzz...

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OBJECTIVE Since 2007, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have published 5-star quality rating measures to aid consumers in choosing Medicare Advantage Prescription Drug Plans (MAPDs). We examined the impact of these star ratings on Medicare Advantage Prescription Drug (MAPD) enrollment before and after 2012, when star ratings became tied to bonus payments for MAPDs that could be use...

Spectrum reservation is emerging as one of the potential solutions to cater for the communication needs of massive number of wireless Internet of Things (IoT) devices with reliability constraints particularly in mission-critical scenarios. In most mission-critical systems, the true utility of a reservation may not be completely known ahead of time as the unforseen events might not be completely...

In recent years, the market for credit default swaps (CDSs) has expanded dramatically. In these financial contracts, a sequence of payments is promised in return for protection against the credit losses in the event of default. By offering investors the chance to gain or sell risk exposure to a reference entity without buying or selling the underlying bond or loan, credit default swaps have gre...

This paper studies the link between enforcement in financial contracts and output volatility. In particular we study how cycles and importantly recessions can be amplified in economies with weak contract enforcement. The idea of the paper is that firms in economies with enforcement problems will not be able to have the optimal scale of production because investors cannot enforce the collection ...

This paper develops a model of career concerns. As in Holmström (1999), a worker’s productive abilities are revealed over time through output, and wages are based on expected output, and so on assessed ability. Specifically, work increases the probability that a skilled worker achieves an observable breakthrough. It is shown that effort at different times are strategic substitutes. As as result...

BACKGROUND Family physician plans in Iran face several challenges, one of which is developing attractive and efficient contracts that motivate physicians to participate in the plan. OBJECTIVES This study aimed to elicit GPs' preferences for family physician contracts. PATIENTS AND METHODS In a cross-sectional study using the conjoint analysis technique, 580 GPs selected from the family phys...

Dear Editor: Medical education is associated with significant costs [1]. Those who are responsible for the delivery of medical education must continually make decisions that have financial consequences [2]. Sometimes decisions are to invest in a new product or service, sometimes to disinvest. Sometimes decisions involve the educator realising that they should switch from one provider of medical...