The incentive regulation of costs related to physical and cyber security in electricity networks is an important but relatively unexplored and ambiguous issue. These costs can be part of a cost efficiency benchmarking or alternatively dealt separately. This paper discusses the issues and proposes on the options for incorporating network security costs within incentive regulation in a benchmarki...

Financial resources tend to be limited in schistosomiasis endemic areas, forcing program managers to balance financial and scientific considerations when selecting detection assays. Therefore, we compared the costs of using single stool Kato-Katz, triplicate stool Kato-Katz, and point-of-contact circulating cathodic antigen (POC-CCA) assays for the detection of Schistosoma mansoni infection. Ec...

Costs of reproduction are expected to be ubiquitous in wild animal populations and understanding the drivers of variation in these costs is an important aspect of life-history evolution theory. We use a 43 year dataset from a wild population of red deer to examine the relative importance of two factors that influence the costs of reproduction to mothers, and to test whether these costs vary wit...

Purpose – This paper describes the design and implementation of an activity-based costing (ABC) system for a textile company in Taiwan. Design/methodology/approach – An in-depth field investigation by collecting and analyzing 39 months of field data, gathering information from files and archives, direct observation, interviews, and statistical analyses was conducted. Findings – First, the compa...

Photochemical machining (PCM), also known as photoetching, photofabrication or photochemical milling, is a non-traditional manufacturing method based on the combination of photoresist imaging and chemical etching. PCM uses techniques similar to those employed for the production of printed circuit boards and silicon integrated circuits. The PCM industry plays a valuable worldwide role in the pro...

BACKGROUND In order to assist health service planning, understanding factors that influence higher trauma treatment costs is essential. The majority of trauma costing research reports the cost of trauma from the perspective of the receiving hospital. There has been no comprehensive synthesis and little assessment of the drivers of cost variation, such as country, trauma, subgroups and methods. ...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the costs of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) outpatient treatment for individuals with different CD4 cell counts in the Brazilian public health system, and to compare to costs in other national health systems. METHODS A retrospective survey was conducted in five public outpatient clinics of the Brazilian national HIV program in the city of São Paulo. Data on healthcare...

BACKGROUND The costs of performing research are an important input in value of information (VOI) analyses but are difficult to assess. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate the costs of research, serving two purposes: (1) estimating research costs for use in VOI analyses; and (2) developing a costing tool to support reviewers of grant proposals in assessing whether the proposed b...