The most popular way to improve consumers’ control over their electricity cost is by providing frequent and detailed feedback with “in-home displays” (IHD). In this study, we examined alternative ways to train experimental participants to control and optimize their use of electricity by “feedforward” training to map energy consuming behaviors to costs. The participants were trained in one of fo...

Financial protection is a core dimension of health system evaluation; therefore, several works on catastrophic expenditure (CHE) have been developed. There are, however, some gaps in the literature; hence, this work aims to look at CHE from different angle, analysing money spent by households.

The literature on store loyalty views a consumer as possessing store loyalty towards a particular store for her/his overall grocery shopping needs. In this study, we show that store loyalty is a category-specific trait of a consumer. In other words, while a given customer may be loyal to Store A in category 1, the same customer may be loyal to Store B in category 2. We call this store-category ...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES In 2008, India's Labour Ministry launched a hospital insurance scheme called Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) covering 'Below Poverty Line' (BPL) households. RSBY is implemented through insurance companies; premiums are subsidized by Union and States governments (75 : 25%). We examined RSBY's enrolment of BPL, costs vs. budgets and policy ramifications. METHODS Nu...

Domestic tourism has an important role in socio-economic development in several ways including creating jobs and improving income distribution. Although several researcheshave been done on tourism demand, a small proportion of them have been on domestic tourism. In this paper, the price and expenditure elasticities of the household demand for domestic tourism in Iran, focusing on the case of Ha...

Despite the increased coverage schemes of universal health insurance, unresolved challenges still remain in the current health care model. The expected epidemiological changes for chronic diseases in Latin American countries (LACs), will lead, in economic terms, to catastrophic expenditures for the health systems (more than 10% of the health budget) and for patients (more than 30% of the househ...

This paper has two objectives. First, we identify a problem with the ability of the discretecontinuous choice framework and conditional demand functions to fully describe consumer preferences in the presence of kinked budget constraints. Second, we propose and illustrate an alternative, preference-based method for estimating consumer responses to price changes under these conditions. This frame...

Poverty dominance analysis uses stochastic dominance to provide rankings of distributions in terms of poverty which are not sensitive to the choice of poverty line. This analysis is carried out for Ireland using Household Budget Survey data for 1987 and 1994 including tests for the statistical significance of the results. We find that for a wide range of absolute poverty lines, poverty in Irela...