BACKGROUND Markets for physician services are becoming increasingly concentrated, with many areas being dominated by a few groups. Antitrust authorities are concerned that increasing concentration will lead to inappropriately high payments for physician services from private insurers. The authors examined the association between market concentration and private insurer payments for anesthesia s...

To explore the extent and nature of disability among parents in families receiving payments under the State program for aid to needy children and to determine what can and should be done to restore to self-maintenance the largest possible number, California developed the project described in the folbowing pages. The philosophy on which the project was based, its methods cf operating, and its va...

Private information induces individuals to self-select as subjects into clinical research trials, and it induces researchers to select which trials they conduct. The authors show that selection can induce ex ante therapeutic misconception and ex post disappointment among research subjects, and it undermines the rationale of collective equipoise as an ethical basis for clinical trials. Selection...

STUDY DESIGN Retrospective cohort. OBJECTIVE To explore the ability to capture low back pain (LBP) recurrence using wage-replacement (WR) data. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA LBP can be a recurrent, fluctuating, and disabling condition. Because of its largely nonspecific and subjective nature, the condition poses challenges for research and clinical management, as speaking directly with the aff...

The problem of outsourcing computations in distributed environments has several security challenges. These challenges stem from the lack of trust between the outsourcer and a worker. Previous work has extensively considered one side of the trust problem the efficient verification of the completion of the outsourced computation. We believe this to be the first work that simultaneously addresses ...

Interfirm late payments are a hot issue in the EU, as witnessed by the 1998 bills passed in Italy and in the U.K. and by the soon to be approved EU Directive. Comprehensive information, especially on the effective own cost, is however almost absent in the literature. The paper provides the first detailed evidence of the trade debt own cost for the Italian manufacturing firms, arising out of dis...

BACKGROUND Informal payments for health care, which are common in many countries, can have negative effects on health care access, equity and health status as they lead people to forgo or delay seeking care, or to sell assets to pay for care. Many countries are putting reforms in place with the aim of reducing informal payments. In order to be successful, such policies should be informed by the...

Informal payments for health care are a growing concern in Albania and other transitional economy countries. Recent international studies have shown that informal payments can have negative effects on health care access, equity and health status by causing people to forgo or delay seeking care, or sell assets to pay for care. Many countries are putting in place reforms meant to reduce informal ...

This paper explores the economic models associated to different mobile-payment systems. We first present the existing experiences and exhibit their distinctive components: new technological possibilities to create direct links between users, new potential intermediaries, new economic models to coordinate the commercial interests of financial and non-financial operators. After a short review of ...