For over four decades, the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) has been operated by nonprofit organizations. Research has demonstrated that nonprofit PACE provides quality, cost-effective community-based care to older adults who would otherwise require a nursing home level of care. Recently, the U.S. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services has authorized for-pr...

BACKGROUND Governments use different approaches to ensure that private for-profit healthcare services meet certain quality standards. Such government guidance, referred to as public stewardship, encompasses government policies, regulatory mechanisms, and implementation strategies for ensuring accountability in the delivery of services. However, the effectiveness of these strategies in low- and ...

Resource allocation for simulation applications in cloud simulation environment brings new challenges to infrastructure service providers. In order to meet the constraint of SLA and to allocate the available virtualized resources optimally, this paper first presents autonomic resource management architecture, and then proposes a resource allocation algorithm for infrastructure service providers...

In this article, we present a model to evaluate both marketable quality and profitability considering service providers and consumers relation. We use the real values of some leading Japanese manufacturing corporations as virtual data of service providers to our proposed model to analyze its accuracy. By analysis, we found that the theoretical and real standard values of the marketable quality ...

Internet service providers (ISPs) depend on one another to provide global network services. However, the profit-seeking nature of the ISPs leads to selfish behaviors that result in inefficiencies and disputes in the network. This concern is at the heart of the “network neutrality” debate, which also asks for an appropriate compensation structure that satisfies all types of ISPs. Our previous wo...

Cloud computing has recently emerged as one of the buzzwords in the IT industry. Several IT vendors are promising to offer computation, data/storage, and application hosting services, offering Service-Level Agreements (SLA) backed performance and uptime promises for their services. While these „clouds‟ are the natural evolution of traditional clusters and data centers, they are distinguished by...

There has been a huge expansion in the private health-care sector over the past two decades, particularly in South Asia, resulting in over 80% of patients seeking care from private health providers. Despite concerns about the quality and equity of private sector service provision, most government public health bodies recognize that the private sector reaches individuals that public institutions...

This paper investigates the role of discount travel agencies such as Priceline and Hotwire in the market segmentation of the hotel and airline industries. These agencies conceal important characteristics of the offered services, such as hotel locations or flight schedules. We explicitly model this opaque feature and show that it enables service providers to price discriminate between those cust...