This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. The study examines the effect of health care reform in Bulgar...

People establish personal profiles to obtain online services. Profiles consisting of simple factual data provide an inadequate description of the individual, as they are often incomplete, mostly subjective and cannot reflect dynamic changes. This research explores the idea of “you are what you tag”, namely, an individual can be effectively profiled by the tags associated with his/her social med...

social apathy refers to avoidance from participation in social problems, discouragement and disinterest, civic disinvolvement and being inattentive to social, political, cultural subjects and social alienation happens when the individuals in relation to self, others and society at diverse forms feel powerless, abnormal, meaningless, socially isolated or hate the culture or themselves. the main ...

A brief introduction and overview of models of the formation of networks is given, with a focus is on two types of models. The …rst views networks as arising stochastically, and uses random graph theory; while the second views the links in a network as social or economic relationships that are chosen by the involved parties, and uses game theoretic reasoning.

Failure to express minority views may distort the behavior of company boards, committees, juries, and other decision-making bodies. Devising a new experimental procedure to measure such conformity in a judgment task, we compare the degree of conformity in groups with varying gender composition. Overall, our experiments offer little evidence that gender composition affects expression of minority...

BACKGROUND Differences in beliefs about Cannabis were compared between Canada, Sweden and Finland using nationally representative population surveys containing similar items. FINDINGS Compared to Finnish and Swedish respondents, Canadians were both more likely to have tried Cannabis and to view Cannabis as a less serious problem for society. CONCLUSIONS These findings emphasize the extent t...

A barrier to dissemination of research is that it depends on the end-user searching for or 'pulling' relevant knowledge from the literature base. Social media instead 'pushes' relevant knowledge straight to the end-user, via blogs and sites such as Facebook and Twitter. That social media is very effective at improving dissemination seems well accepted, but, remarkably, there is no evidence to s...

We consider the problem of how societies should be partitioned into classes if individuals express their views about who should be put with whom in the same class. A non-bossy social aggregator depends only on those cells of the individual partitions the society members classify themselves in. This fact allows us to concentrate on a corresponding “opinion graph” for each pro…le of views. By mea...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the impact of a mental health elective on pharmacy students' perceptions and stigmatizing views of mental illness. DESIGN An elective was designed that featured an advanced overview of psychopharmacology; student training in motivational interviewing; a presentation by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) local chapter; introduction to pharmacy collaborations w...