The vast majority of health plans in the United States require patients to meet cost-sharing requirements that are unrelated to income. Because this is highly inequitable, the authors propose a new system in which cost sharing is explicitly linked to income levels. This proposal differs from earlier proposals to relate cost sharing to income, which relied on the federal income tax system. In th...

Reference pricing in health insurance creates incentives for patients to select for nonemergency services providers that charge relatively low prices and still offer high quality of care. It changes the "choice architecture" by offering standard coverage if the patient chooses cost-effective providers but requires considerable consumer cost sharing if more expensive alternatives are selected. T...

Sharing economy is a transformative socio-economic phenomenon built around the idea of sharing underused resources and services, e.g. transportation and housing, thereby reducing costs and extracting value. Anticipating continued reduction in the cost of electricity storage, we look into the potential opportunity in electrical power system where consumers share storage with each other. We consi...

Resource selection games provide a model for a diverse collection of applications where a set of resources is matched to a set of demands. Examples include routing in traffic and in telecommunication networks, service of requests on multiple parallel queues, acquisition of services or goods with demanddependent prices, etc. In reality, demands are often submitted by selfish entities (players) a...

A review of continuous cost sharing solutions for the minimum cost spanning tree problem is proposed, with a particular focus on the folk and Kar solutions. We compare the characterizations proposed, helped by some new results on equivalencies between sets of properties.

A principal requires a manager for production. He can use an internal manager, or contracts with an external manger. In each case, the manager obtains experience benefits from production. When the principal uses an internal manager, both parties share cost information. When the principal contracts with an external manager, only the external manager acquires cost information. The internal manage...

OBJECTIVE To examine the effect of cost-sharing on the use of asthma medications in asthmatic children. According to asthma guidelines, children with asthma may require treatment with multiple medications, including controllers and relievers, to achieve optimal control. Although families may be enrolled in drug benefit plans, impediments to access persist in the form of cost-sharing. DESIGN P...

PURPOSE To assess the relationship between patient cost-sharing (e.g., copayments or coinsurance) and adherence and persistence to second-generation (atypical) antipsychotic (SGA) medications. DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY A retrospective, observational study of adults aged 18-64 years with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder (n = 7,910) who initiated SGA medications with employer-sponsored insurance ...

In this paper we analyze the (im)possibility of the exact distinguishability of orthogonal multipartite entangled states under restricted local operation and classical communication. Based on this local distinguishability analysis we propose a new scheme for quantum secret sharing (QSS). Our QSS scheme is quite general and cost efficient compared to other schemes. In our scheme no joint quantum...