BACKGROUND Little is known about the effect of different forms of patient cost-sharing on the utilization of clinical preventive services or if the effect varies by type of health plan. OBJECTIVES To assess empirically the relationships between the utilization of recommended preventive services and different forms of patient cost-sharing and how the effect is mediated by type of preventive se...

INTRODUCTION Under the Massachusetts health reform, low income residents (those with incomes below 150 % of the Federal Poverty Level [FPL]) were eligible for Medicaid and health insurance exchange-based plans with minimal cost-sharing and no premiums. Those with slightly higher incomes (150 %-300 % FPL) were eligible for exchange-based plans that required cost-sharing and premium payments. M...

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 ...

This paper focuses on the design of cost sharing rules to optimize the efficiency of the resulting equilibria in cost sharing games with concave cost functions. Our analysis focuses on two well-studied measures of efficiency, termed the price of anarchy and price of stability, which provide worstcase guarantees on the performance of the (worst or best) equilibria. Our first result characterizes...

Roughgarden and Sundararajan recently introduced an alternative measure of efficiency for cost sharing mechanisms. We study cost sharing methods for combinatorial optimization problems using this novel efficiency measure, with a particular focus on scheduling problems. While we prove a lower bound of Ω(logn) for a very general class of problems, we give a best possible cost sharing method for m...

during the last two decades, financial institutions worldwide have witnessed a lot of stress in managing their margins in wake of the new risks, challenges and increase in the competition posed to them by the factors of liberalization and deregulation. the key to create value and achieve competitive edge lies in the better operational efficiency and productivity of these institutions under such...

We consider a new class of cooperative cost sharing games, associated with the economic lot-sizing problem with remanufacturing options (ELSR). As a preliminary step, we investigate the relative strength and integrality gaps of various mathematical optimization formulations of ELSR. Using insights from these results, we study the core of the associated cost sharing game. We show that the cost s...

We identify how to share costs locally in weighted congestion games with polynomial cost functions to minimize the worst-case price of anarchy (POA). First, we prove that among all cost-sharing methods that guarantee the existence of pure Nash equilibria, the Shapley value minimizes the worst-case POA. Second, if the guaranteed existence condition is dropped, then the proportional cost-sharing ...

Daily-deal business model is a type of performance-based advertising wherein a publisher provides advertising space to a merchant who pays a proportion of revenue generated on the website to the publisher. We develop a two-period model to capture the strategic interaction between a publisher and a merchant where consumers are heterogeneous in their willingness to pay for quality and awareness a...