We investigate in a duopoly setting the consequences of competitive mobile targeting, the practice of firms' setting prices based on consumers' real-time locations. A distinct market feature of mobile targeting is that a consumer could travel across different locations for an offer that minimizes his total cost of buying. This cherry-picking opportunity imposes constraints on firms to carefully...

In response to the Institute of Medicine's To Err Is Human report on the prevalence of medical errors, the Leapfrog Group, an organization that promotes hospital safety and quality, established a voluntary hospital survey assessing compliance with several safety standards. Using data from the period 2002-07, we conducted the first longitudinal assessment of how hospitals in specific cities and ...

Although there is no clear concept of volition or the will, we do have intuitive ideas that characterize the will, agency, and voluntary behavior. Here I review results from a number of strands of neuroscientific research that bear upon our intuitive notions of the will. These neuroscientific results provide some insight into the neural circuits mediating behaviors that we identify as related t...

The ability to perform an appropriate response in the presence of competing alternatives is a critical facet of human behavioral control. This is especially important if a response is prepared for execution but then has to be changed suddenly. A popular hypothesis of basal ganglia (BG) function suggests that its direct and indirect pathways could provide a neural mechanism to rapidly switch fro...

Activity of mecillinam against ESBL producers in vitro K. Thomas, M. J. Weinbren*, M. Warner, N. Woodford and D. Livermore Department of Microbiology, Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital, University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire, Stoney Stanton Road, Coventry CV1 4FH, UK; Antibiotic Resistance Monitoring and Reference Laboratory, Centre for Infections, Health Protection Agency, 61 Colin...

BACKGROUND Recruiting and retaining healthcare professionals (HCPs) for rural areas is challenging throughout the world. Although rural origin HCPs have been identified as being the most likely to work in rural areas, only a small number of rural-origin South African scholars are trained as HCPs each year and many do not return to work in rural areas. AIM The aim of this article was to presen...

Public Welfare of the problems of loneliness, vvt11 he believed, were taking toll of the nation's mental health. As a result of his address, a working group was set up under the chairmanship the Dowager Viscountess Falmouth to examine the causes of loneliness and to f1," recommendations on how individuals, voluntary organisations and public b?, could help solve the problem. Its report, first pu...

In recent years, the third or voluntary sector has become more important for ‘Europe’, as indicated by the 1997 Communication of the European Commission and various Declarations attached to the EU Treaties. These official statements not only suggest greater political interest in the third sector, they also seem to indicate that the European Union is taking a more active role in policy-making in...

Accreditation, as an approach to quality assurance and improvement, has a hundred-year history in the United States. Other countries have started to establish such systems in the past twenty years. Recently, we have witnessed numerous discussions and some practical steps toward establishing accreditation systems in Iran. A major practical challenge for such newer accreditation systems is that...