and facilities. A book whichl describes clinical chemistry teclhniques should pro-vi(le sufficient discussion of theory and principles to give the readcer enoughi back-grounld wisely to select and evaluate metlhods and to remain current in tlle field. NILucII of Tcchniquics of Clinical Chlmistry lhas the format of a recipe book. No explaniation of the autlhors rationale for choice of methods is...

Improved consumer addressability in electronic markets allows vendors to send focused promotional messages to specific customers, facilitating a targeted advertising approach that we call “narrowcasting”. We characterize a rational consumer’s market participation decision and identify a narrowcasting firm’s optimal targeting decision when buyers face nontrivial search costs. In the special case...

The Shannon interval entropy function as a useful dynamic measure of uncertainty for two sided truncated random variables has been proposed in the literature of reliability. In this paper, we show that interval entropy can uniquely determine the distribution function. Furthermore, we propose a measure of discrepancy between two lifetime distributions at the interval of time in base of Kullback-...

We consider a model of strategic information transmission in which a firm can communicate its quality to consumers through informative advertising. Our main result is that informative advertising claims can be credible even when the firm faces consumers with ex ante homogeneous preferences. A fundamental assumption of our model is that whether the product is available for purchase is independen...

Noncompliance with study medications is an important issue in the design of endpoint clinical trials. Including noncompliant patient data in an intention-to-treat analysis could seriously decrease study power. Standard methods for calculating sample size account for noncompliance, but all assume that noncompliance is noninformative, i.e., that the risk of discontinuation is independent of the r...

We develop an informational model of judicial decision-making in which deference to precedent is useful to policy-oriented appellate judges because it improves the accuracy with which they can communicate legal rules to trial judges. Our simple model yields new implications and hypotheses regarding conditions under which judges will maintain or break with precedent, the constraining effect that...

Recent years have seen much interest in the study of systems characterized by multiple interacting components. A class of statistical models called graphical models, in which graphs are used to represent probabilistic relationships between variables, provides a framework for formal inference regarding such systems. In many settings, the object of inference is the network structure itself. This ...

This paper introduces a model to analyze the role of the cost of information dissemination in large markets where firms have varying degrees of intrinsic efficiency reflected in their marginal costs. Firms enter a market and discover how efficient they are. Those firms with high enough efficiency stay, others exit. Remaining firms then compete to attract consumers by disseminating information a...

Background: Indirect genetic diagnosis using polymorphic DNA markers can detect carriers of hemophilia A. This technique is preferable in developing countries because of its simplicity and cost effectiveness compared to direct mutation analysis. In the present study, we examined usefulness of intragenic marker BclI restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) at intron 18, for carrier detect...