OBJECTIVE Limited consumer use of health care report cards may be due to the large amount of information presented in report cards, which can be difficult to understand. These limitations may be overcome with summary measures. Our objective was to evaluate consumer response to summary measures in the setting of nursing homes. DATA SOURCES/STUDY SETTING 2005-2010 nursing home Minimum Data Set ...

The likelihood of consumers to use commercial location-based services significantly depends on their perception of privacy protection by the service provider. In this paper we discuss existing privacy-enhancing architectures for LBS and argue that they are either not applicable or insufficient for services requiring continuous location queries. In order to offer such services providers often pr...

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of monopoly differential pricing in the important but largely neglected case where costs of service differ across consumer groups. Cost-based differential pricing is shown to increase total welfare and consumer welfare relative to uniform pricing for broad classes of demand functions, even though total output can still fall or the output allocation betwee...

A model of the Iranian wheat market is specified and fitted to data from 1981-2008. Severaldiagnostic tests were employed in the analysis to determine the specification of the model. Despitethe simplicity of the model and data problems, an examination of the econometric model leads toseveral conclusions with possible important policy implications for the wheat economy in Iran.The general result...

Governments can play great roles in their countries, regions, and cities; facilitating or leading the resolution of festering problems and opening new pathways for progress. Examples are more numerous than one might imagine and raise an important question: ‘how do governments become great?’. This paper identifies ten cases of great governments to answer four dimensions of this question: What ki...