Investments in Generating Capacities between a monopolist and two competing firms are compared where the firms invest in their capacity and fix the retail price while electricity demand is uncertain. A unit price auction determines the wholesale electricity price when the firms compete. They know the level of demand when they bid their capacities. Total capacities can be larger or smaller with ...

BACKGROUND Nepal was struck by devastating earthquakes in April-May 2015, followed by the India-Nepal border blockade later that year. METHODS We used the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics (UN Comtrade) database to analyse exports of various health commodities from India to Nepal from January 2011-September 2016. We used time-series regressions of trading volume vs. unit price to ask ...

background both rising healthcare costs and the global financial crisis have fueled a search for policy tools in order to avoid unsustainable future financing of essential health benefits. the scope of essential health benefits (the range of services covered) and depth of coverage (the proportion of costs of the covered benefits that is covered publicly) are corresponding variables in determini...

It is shown that when a special vertex stretching is applied to a graph, the cochordal cover number of the graph increases exactly by one, as it happens to its induced matching number and (Castelnuovo-Mumford) regularity. As a consequence, it is shown that the induced matching number and cochordal cover number of a special vertex stretching of a graph G are equal provided G is well-covered bipa...

Empirical studies on pharmaceutical pricing across countries have found evidence that prices vary according to per capita income. These studies are typically based on survey data from a subset of countries and cover only one year. In this paper, we study the international trade and price of insulin by using detailed trade data for 186 importing countries from 1995 to 2013. With almost 12,000 ob...

In this paper, we study the problem of online pricing for multi-type items. Given a seller with k types of items where the amount of each type is m, a sequence of users {u1, u2, ...} arrive one by one. Each user is single-minded, i.e., each user is only interested in a particular bundle of items. The seller must set the unit price and assign some amount of bundles to each user upon his/her arri...

We analyse the bidding for unit-price contracts, a very common procurement auction. With a unit price contract, not the provision of the good but the employment of several kinds of inputs is priced. The seller charges a unit price for the employed quantity of each input. To select one seller, a linear selection rule is used to rank submitted lists of unit prices. In this paper, we model heterog...

BACKGROUND Fourteen African countries are scaling up voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) for HIV prevention. Several devices that might offer alternatives to the three WHO-approved surgical VMMC procedures have been evaluated for use in adults. One such device is PrePex, which was prequalified by the WHO in May 2013. We utilized data from one of the PrePex field studies undertaken in Zim...

The world spends more than $500m on long-lasting Insecticidal nets (LLINs) every year; it is the largest single item in the global malaria control budget. A number of agencies have recently expressed interest in exploring how value-for-money in this market could be improved. The WHO Global Malaria Programme has therefore developed a system for reducing the cost-per-year of LLIN coverage. The pr...

Clinical archetypes provide a means for health professionals to design what should be communicated as part of an Electronic Health Record (EHR). An ever-growing number of archetype definitions follow this health information modelling approach, and this international archetype resource will eventually cover a large number of clinical concepts. On the other hand, clinical terminology systems that...