Massive structural change is occurring in health care provision in the United States, significantly reducing the number of not-for-profit suppliers. This trend is fueled in part by government policies. To evaluate these policies one must know about the motives of not-for-profit health care providers. The theory of not-for-profit hospitals suggests buyers may prefer dealing with sellers who are ...

INTRODUCTION Residents of low-income communities often purchase sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) at small, neighborhood "corner" stores. Lowering water prices and increasing SSB prices are potentially complementary public health strategies to promote more healthful beverage purchasing patterns in these stores. Sustainability, however, depends on financial feasibility. Because in-store pricing e...

In many production firms it is common practice to financially reward managers for firm performance improvement. The use of financial incentives for improvement has been widely researched in several analytical and empirical studies. Literature has also addressed the strategic effect of incentives, in particular what the effect of certain incentive structures would be on the behavior of a firm's ...

This paper presents results from a survey aimed at analyzing farmers willingness to invest in agroforestry near the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in the state of Campeche in Southeastern Mexico. One hundred seventy-five farmers were interviewed from January through March of 1998. The survey included questions pertaining to levels of human capital investment made by individual farmers. The objectiv...

This paper analyses how different management schemes influence the exploitation and economics of a wildlife population--the moose (Alces alces)--that is both a value (harvesting income) and a pest (forestry damage). Two regimes are explored; the unified management scheme where the wildlife manager aims to find harvesting quotas that maximise the overall benefit of the moose population, and the ...

It is well documented that losses are less persistent than profits and that stock prices anticipate the lower persistence of losses. Yet the underlying explanation for these results is unclear. One explanation lies in the abandonment option, whereby firms with losses are more likely to curtail operations (e.g., Hayn 1995). Another explanation involves timely loss recognition stemming from conse...

While profit maximization is one important objective in this decision domain, other objectives are important as well. This paper discusses multiple criteria and their respective objectives in construction bidding, and presents a bidding framework which recommends a pairwise comparison procedure to generate criterion weights and a linear transformation procedure to calculate relative scores for ...

In the Attractive Traveling Salesman Problem the vertex set is partitioned into facility vertices and customer vertices. A maximum profit tour must be constructed on a subset of the facility vertices. Profit is computed through an attraction function: every visited facility vertex attracts a portion of the profit from the customer vertices based on the distance between the facility and customer...

This paper examines the amount of grandfathering needed for an emissions trading scheme (ETS) to have a neutral impact on firm profits. We provide a simple formula to calculate profit-neutral grandfathering in an asymmetric Cournot model with a general demand function. Using this formula, we obtain estimates of profit-neutral grandfathering for the electricity, cement, newsprint and steel indus...