The search for a ‘‘good’’ health system is constant. Even in countries where comprehensively organized national health systems have existed for over a century, the debate on how best to design them to ensure the effective financing, organization and provision of care is as lively and controversial as ever. During the last quarter of the 20th century many countries proposed a wide variety of swe...

Analysis of new data on the relationship between and premiums and coverage in the individual insurance market and health risk shows that actual premiums paid for individual insurance are much less than proportional to risk, and risk levels have a small effect on obtaining coverage. States limiting risk rating in individual insurance display lower premiums for high risks than other states, but s...

The Location Model with Risk Pooling (LRMP) seeks to locate distribution centers to minimize the sum of fixed location costs, transportation costs, and inventory costs. The risk-pooling effects of consolidating inventory sites are explicitly handled in the location model. In this paper, we present a stochastic version of the LMRP (SLMRP) that optimizes location, inventory, and allocation decisi...

Using an agent-based model to study risk-pooling in herder dyads using rules derived from Maasai osotua ("umbilical cord") relationships, Aktipis et al. (2011) found that osotua transfers led to more risk-pooling and better herd survival than both no transfers and transfers that occurred at frequencies tied to those seen in the osotua simulations. Here we expand this approach by comparing osotu...