Little information exists on the cost structure of routine infant immunization services in low- and middle-income settings. Using a unique dataset of routine infant immunization costs from six countries, we estimated how costs were distributed across budget categories and programmatic activities, and investigated how the cost structure of immunization sites varied by country and site characteri...

The vast majority of health plans in the United States require patients to meet cost-sharing requirements that are unrelated to income. Because this is highly inequitable, the authors propose a new system in which cost sharing is explicitly linked to income levels. This proposal differs from earlier proposals to relate cost sharing to income, which relied on the federal income tax system. In th...

Reference pricing in health insurance creates incentives for patients to select for nonemergency services providers that charge relatively low prices and still offer high quality of care. It changes the "choice architecture" by offering standard coverage if the patient chooses cost-effective providers but requires considerable consumer cost sharing if more expensive alternatives are selected. T...

A review of continuous cost sharing solutions for the minimum cost spanning tree problem is proposed, with a particular focus on the folk and Kar solutions. We compare the characterizations proposed, helped by some new results on equivalencies between sets of properties.

A principal requires a manager for production. He can use an internal manager, or contracts with an external manger. In each case, the manager obtains experience benefits from production. When the principal uses an internal manager, both parties share cost information. When the principal contracts with an external manager, only the external manager acquires cost information. The internal manage...

In this paper we analyze the (im)possibility of the exact distinguishability of orthogonal multipartite entangled states under restricted local operation and classical communication. Based on this local distinguishability analysis we propose a new scheme for quantum secret sharing (QSS). Our QSS scheme is quite general and cost efficient compared to other schemes. In our scheme no joint quantum...

BACKGROUND To address the impact that out-of-pocket prices may have on medication use, it is vital to understand how the demand for medications may be affected when patients are faced with changes in the price to acquire treatment and how price responsiveness differs across medication classes.  OBJECTIVE To examine the impact of cost-sharing changes on the demand for 8 classes of prescription...

Economic guidance can be of substantial value to policymakers in principle. However, guidance delivered in the form of complex formulae and detailed mathematical characterizations of optimal policies may not be fully appreciated or warmly embraced. Consequently, insights like those of William Rogerson (2003) are particularly important. Rogerson demonstrates in a plausible setting that a pair of...

We study the cost sharing problem for cooperative games in situations where the cost function C is not available via oracle queries, but must instead be learned from samples drawn from a distribution, represented as tuples (S,C(S)), for different subsets S of players. We formalize this approach, which we call STATISTICAL COST SHARING, and consider the computation of the core and the Shapley val...

A new serial cost sharing rule, called mixed serial cost sharing, is defined on the class of cost functions which equal a sum of an increasing convex and increasing concave function. This rule is based on a particular decomposition principle known as complementary-slackness decomposition and it coincides with the original serial rule of Moulin and Shenker (1992) [Moulin, H., Shenker, S., 1992. ...