As health reform drives the largest expansion of health insurance since Medicare and policy-makers grapple with how to slow the increase in health care spending, cost-sharing--the division of health care costs between patients and insurers--is considered an important tool. This synthesis reviews the evidence on cost-sharing. Key findings include: Research consistently shows demand for health ca...

This work studies the price of anarchy and the price of stability of cost-sharing methods in weighted congestion games. We require that our cost-sharing method and our set of cost functions satisfy certain natural conditions and we present general tight price of anarchy bounds, which are robust and apply to general equilibrium concepts. We then turn to the price of stability and prove an upper ...

service oriented enterprises (soes) are subject to constant change and variation. in this paper, the changes are considered from an economic perspective based on service culture notion. once a change is implemented, the costs of some member services may increase, whereas the costs of some other services may reduce. we construct a game theoretic model trying to capture the possible conflicting i...

We provide several new characterizations of well known cost sharing methods (CSMs) as maxima of linear (or convex) functionals. For the Shapley-Shubik method the characterization has an interpretation in terms of randomly ordered agents choosing their most preferred CSM, while the characterizations of the Aumann-Shapley and Serial methods have a very general character: any symmetric convex func...

AIM To understand stakeholders' views on data sharing in multicenter comparative effectiveness research studies and the value of privacy-protecting methods. MATERIALS & METHODS Semistructured interviews with five US stakeholder groups. RESULTS We completed 11 interviews, involving patients (n = 15), researchers (n = 10), Institutional Review Board and regulatory staff (n = 3), multicenter r...

With the transformation of economic form from industrial economy into economy based on knowledge and the transformation of enterprise’s nature from “economic man” into “social-ecological-economic man”, enterprise’s sustainable growth becomes a more complex task. The objectives of the company should be derived by balancing the conflicting claims of the various 'stakeholders' in the firm, and max...

Though BitTorrent is an extremely popular and cost efficient P2P file distribution system, it is not able to efficiently utilize all available bandwidth. BitTorrent employs fairness and anti-freeriding mechanisms that function optimally in scenarios when broadband connections are symmetric. However, the majority of peers in BitTorrent swarms have asymmetric broadband connections. This makes it ...