This article summarizes an evaluation of the Maximum Allowable Cost (MAC)-Estimated Acquisition Cost (EAC) program, the Federal Government's cost-containment program for prescription drugs. The MAC-EAC regulations which became effective on August 26, 1976, have four major components: (1) Maximum Allowable Cost reimbursement limits for selected multisource or generically available drugs; (2) Est...

Combinatorial auctions are desirable as they enable bidders to express the synergistic values of a group of assets and thus may lead to better allocations. Compared to other types of auctions, they keep bidders from being exposed to risks (of receiving only parts of combinations that would be valuable to them) or from being overly cautious (in order to minimize such risks). However, computation...

Purpose Chiropractic care is covered under Medicare, but the scope of services is restricted. The Demonstration of Expanded Coverage of Chiropractic Services under Medicare projected that expanded services would cost Medicare up to $1.15 billion annually. The potential expansion of chiropractic services under Medicare remains controversial. Advocates for expansion cite clinical effectiveness an...

This is the first part of our four-part series of papers which proposes a general framework for error analysis in measurement-based geographical information systems (MBGIS). The purpose of the series is to investigate the fundamental issues involved in measurement error (ME) analysis in MBGIS, and to provide a unified and effective treatment of errors and their propagations in various interrela...

The stability and dispersion performance of the recently developed Battle–Lemarie multiresolution time-domain schemes is investigated for different stencil sizes. The contribution of wavelets is enhanced and analytical expressions for the maximum allowable time step are derived. It is observed that larger stencils decrease the numerical phase error, making it significantly lower than finite-dif...

We consider a general class of nonlinear reduced-order observers and show that the global asymptotic convergence of the observation error in the absence of network-induced constraints is maintained for the emulated observer semiglobally and practically (with respect to the maximum allowable transmission interval) when system measurements are sent through a communication channel. Networks govern...

Security of quantum key exchange depends on successfully detecting the presence of an eavesdropper. In most cases this is done by comparing the errors introduced by an eavesdropper with the channel error rate. In other words, the communicating parties must tolerate some errors without losing a significant amount of key information. In this paper, we characterize the effects of amplitude damping...

This paper dealswith the distributed discrete-time coordinated tracking problem formulti-agent systems with Markovian switching topologies. In the multi-agent team, only some of the agents can obtain the leader’s state directly. The leader’s state considered is time varying. We present necessary and sufficient conditions for boundedness of the tracking error system and show the ultimate bound o...