Purchasers and health plans are reemphasizing deductibles, coinsurance, and other consumer incentives in response to renewed inflation and the continuing backlash against managed care. This paper explores the partial convergence of cost sharing and benefit design for preferred provider and health maintenance products and highlights experiments that foster price-conscious choice among benefit co...

We propose a new topic model for tracking timevarying consumer purchase behavior, in which consumer interests and item trends change over time. The proposed model can adaptively track changes in interests and trends based on current purchase logs and previously estimated interests and trends. The online nature of the proposed method means we do not need to store past data for current inferences...

Earthquake early warning (EEW) can reduce harm to people and infrastructure from earthquakes and tsunamis, but it has not been implemented in most high earthquake-risk regions because of prohibitive cost. Common consumer devices such as smartphones contain low-cost versions of the sensors used in EEW. Although less accurate than scientific-grade instruments, these sensors are globally ubiquitou...

Strategic delegation to an independent regulator with a pure consumer standard improves dynamic regulation by mitigating ratchet effects associated with short term contracting. A consumer standard alleviates the regulator’s myopic temptation to raise output after learning the firm is inefficient. Anticipating this tougher regulatory behavior, efficient firms find cost exaggeration less attracti...

AbstrAct: In market-like grids, applying an economical method for providing fault-tolerant job scheduling is necessary. Since we have to pay cost for job execution in economic grids, consumers tend to execute their jobs on a grid with minimum cost and acceptable completion time. To do this, many approaches have been proposed, but they unilaterally consider either time/cost or consumer/provider ...

The smart meter (SM) privacy problem is addressed together with the cost of energy for the consumer. It is assumed that a storage device, e.g., an electrical battery, is available to the consumer, which can be utilized both to achieve privacy and to reduce the energy cost by modifying the energy consumption profile. Privacy is measured via the squared-error distortion between the SM readings, w...

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic model of consumer demand for deposits, in which banks provide di¤erentiated products, and product characteristics evolve over time. Consumers choose their banks based on the utility received from using their services, and incur a …xed cost when they switch banks. Consequently, consumer choices include which bank to use and when to switch. Utilizing th...

The use of cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the net welfare payoffs from water projects has now been an established practice for many years. One of the interesting aspects of such cost-benefit studies is that water projects involve an uncertain flow of costs and benefits, arising from the stochastic nature of streamflows. Hence a basic problem for the cost-benefit analyst is that of incorporat...

pond aquaculture is the most significant fish production method in central europe, approximately 70% of the total fish production is originated from traditional fish ponds in this region, which is a resource-saving, ecologically sustainable production method. however, the growth of this sector is not expected because of the low production capacity of valuable fish species and the relatively hig...

This paper empirically evaluates the effect of consumer switching costs on market power of cable television providers. To do so I propose an algorithm to estimate supply side parameters when the demand side is represented by consumers with persistent heterogeneity in tastes and state-dependent utility. Under such conditions, regardless of whether consumers are forward-looking or behave in a myo...