OBJECTIVE Estimating the cost of chicken pox in a Colombian pediatric population. METHODOLOGY This was a retrospective case study which searched for all diagnosed chicken pox cases in the Napoleón Franco Pareja children's hospital (Cartagena, Colombia), during 2005-2008. The hospital's records/perspective was used. Cost related to health personnel, lab, diagnostic images and drugs were search...

The 2002 Trading Agent Competition (TAC) presented a challenging market game in the domain of travel shopping. One of the pivotal issues in this domain is uncertainty about hotel prices, which have a significant influence on the relative cost of alternative trip schedules. Thus, virtually all participants employ some method for predicting hotel prices. We survey approaches employed in the tourn...

The prognosis of leptospirosis depends of severity, early diagnosis and prompt intensive treatment. Only few studies estimate the costs in outbreak of leptospirosis. We aimed to assess the cost effectiveness of predicting severity in leptospirosis by retrospective cohort study of 100 consecutive hospitalized patients with leptospirosis (1976-2015). The prices of service, investigations, drugs a...

Hotel websi tes ha ve been m ore concerned abou t th e s tructure an d co ntent o f t he web site itsel f, ignoring the hot el websites ’ n ature for custo mer service. Thus, t his paper starts the basis of determining the function st ructures an d evaluation in dex systems of hot el websites, focusin g on discussing the hotel websites’ nature for customer service. This paper found out the cust...

In this paper, we empirically estimate the economic value of different hotel characteristics, especially the location-based and service-based characteristics given the associated local infrastructure. We build a random coefficients-based structural model taking into consideration the multiple-levels of consumer heterogeneity introduced by different travel contexts and different hotel characteri...

As part of the adoption of the 2005 Building Energy Efficiency Standards, the California Energy Commission adopted Joint Appendix IV, which contains standard U-factor, C-factor and Thermal Mass data for roof, wall and floor construction assemblies (see page IV-1 of the Joint Appendices at: http://www.energy.ca.aov/title24/2005standards/2004-10-06 400-03-001JAF.PDF). The data in Joint Appendix I...

Healthcare is a critical and costly industry. In the U.S. a significant component of healthcare costs are expenses generated in hospitals. This paper reports the results of analyzing 607 U.S. hospitals between 2006-2009 using a dynamic network slack-based Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Model. We find accounting for the dynamic and network structure of the hospital lowers efficiency estimates. ...