Consider a supplier selling to multiple retailers. Demand varies across periods, but the supplier’s capacity and wholesale price are fixed. If demand is high, the retailers’ needs exceed capacity, and the supplier must implement an allocation mechanism to dole out production. We examine how the choice of mechanism impacts retailer actions and supply chain performance. In particular, we analyze ...

This paper describes a decision support system (DSS) for use in allocating scarce resources associated with data quality efforts in the construction of a data warehouse. The DSS is populated with metadata from a data warehouse project, including tags that identify the quality at intersections of data field, data use, and data dimension. The resulting DSS can then be queried by novices on a data...

Introduction Many intravenous (IV) drugs are required for complex and polypathologic critically ill ICU patients management. ICU nurses are daily confronted with drugs preparation and administration (solvent type and volume, infusion rate). They also have to deal with drugs physiochemical incompatibilities (PCI), especially as various IV medications are delivered via a single catheter lumen. PC...

How do we decide which treatments should be offered by the National Health Service (NHS) when we cannot afford to fund them all? In the absence of a positive appraisal by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which mandates the provision of a treatment by the NHS, Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) are free to decide whether to provide a particular drug to some, or all, of t...

A number of identical objects is allocated to a set of privately informed agents. Agents have linear utility in money. The designer wants to assign objects to agents that possess specific traits, but the allocation can only be conditioned on the willingness to pay and on observable characteristics. I solve for the optimal mechanism. The choice between market or non-market mechanisms depends on ...

Resource allocation is a central part of the decision-making process in any health care system. Resources have always been finite, thus the ethical issues raised are not new. The debate is now more open, and there is greater public awareness of the issues. It is increasingly recognised that it is the technology which determines resources. The ethical issues involved are often conflicting and re...

Generic medicines are proven to be chemically and therapeutically equivalent to originator brands, but are in principle significantly cheaper because they are allowed to enter the market after the patent expiry of the originator brand. In this way, generic manufacturers do not incur R&D costs and are able to offer a significant price advantage to the originator brand. As a result, health insura...