The US healthcare system is in crisis, with documented gaps in quality, safety, access, and affordability. Many believe the solution to unsustainable cost increases is increased patient cost-sharing. From an overall cost perspective, reduced consumption of certain essential services may yield short-term savings but lead to worse health and markedly higher costs down the road--in complications, ...

Using data from 49 states and Washington, D.C., we analyzed changes in cost-sharing under health plans offered to individuals and families through state and federal exchanges from 2014 to 2015. We examined eight vehicles for cost-sharing, including deductibles, copayments, coinsurance, and out-of-pocket limits, and compared findings with cost-sharing under employer-based insurance. We found cos...

This research reviews and tests two contradicting notions in cost stickiness literature by empirical recognition of the consequences of cost stickiness. Cost stickiness is consistent with both rational resource planning and opportunistic incentives of manager to increase personal benefits arising from status and power. Although both mechanisms involve asymmetric retention of slack, some of the ...

Agents who invest periodically in two complementary projects i and j try to minimize shortfall due to misperceptions concerning the interaction α between i and j. Previous studies have analytically solved such problems but they have been limited to two agents making one decision. We set out with the hypothesis of a large number of deciders sharing information with their nearest neighbors in ord...

Scholars have studied the critical factors that affect the intentions behind knowledge sharing. However, an individual who is satisfied with those factors doesn’t necessarily do so. When he/she considers whether to share or not, he/she usually calculates the losses and gains based on the level of perceived value of knowledge. With inclusion of the perceived value of knowledge, it has been found...

With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), access to insurance and coverage of preventive care services has been expanded. By removing the barrier of shared costs for preventive care, it is expected that an increase in utilization of preventive care services will reduce the cost of chronic diseases. Early detection and treatment is anticipated to be less costly than treatment at ...

Many real-world systems involve distributed and selfish agents who optimize their own objective function. In these systems, we need to design efficient mechanisms so that system-wide objective is optimized despite agents acting in their own self interest. In this thesis, we develop approximation algorithms and decentralized mechanisms for various combinatorial optimization problems in such syst...