Estimating the costs of non-fatal consumer product injuries in the United States

This paper describes a data-driven injury cost model (ICM) developed to estimate the costs associated with non-fatal consumer product injuries. The modeling effort combines information by diagnosis from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) and 17 other large data sets. The ICM contains four aggregated cost components: (1) medical costs, (2) work losses, (3) quality of life and pain and suffering costs, and (4) product liability insurance administration and litigation costs. The ICM estimates societal costs, which are broader than costs to any individual group, such as victims, insurers, or product manufacturers. Costs associated with consumer product injuries are estimated to be approximately $500 billion in 1996, accounting for nearly one-third of the total annual injury costs. We examine injury costs in several ways, including by major product category, by sex and age of victims, by body part injured, by injury diagnosis, and by highest level of medical treatment received. We also rank the 10 leading consumer products that account for injury costs overall and within different age groups. Products such as stairs and floors are among the top 10 for all age groups. Other products, however, are more closely tied to injuries at particular stages of life (e.g., infant/toddler, child, young adult, elderly). These cost estimates are useful in assessing which products and types of injuries impose the greatest costs on society and for identifying areas for focused injury prevention efforts.     

A hybrid clustering and classification approach for predicting crash injury severity on rural roads

As a threat for transportation system, traffic crashes have a wide range of social consequences for governments. Traffic crashes are increasing in developing countries and Iran as a developing country is not immune from this risk. There are several researches in the literature to predict traffic crash severity based on artificial neural networks (ANNs), support vector machines and decision trees. This paper attempts to investigate the crash injury severity of rural roads by using a hybrid clustering and classification approach to compare the performance of classification algorithms before and after applying the clustering. In this paper, a novel rule-based genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed to predict crash injury severity, which is evaluated by performance criteria in comparison with classification algorithms like ANN. The results obtained from analysis of 13,673 crashes (5600 property damage, 778 fatal crashes, 4690 slight injuries and 2605 severe injuries) on rural roads in Tehran Province of Iran during 2011–2013 revealed that the proposed GA method outperforms other classification algorithms based on classification metrics like precision (86%), recall (88%) and accuracy (87%). Moreover, the proposed GA method has the highest level of interpretation, is easy to understand and provides feedback to analysts.     

Consumer product-related injury in Australia: direct hospital and medical costs

Abstract

This research was carried out on behalf of the Australia National Audit Office to obtain an estimate of the direct hospital and medical treatment costs of consumer product-related injury in Australia.

Overall, it is estimated that there are almost 5.5 million cases of consumer product-related injury seeking medical attention annually with over 238,000 of these requiring hospitalisation and over 4,000 resulting in death. It is estimated that almost half a million of these cases were related to product failure or malfunction with 18,000 of these requiring hospitalisation and 200 resulting in death.

The direct hospital and medical treatment of all non-intentional consumer product-related injury in Australia is estimated to cost at least $A i 355 million annual ly. This includes treatment costs of injury associated with product failure or malfunction of at least $A95 million.

The Commonwealth government of Australia bears most of this burden through its support of State hospital systems and the universal health insurance scheme Medicare. The report concludes that the high cost of medical and hospital treatment of consumer product-related injury indicates the need to undertake a coordinated program aimed at reducing the frequency and severity of such injury and makes several recommendations particularly in relation to data collection and the dissemination of information in the area of consumer product safety in Australia.     

New directions in injury surveillance: Development of a model for continuous monitoring of direct medical costs

Information on the costs of injuries is an important additional instrument in setting priorities for injury prevention. The importance of this instrument is increasingly being recognized by health policy makers. The objective of this study was to develop a model which continuously monitors the direct medical costs of injuries in The Netherlands. This model should provide information on the direct medical costs of injuries at any time and for any selection of injury categories. It is an incidence-based model according to the ‘bottom up’ principle. Homogeneous patient groupings with respect to health care use are defined. The groupings are based on existing classifications from the literature and the experience of medical experts, and are defined by means of seven criteria: nature of care provided, body region of the injury, type of injury, severity of injury, age, complications, and sex of the patient. Several cost elements are distinguished (e.g., general practitioner help, hospital care, nursing home care). For each cost element, relevant patient groupings are determined. The new Dutch Injury Surveillance System (LIS) for injuries treated in an A&E department is an important source for incidence data. This article presents the design of the model as adopted by the Working Group on the Costs of Injuries of the European Consumer Safety Association (ECOSA).     

Hospitalisation costs and duration of elderly motorcyclists’ non-fatality crashes in Taiwan

This paper investigates the relationship between medical treatment costs and the length of hospital stays resulting from motorcycle crashes involving the elderly. The World Health Organization defines ‘elderly’ as people more than 65 years old. The sample for this study consisted of data for the year 2007 collected by the Bureau of National Health Insurance, Taiwan. We develop models for predicting medical costs and the length of hospital stays based on diagnosis, hospital and user types. The seemingly unrelated regression equation (SURE) model was applied first to investigate the relationship between medical costs and the length of hospital stays. The SURE model shows that the type of injury (e.g. head injury) is statistically significant and has positive effects on medical costs for motorcycle crashes involving the elderly in Taiwan. Due to the statistical insignificance of the dependency between medical costs and length of hospital stays, two separate simple linear regression models were subsequently estimated. For motorcycle crashes, patients over 80 years old had the highest medical costs. The findings reinforce the need for transportation authorities to focus on preventing certain types of injuries that are particularly serious and costly for the elderly in Taiwan.     

Customs-related Transaction Costs,Firm Size and International Trade Intensity

customs are generally perceived as a time-consuming impediment to international trade. However, few studies have empirically examined the determinants and the impact of this type of government-imposed transaction costs. This paper analyses the role of firm size as a determinant of customs-related transaction costs, as well as the effect of firm size on the relationship between these costs and the international trade intensity of firms. The results of this study indicate that customs-related transaction costs repress international trade activities of firms, even at low levels of these costs. The paper identifies transaction-related economies of scale, simplified customs procedures and advanced information and communication technology as main determinants of customs-related transaction costs. It is shown that when these factors are taken into account, firm size has no effect on customs-related transaction costs. Policy implications are considered for firm strategy and public policy.     

Drivers of the cost of capital: The joint role of non-financial metrics

Recent marketing studies suggest that non-financial metrics, such as customer satisfaction and brand value, help explain the variation in the cost of equity and the cost of debt. These studies typically focus on only one non-financial metric and one component of capital cost. In this study, we broaden the understanding of the relevance of non-financial metrics to the cost of capital. We investigate the joint role of customer satisfaction, brand value, and corporate reputation for stock market beta and credit ratings, which reflect variation in equity and debt risk premiums across firms. In addition to the joint direct influence of these metrics on capital cost, we also study their interaction effects. We develop a conceptual model to explain the effects on capital costs and test the resulting hypotheses in a broad sample of 344 firms from diverse industries using data from the 1991–2006 period.     

The right metrics for marketing-mix decisions

This study addresses the following question: For a given managerial, firm, and industry setting, which individual metrics are effective for making marketing-mix decisions that improve perceived performance outcomes? We articulate the key managerial takeaways based on testing a multi-stage behavioral framework that links decision context, metrics selection, and performance outcomes. Our statistical model adjusts for potential endogeneity bias in estimating metric effectiveness due to selection effects and differs from past literature in that managers can strategically choose metrics based on their ex-ante expected effectiveness. The key findings of our analysis of 439 managers making 1287 decisions are that customer-mindset marketing metrics such as awareness and willingness to recommend are the most effective metrics for managers to employ while financial metrics such as target volume and net present value are the least effective. However, relative to financial metrics, managers are more uncertain about the ex-ante effectiveness of customer-mindset marketing metrics, which attenuates their use. A second study on 142 managers helps provide detailed underlying rationale for these key results. The implications of metric effectiveness for dashboards and automated decision systems based on machine learning systems are discussed.     

The Implications of the Home Bias in Equity Portfolios

Although the diversification benefits of international investment are well documented, many large equity portfolios remain heavily concentrated in their domestic stock market. The reason for this is sometimes given as a desire to hedge domestic inflation by holding domestic equities. The evidence is, however, that equities do not hedge inflation in this way for the types of investment horizon relevant to most portfolios. An alternative explanation is that there are costs, such as taxes, which prevent investors taking full advantage of international diversification. The magnitude of these costs necessary to explain the level of "home bias" is above the level of observable costs, such as withholding taxes. The implications of these results are that international capital markets are segmented not only by costs and restrictions, but also by other informational imperfections. They also imply that international corporate investment and financing decisions depend on the location of the investing company.     

再论“国际贸易的全成本”

从内涵看,"国际贸易的全成本"是某种物品的产权在跨国转移中,发生于国际贸易过程,进而涉及生产和消费、经济和生态、今人和后人,使用一切资源要素的代价总和;从外延看,"国际贸易的全成本"是以国际贸易中的生产成本、交易成本、环境成本和代际成本等为子系统的动态开放系统。其中,使用劳动、资本、土地等传统要素的机会成本为生产成本;使用制度要素的机会成本为交易成本;使用生态环境要素的机会成本为环境成本;耗费"可持续性"要素的机会成本为代际成本。贸易理论和现实的发展表明,国际贸易的动因是比较优势,比较优势的本质是比较成本优势,它反映了不同国家同种产品的机会成本差异。比较优势理论的"硬核"在于"比较之比较",其"外围保护带"则表现为对资源要素和成本外延的界定。为化解比较优势理论面临的种种冲突和困境,有必要拓展它的成本观,使其成为进步而非退化的研究纲领。因此,使用或耗费广义要素而形成的"全成本"是一国参与国际分工和贸易的比较优势的基础。     

Improved portable circular power saw safety performance through riving knife design modification

Abstract

This study on portable circular power saw safety focused on body contact with an under-work protruding blade. Three guard were evaluated relative to injury severity, including two innovations and an unguarded saw with below-work configuration typically identical to one with a riving knife. Innovations consisted of riving knife modifications, including an ‘extended’ riving knife or ‘riving ring’, and a riving ring plus outrigger. Injury severity was simulated using human finger prostheses as test specimens.

Thirty single-specimen trials were conducted per experimental setup. For each trial the experimenter operated the saw, simulating a woodworking cut. An assistant fed specimens into the blade contact zone. After 90 trials, two medical raters ranked simulated severities using a five-level classification. Severities for riving ring plus outrigger proved significantly less than for a riving ring alone, which in turn caused significantly less severe injuries than a riving knife.

On the basis of severity level frequencies, it was concluded that the riving ring plus outrigger, which produced no injuries, represents the safest alternative tested. A riving ring without outrigger, which produced a significant number of minor injuries, represents minimally acceptable guarding.

The conventional riving knife, which generated significantly more finger-contact mutilation incidents than the other designs, was the most dangerous configuration. The research results do not detract from the significant benefits of riving knives relative to kickback prevention. However, both modified riving knife designs also possess identical kickback-prevention features.     

Social Media's Impact on the Consumer Mindset: When to Use Which Sentiment Extraction Tool?

User-generated content provides many opportunities for managers and researchers, but insights are hindered by a lack of consensus on how to extract brand-relevant valence and volume. Marketing studies use different sentiment extraction tools (SETs) based on social media volume, top-down language dictionaries and bottom-up machine learning approaches. This paper compares the explanatory and forecasting power of these methods over several years for daily customer mindset metrics obtained from survey data. For 48 brands in diverse industries, vector autoregressive models show that volume metrics explain the most for brand awareness and purchase intent, while bottom-up SETs excel at explaining brand impression, satisfaction and recommendation. Systematic differences yield contingent advice: the most nuanced version of bottom-up SETs (SVM with Neutral) performs best for the search goods for all consumer mind-set metrics but Purchase Intent for which Volume metrics work best. For experienced goods, Volume outperforms SVM with neutral. As processing time and costs increase when moving from volume to top-down to bottom-up sentiment extraction tools, these conditional findings can help managers decide when more detailed analytics are worth the investment.     

Healthcare Ethics: A Patient-Centered Decision Model

A common financial model used in business decisions is the cost/benefit comparison. The costs of a proposed project are compared with the benefits, and if the benefits outweigh the costs, the project is accepted; if the costs exceed the benefits, the project is rejected. This model is applicable when tangible costs and benefits can be reasonably measured in monetary units. However, it is difficult to consider intangible factors in this model because intangible factors cannot be readily quantified in money. While some might argue that the financial model should not apply to healthcare decisions, the fact is that costs do enter into the picture. People may decide to forego needed healthcare because they cannot afford it. Healthcare providers may make choices based in part on the costs of diagnosis and treatment, rather than solely on medical information and what is best for the patient. Should financial issues enter into healthcare decisions – decisions about human health and well being? If so, how should the costs and benefits be measured and evaluated? What are some ethical issues and dilemmas involved in such decisions? This paper addresses ethical dilemmas and financial issues in healthcare. A healthcare decision model, which considers medical information, financial information, as well as ethical and other intangible factors, is proposed.     

住院医疗费用控制的系统规制与微观治理分析

对患者住院医疗费用构成及影响因素进行分析,探讨新医改后的医疗控费方向,以某县级市属人民医院的5205例住院病例为研究对象,通过研究发现：（1）人均住院费用构成中,药占比大幅度下降了,而检查治疗费与材料费占比很高;（2）病种、科室、医嘱变异率、临床路径完成情况、疾病转归对住院费用都有显著影响;（3）医疗控费,在宏观上需要系统规制,完善医保、规范医疗、改革医药等政策联动。在微观治理上应将一些有效的控费手段如临床路径进一步完善,提高完成率,减少变异率等。     

Book review

The paper develops a general equilibrium model of international production and trade. Technology is carried across borders by multinational producers and the set of technologies being used in a particular country is endogenous. Production locations are chosen based on the costs of production and getting the product to market. A producer may manufacture its product in its home country, target market country, or a third country. Estimated model parameters describe the states of technology in different countries, barriers to international investment, and trade costs. It is found that the barriers to international trade and investment are highly correlated. The model is used to measure the extent of technology diffusion across countries, study the relationship between international production and trade, investigate the effects of free-trade agreements (FTAs) on offshoring, and to quantify the welfare effects of international production and trade.     

企业国际多元化：一个文献综述

从资源配置的角度看,企业战略包括两个基本方面：行业多元化和国际多元化。与行业多元化相比,对国际多元化的关注较少。理论分析表明,国际多元化既有成本,也有收益。通过总结国外关于国际多元化的最新研究发现,目前关于国际多元化与企业绩效关系的实证研究结论并不一致,这些经验研究主要是基于发达国家企业的样本,并且这些研究本身也存在许多问题。利用新兴市场经济国家的样本可能会得出不同的结论。     

Exchange rates and US direct investment into Latin America

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze separately the determinants of maritime transport and road transport costs for Spanish exports to Poland and Turkey (markets for which maritime and road transport are competing modes) and investigate the different effects of these costs on international trade. First, we investigate the extent to which maritime and road transport costs depend on different factors such as unit values, distances, transport conditions, service structures, and service quality. Second, we analyze the relative importance of road and maritime transport costs in comparison with distance measures as determinants of trade flows. The main results of this investigation indicate that real distance is not a good proxy for transportation costs and identify the central variables influencing road and maritime transportation costs: for both modes, transport conditions are strong determinants, whereas efficiency and service quality are more important for maritime transport costs, and geographical distance is more important for road transport. Road and maritime transport costs are central explanatory factors of exports and they seem to deter trade to a greater extent than road or maritime transit time when endogeneity is considered.     

Developing a glossary of terms for burden of injury studies

Objectives. To compile and publish a dictionary of terminology containing a set of terms representing concepts found in burden of injury studies. Methods. A systematic outline of the glossary was designed on the basis of the literature. The glossary was filled with concepts and terms brought up by experts in the field of burden of injury research. Decisions were made by experts from several European countries in the field of burden of injury research. Definitions are based on the international literature, existing glossaries, medical dictionaries and expert opinion. In group sessions, the experts decided on preferred terms/definitions, admitted terms/definitions, and refused terms/definitions. Results. The glossary consists of three parts: concepts in health economics, concepts in health status measurement and valuation, and concepts related to health care practice. The glossary contains about 140 terms and is publicly available via the Internet. Conclusions. The glossary fulfils a clear need for uniform terminology. New terms will be considered and assessed by a group of experts. In order to make the glossary more user-friendly, interactive software should be developed.     

A machine-learning method for improving crash injury severity analysis: a case study of work zone crashes in Cairo,Egypt

Abstract

The quality of vehicular collision data is crucial for studying the relationship between injury severity and collision factors. Misclassified injury severity data in the crash dataset, however, may cause inaccurate parameter estimates and consequently lead to biased conclusions and poorly designed countermeasures. This is particularly true for imbalanced data where the number of samples in one class far outnumber the other. To improve the classification performance of the injury severity, the paper presents a robust noise filtering technique to deal with the mislabels in the imbalanced crash dataset using the advanced machine learning algorithms. We examine the state-of-the-art filtering algorithms, including Iterative Noise Filtering based on the Fusion of Classifiers (INFFC), Iterative Partitioning Filter (IPF), and Saturation Filter (SatF). In the case study of Cairo (Egypt), the empirical results show that: (1) the mislabels in crash data significantly influence the injury severity predictions, and (2) the proposed M-IPF filter outperforms its counterparts in terms of the effectiveness and efficiency in eliminating the mislabels in crash data. The test results demonstrate the efficacy of the M-IPF in handling the data noise and mitigating the impacts thereof.     

Reevaluating hedging performance

Mixed results have been documented for the performance of hedging strategies with the use of futures. This article reinvestigates this issue with the use of an extensive set of performance‐evaluation metrics across seven international markets. The hedging performances of short and long hedgers are compared with the use of traditional variance‐based approaches together with modern risk‐management techniques, including value at risk, conditional value at risk, and approaches based on downside risk. The findings indicate that use of these metrics to evaluate hedging performance yields differences in terms of best hedging strategy as compared with the traditional variance measure. Also, significant differences in performance between short and long hedgers are found. These results are observed both in sample and out of sample. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 26:677–702, 2006