Profutures. The birth of the strategic prospective and futures studies international network for applied methodology

On 30 September and 1 October 1993, the European Commission's Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (PROMPT) organized a meeting, in collaboration with LIPS-CNAM (the Laboratory for Investigation in Prospective and Strategy of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris), on the theme: ‘Methods and tools in strategic prospective: retrospective and perspectives’. The main outcome of this meeting, which brought together 23 international experts from the strategic prospective-futures studies field at the Ispra campus of the EC's joint Research Centre, was the creation of a new network, devoted to applied methodology, to be known as Profutures.     

Price Rigidity and the Selection of the Exchange Rate Regime

We evaluate and qualify Friedman's, 1953, “case for flexible exchange rates” in the presence of sticky prices in a two country model. We find that a flexible regime performs indeed better when the degree of nominal price rigidity is high while a bilateral peg does better when prices are fairly flexible. This result obtains independent of whether monetary policy is activistic or not and is mostly due to the negative relationship between employment and productivity shocks when prices are relatively sluggish (Gali, 1999). A unilateral peg tends to produce the lowest level of world welfare but it sometimes represents the best monetary arrangement for the pegger. JEL Classification Numbers: E32, E52, F33, F42     

A simple random assignment problem with a unique solution

Summary. All agents have the same ordinal ranking over all objects, receiving no object (opting out) may be preferable to some objects, agents differ on which objects are worse than opting out, and the latter information is private. The Probabilistic Serial assignment, improves upon (in the Pareto sense) the Random Priority assignment, that randomly orders the agents and offers them successively the most valuable remaining object. We characterize Probabilistic Serial by efficiency in an ordinal sense, and envy-freeness. We characterize it also by ordinal efficiency, strategyproofness and equal treatment of equals. Received: October 5, 1999; revised version: December 20, 2000     

Voting in assemblies of shareholders and incomplete markets

Summary. An economy with two dates is considered, one state at the first date and a finite number of states at the last date. Shareholders determine production plans by voting - one share, one vote - and at -majority stable stock market equilibria, alternative production plans are supported by at most percent of the shareholders. It is shown that a -majority stable stock market equilibrium exists if where S is the number of states at the last date and J is the number of firms. Moreover, an example shows that -majority stable stock market equilibria need not exist for smaller s.Received: 23 December 2002, Revised: 14 June 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D21, D52, D71, G39. Correspondence to: Hervé CrésThe authors are grateful to an anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions. Financial support from the Danish Research Councils and hospitality of HEC is gratefully acknowledged by Mich Tvede and support from Fondation HEC is gratefully acknowledged by Hervé Crés.     

Aggregation of Directional Distance Functions and Industrial Efficiency

Three main objectives are pursued in this paper. First, we intend to analyze the aggregation problem of directional distance functions from a constructive viewpoint. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions concerning the structural properties of the production technology and of the nature of groups of firms. Indeed, exact additive aggregation holds for a linear technology and for a direction solely defined in the output space. Second, since these conditions are somewhat restrictive, we are interested in providing a measure for the aggregation bias through the relationship between industrial and structural technical efficiency. Finally, we show that this aggregation bias is a lower bound for industrial allocative efficiency.     

Healthcare burden and reimbursement of hospitalization during chemotherapy for adults with Ph-negative relapsed or refractory B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia in France: a retrospective chart review

Objective: Philadelphia chromosome negative [Ph(?)] relapsed or refractory (R/R) B-precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is an extremely rare condition requiring intensive treatment. This retrospective chart review aimed to quantify hospitalizations and reimbursement in this patient population in France.

Methods: Patients aged ≥18 years and with at least one hospitalization for Ph(?) R/R B-precursor ALL were included in the study. They were relapsed with first remission lasting <12 months, relapsed after first salvage therapy, relapsed any time after hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT), or were refractory to initial or salvage therapy. Data were collected from the index date (first diagnosis of R/R ALL) until death or loss to follow-up. The chemotherapy period was defined as the first chemotherapy date after the index date to the earliest of death, loss to follow-up, last chemotherapy dose plus 30 days, or initiation of HSCT. The primary outcome was the percentage of time hospitalized during the chemotherapy period.

Results: Thirty-three patients were included, with a mean age of 49 years. The mean proportion of time spent in the hospital during the chemotherapy period was 46% (95% CI =34–57%). Patients had a mean of 2.2 (SD =1.5) inpatient hospitalizations and the mean length of stay per hospitalization was 16.8 (SD =14.8) days. During the chemotherapy period, the mean amount reimbursed per hospitalization was €31 067 (SD = €4850) and the total hospitalization reimbursement per patient was €68 344. From the index date to death, excluding HSCT, the total reimbursement per patient was €108 873.

Limitations: The sample size was small, although this was expected given the rarity of the patient population.

Conclusions: Adults with Ph(?) R/R B-precursor ALL had repeated and prolonged hospitalizations during salvage chemotherapy. Approximately half the follow-up period was spent in the hospital, and this time was associated with high economic burden in France.     

To post or not to post: social media sharing and sporting event performance

Social networks are becoming increasingly important for consumers, especially in the context of sport, where the service experience is highly intense. Few studies have combined subjective event performance variables and social network variables to analyze social network content sharing by sports practitioners. This article investigates the use of social networks in relation to sporting events. An empirical study examined the role of social network variables and sporting event performance variables in social media use. The sample consisted of 410 triathletes (72.2% male) aged between 18 and 66 years (mean 37.03 ± 8.62). Four analyses were performed using fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis to examine the causes of sharing comments through social media, sharing photos and videos on social media, participant satisfaction, and word‐of‐mouth (WOM). The event's general image was a necessary condition in all cases. The combination of participants’ satisfaction and positive event image and the combination of social network use and positive event image lead to social network content sharing by athletes. The combination of positive event image and participant satisfaction leads to a positive WOM.     

Equilibrium price formation in markets with differentially informed agents

We consider a pure exchange economy with a finite set of types of agents which have incomplete and asymmetric information on the states of nature. Our aim was to describe the equilibrium price formation and analyze how the lack of information may affect the allocation of resources. To do so, we adapt to an asymmetric information scenario a variant of the Shapley–Shubik game introduced by Dubey and Geanakoplos (J Math Econ 39:391–400, 2003 ).