Why drug prices will go lower

The industry's days of gargantuan earnings are gone forever. Why? Managed-care outfits are demanding price breaks, and generics are proving tough competitors.     

Why we need more doctors

Granting health benefits to 37 million uninsured Americans will inflate demand for doctors--who are already stretched to the limit. The result: soaring prices and long waits.     

Access Health Marketing. Remedy: educate the patient

Access Health Marketing is providing a radical cure for the feverish rise in medical costs. It's counseling patients over the telephone to help them make their own health care decision.     

Visualising the operating behaviour of SMEs in sector and cluster: Evidence from the West Midlands

Cluster policy in the UK, pursued by the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs), has readily adopted a simplistic definition based upon industrial sectors and location quotients. Evidence drawn from a study of the operating behaviour of SMEs belonging to two traditional manufacturing industries within the West Midlands—automotive components and clothing—provides a critique of this approach. Whilst the automotive components industry has been designated part of a key, high priority cluster, the clothing industry has not. Using case studies from both industries, this paper shows firms both within and outside RDA cluster definitions display a remarkably similar range of behavioural characteristics. Yet, based on weakly defined cluster policy, one industry enjoys considerably more policy support than the other. The paper begins to question the logic of RDA cluster policy and to ask whether a more sophisticated and locally sympathetic manner of visualising clusters and business behaviour rather than an emphasis on employment numbers would have a greater impact for policy.     

The Role of the Beneficiary in Willingness to Pay for Socially Responsible Products: A Meta-analysis

Many companies have made significant investments in socially responsible production practices for their products. Environmentally safe cleaning products, fair trade coffee, and sustainable seafood are just a few examples. In this paper, we conduct a meta-analysis of over 80 published and unpublished research papers across a large number of product categories to better understand differences in willingness to pay (WTP) for socially responsible products. In particular, we are interested in whether the beneficiary of the social responsibility program—humans, animals, or the environment—affects WTP. We use two dependent variables: the percentage premium people are willing to pay and the proportion of respondents who are willing to pay a positive premium. We find that the mean percentage premium is 16.8 percent and that, on average, 60 percent of respondents are willing to pay a positive premium. Importantly, across both dependent measures, we find that WTP is greater for products where the socially responsible element benefits humans (e.g., labor practices) compared to those that benefit the environment. Implications for retailers, manufacturers, and future research are discussed.