A voucher plan for financing health care delivery

There seems to be a growing consensus in this country that everyone should have guaranteed access to at least a minimum level of preventive and curative medical care. The real controversy is over the method by which such care would be assured.

I have proposed elsewhere that each individual be given a voucher; ‘good’ for either full premium payment for membership in a comprehensive prepaid health plan in a specified period, or for a predetermined amount toward one's health insurance premium if it is desired to maintain consumption of care in a fee-for-service (ffs) mode.

The purpose of the present paper will be to provide a preliminary examination of some of the operational characteristics of such a voucher which may be implemented on an ‘area’ basis, such an area containing some number of somehow identifiable ‘regions’. In each of the regions a governing board would make management decisions taking into account its peculiarities and needs. The regional board would then be responsible to some area Health Council. This, of course, parallels the kinds of decision-making bodies specified both in national proposals such as Senator Kennedy's, and statewide plans such as California Senate Bill 770 proposed by Senator Moscone (D., San Francisco).

An analytical model of the decision process of such regional boards and Health Councils is developed and the optimal selection of voucher redemption levels and capital subsidy programs is characterized.     

Estimated parameters as independent variables: An application to the costs of electric generating units

The cost of an electric generating unit or other piece of capital equipment should depend on several unit-specific attribtes. Some of these attributes (such as capacity) can be observed without error, but others (such as reliability or efficiency) cannot be. This study is concerned with situations in which estimates of key unobservable quality attributes can be obtained from time series data on actual performance. Adopting a measurement error perspective, a consistent (adjusted least-squares) technique for using such estimates as independent variables in cross-section regression analysis is derived. Our technique is applied to the estimation of a construction cost function for coal-fired electric generating units.     

Software for Learning and for Doing Statistics

The community of statisticians and statistics educators should take responsibility for the evaluation and improvement of software quality from the perspective of education. The paper will develop a perspective, an ideal system of requirements to critically evaluate existing software and to produce future software more adequate both for learning and doing statistics in introductory courses. Different kinds of tools and microworlds are needed. After discussing general requirements for such programs, a prototypical ideal software system will be presented in detail. It will be illustrated how such a system could be used to construct learning environments and to support elementary data analysis with exploratory working style.     

Copyright Damages and Statistics

This paper discusses the statistical issues that arise in conducting an economic damages analysis in the context of a litigation matter involving copyrights. Calculating damages in copyright cases turns out to be a natural application for econometric modelling methods. Surprisingly, elementary statistical issues can be a source of significant debate between the experts in such matters. In this paper, we present a case study and illustrate how issues such as interpretation of p -values and what "rejection of the null hypothesis" really "means" in such matters.     

Consumers' processing of mindful commercial car sharing

Commercial car sharing offers a form of market‐mediated, access‐based consumption with a markedly lower impact on the natural environment than that of car ownership. Consumers adopting such alternative transportation modes are manifesting a marketplace behavior that can be said to be mindful because of the innovative and sustainable nature of car sharing. This study employs behavioral reasoning theory to examine how consumers' value orientations, as well as reasons for and against car sharing, might be used in consumers' processing of mindful commercial car‐sharing adoption. Findings suggest that subjective norms (thoughts of important others for consumers, such as co‐workers) serve an important mediating role for both consumers' value orientations and reasons for car sharing in their relationship with car‐sharing behavior. These results provide marketing researchers important knowledge about green consumption and suggest that practitioners would do well to emphasize the social dimension when marketing environmentally oriented services, such as car sharing.     

Measuring Agreement in Ordered Rating Scales

Ordered rating scales are one of the most frequently used question formats in large-scale surveys. Analysts of the responses to such questions often find themselves in need of describing the degree of agreement (concentration, consensus) of the answers to such questions. For that purpose they commonly use standard deviations of the response distributions, or measures based on these (such as the coefficient of consensus defined by Granberg and Holmberg, 1988), or the coefficient of variability, etc. This paper demonstrates that such measures are inappropriate for this purpose because they misrepresent what they are supposed to measure: the `peakedness' of a distribution. As an alternative a measure of agreement A is proposed. This measure is a weighted average of the degree of agreement that exists in the simple component parts – layers – into which any frequency distribution can be disaggregated, and for which agreement can be expressed in a straightforward and unequivocal way.     

Political Leadership,Conflict and the Prospects for Constitutional Peace

The emphasis in constitutional political economy has been that new rules and institutions can be devised that improve the welfare of a society. Given the number of societies that are infected with political conflict and as a result lower levels of welfare, this paper attempts to analyse why we do not see more constitutional conventions aimed at eliminating conflict. The key idea is that expressively motivated group members may create incentives for instrumentally motivated group leaders such that it leads them to choose conflict rather than compromise. Nonetheless, it is not argued that such a peace is impossible to obtain. This leads to a further question, that if such a constitutional agreement could be found, would the expressive perspective alter the conventional instrumental perspective on the sort of constitutional reform that should be undertaken?     

Matching managers to strategies: Point and counterpoint

In recent years, an emerging and increasingly popular theme in the strategic management literature has been that the selection of general managers should be tied directly to the strategies of business units they will oversee. Because different strategies imply different priorities and the need for different skills, such a proposition has obvious intuitive appeal. Beyond intuitive appeal and supporting conceptual arguments, recent empirical research on whether matching general managers to strategies “pays off” in terms of more effective strategy implementation has also yielded positive results. Despite this evidence, several arguments exist for why it may not always be feasible, necessary, or desirable to match general managers to strategies. Thus, there is need for a point-counterpoint “debate” on the subject of matching general managers to strategies. Based on a review of the relvant literature, logical reasoning, as well as some case evidence, this paper is intended to be such a debate undertaken by the author with himself. It is hoped that such a dialectical analysis will open up new avenues for productive research and also enable corporate executives to make better “managerial selection” decisions.     

轮压不等吊车梁计算方法研究及程序编制

吊车轮压不等情况在冶金厂房中时常出现,此类吊车梁尚无软件可直接利用。本文针对此情况,研究吊车梁计算方法,并与现有软件进行对比,指出现有软件计算方法的不足。本文修正这些不足,并编写专用的设计程序,为今后的设计提供了工具和参考。     

HETEROGENEITY,EXCESS ZEROS,AND THE STRUCTURE OF COUNT DATA MODELS

This paper demonstrates that the unobserved heterogeneity commonly assumed to be the source of overdispersion in count data models has predictable implications for the probability structure of such mixture models. In particular, the common observation of excess zeros is a strict implication of unobserved heterogeneity. This result has important implications for using count model estimates for predicting certain interesting parameters. Test statistics to detect such heterogeneity-related departures from the null model are proposed and applied in a health-care utilization example, suggesting that a null Poisson model should be rejected in favour of a mixed alternative. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A model of the metropolis: The development of an urban activity location model for Jos, Benue-Plateau State, Nigeria

Planning experience emphasizes the testing of alternative strategies and the analysis of the results as an important aspect of structure planning. Unfortunately, this is yet to be incorporated in the planning methodologies of developing countries. A way of doing this is to develop currently successful models in such environments. Consequently a Lowry-type model developed within the entropy maximizing methodology was calibrated for the city of Jos, Nigeria. Apart from the inadequacies of some categories of data, the model and its results display very stimulating results that could be used in extending the formulation into a predictive framework in such a way that such models would provide concerted attempts at the creation of liveability in cities.     

Targeting interventions to high-risk populations: Benefits and costs

Targeting prevention interventions to high-risk populations may increase intervention benefits, but identifying and/or finding the high-risk populations may increase intervention costs. We explore the costs and benefits of targeting in the context of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention in high-risk injection drug users (IDUs). Focusing interventions on such a population should maximize the number of HIV infections averted. Recruiting high-risk IDUs for such interventions, however, may be more difficult and costly. We base our analysis on an earlier model that determines the allocation of resources to two interventions, street outreach and methadone maintenance. The model seeks to minimize HIV incidence in a population of heterosexual IDUs and their non-injecting sex partners. We conclude that while targeting an inexpensive intervention like street outreach rarely proves to be cost-effective, even a costly targeting effort can increase cost effectiveness for an expensive, effective, narrowly focused intervention such as methadone maintenance.     

A general weighted least squares approach for the projection of input–output tables

In the context of input–output analysis, it is often necessary to update a matrix for a date when only the sum of its columns and rows are known. This projection problem is quite similar to temporal disaggregation. I borrow from this literature a class of solutions for which the exact result can be implemented without iteration. These solutions minimize the adjustment made to the out-of-date matrix and as such can be said optimal according to a chosen criteria. The framework I expose is flexible enough to encompass many of the existing methods and develop new ones. I propose one of such methods to project a matrix between two given benchmarks. I exemplify the technique on 35 years of input–output tables for France and show in particular that the issue of negative cells can be avoided.     

复杂科学与城市转型

研究城市问题,应将城市看成是一种复杂的自适应系统,这样才能较准确地把握城市作为一个生态系统的本质和内涵。本文分析了城市作为复杂自适应系统的若干特征,城市的组织成长方式,并提出城市转型的基本思路是重建微降解等十项微循环。     

Optimal ticket pricing for performance goods

When purchasing a ticket to a performance good, such as a movie or sporting event, the consumer does not actually buy the product, but simply access to viewing the product. Although the performance is the primary impetus for the ticket purchase, many performance goods offer complementary products such as concessions to their patrons. This paper suggests that when the price setter receives a share of revenues from concessions, overall profits will be maximized when tickets are priced in the inelastic section of demand. The model can be used to explain inelastic point estimates for ticket pricing found in other performance good studies. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hierarchical Models in Environmental Science

Environmental systems are complicated. They include very intricate spatio-temporal processes, interacting on a wide variety of scales. There is increasingly vast amounts of data for such processes from geographical information systems, remote sensing platforms, monitoring networks, and computer models. In addition, often there is a great variety of scientific knowledge available for such systems, from partial differential equations based on first principles to panel surveys. It is argued that it is not generally adequate to consider such processes from a joint perspective. Instead, the processes often must be considered as a coherently linked system of conditional models. This paper provides a brief overview of hierarchical approaches applied to environmental processes. The key elements of such models can be considered in three general stages, the data stage, process stage, and parameter stage. In each stage, complicated dependence structure is mitigated by conditioning. For example, the data stage can incorporate measurement errors as well as multiple datasets with varying supports. The process and parameter stages can allow spatial and spatio-temporal processes as well as the direct inclusion of scientific knowledge. The paper concludes with a discussion of some outstanding problems in hierarchical modelling of environmental systems, including the need for new collaboration approaches.     

Tales from tails: On the empirical distributions of forecasting errors and their implication to risk

When evaluating the performances of time series extrapolation methods, both researchers and practitioners typically focus on the average or median performance according to some specific error metric, such as the absolute error or the absolute percentage error. However, from a risk-assessment point of view, it is far more important to evaluate the distributions of such errors, and especially their tails. For instance, a lack of normality and symmetry in error distributions can have significant implications for decision making, such as in stock control. Moreover, frequently these distributions can only be constructed empirically, as they may be the result of a computationally-intensive non-parametric approach, such as an artificial neural network. This study proposes an approach for evaluating the empirical distributions of forecasting methods and uses it to assess eleven popular time series extrapolation approaches across two different datasets (M3 and ForeDeCk). The results highlight some very interesting tales from the tails.     

Run length distributions for estimated attributes charts

Attributes control charts, such as c and p charts, are popular methods for detecting out of control signals when it is practical only to obtain qualitative information about a process; in such cases, variables control charts, such as the , s and R charts, cannot be used. The run length distributions have previously been studied for variables charts when the control limits have been estimated. Little has been done in the case of attributes charts. In this paper, the run length distributions for the c chart and p chart are derived for the case when the control limits are estimated. It is shown that, as for variables charts, the effect of estimation on quantities such as the average run length (ARL) can be quite dramatic, but when the underlying process is in control, the ARL is potentially misleading as a basis for comparison. Received: September 1998     

Urban general equilibrium models and simplicial search algorithms

This paper describes how simplicial search algorithms work, and discusses how they may be used to solve static theoretical urban models. If such algorithms are to be used, land must be treated as consisting of a number of discrete sections. It is argued that this is not a serious disadvantage, and that for many purposes such discrete models have significant advantages over models in which land is treated as continuous. In particular, it is possible to deal with several groups of people having different tastes and incomes. Several related models are described, and some interesting qualitative results are presented.