Engaging patients and families in ehealth

National Health IT Week, which ran from September 11-16, 2011, served as a time to highlight the importance of efficient information systems that protect the privacy and security of personal health information while improving the delivery of health care in the United States. During the week, the health IT community came together to raise national awareness regarding the consistent breakthroughs and hard work industry professionals, providers, and consumers have put forward to ensure they are moving toward the common goal of advancing the future of health care through private and secure health IT. Two events during the week (the Consumer Health IT Summit and the launch of the HealthlT.gov web site) brought home a theme increasingly seen as important to improving our health care system--patients participation in their care. Nurses will need to work with patients so they understand the importance of their participation as a partner in their care, instead of playing a passive role. One way we can do that is to encourage our patients to actively use technology to manage their own health care and to share information with their health care providers.     

少子老龄化态势下的居家养老困局及其社区化解之道--兼及昆明城市社区调研的评述、思考与建议

基于中国"少子老龄化"人口现象的加速呈现,以居家养老和子女赡养相结合的传统养老家庭模式已经渐行渐远,而采取入住养老院的集中赡养方式既不可能,也不现实。鉴此,在不改变居住场所的前提下,社区的介入应是化解居家养老困局的-个良策,如果能够在制度建设上强化社区的"实体"地位,明确赋予社区为老服务的职权,在人财物上给予支持,那么,居家养老与社区服务紧密结合的新型养老模式就会具有其普适性。     

Community conversations as a strategy to change harmful traditional practices against women

This article conducts a series of list experiments to detect whether community conversations contribute to a change in thinking about harmful traditional practices in Ethiopia. While our findings are mixed, we provide evidence that community conversations are indeed a valuable instrument to induce a change in social values in order to empower women.     

On the informational content of advice: a theoretical and experimental study

This paper examines the market for advice and the underlying perception that advice is useful and informative. We do this by first providing a theoretical examination of the informational content of advice and then by setting up a series of experimental markets where this advice is sold. In these markets we provide bidders with a demographic profile of the “experts” offering advice.The results of our experiment generate several interesting findings. The raw bid data suggest that subjects bid significantly more for data than they do for advice. Second, in the market for advice there appears to be no consensus as to who are the best advisors although on average economists demand the highest mean price and women suffer a discount. In addition, we find that whether a subject suffers from a representativeness bias in the way he or she processes data has an impact on how he or she bids for advice and on his or her willingness to follow it once offered. Finally, we find that on average people impute a low level of informativeness onto advice, consistent with their bidding behavior for data versus advice.This work was done under grant number SES-0425118 of the National Science Foundation. The authors would like to recognize the Center for Experimental Social Science at New York University for its additional support. We also acknowledge the help of Elizabeth Potamites for her research assistance.     

The culture of courage

We all want health care to be delivered in an atmosphere of utmost integrity. However, integrity only occurs where there is courage to do the right thing in very difficult situations. Leaders must be very courageous to be successful. They must foster and build courage among their staff to create cultures in which the staff feel safe and supported to always act with integrity. We are not born with courage. We learn courage by eventually mastering situations in which we can act with less and less fear. The leader's obligation is to assess the environment and build opportunities for staff to work courageously with less and less fear as they master more difficult situations in their everyday lives.     

Market power, survival and accuracy of predictions in financial markets

In a standard General Equilibrium framework, we consider an agent strategically using her large volume of trade to influence asset prices to increase her consumption. We show that, as in Sandroni (Econometrica 68:1303–1341, 2000) for the competitive case, if markets are dynamically complete and some general conditions on market preferences are met then this agent’ long-run consumption will vanish if she makes less accurate predictions than the market, and will maintain her market power otherwise. We thus argue that the Market Selection Hypothesis extends to this situation of market power, in contrast to Alchian (J Pol Econ 58:211–221, 1950) and Friedman (Essays in Positive Economics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1953) who claimed that this selection was solely driven by the competitiveness of markets. I would like to thank T. Hens, A. Kirman and A. Sandroni for many stimulating conversations and encouragements. Two anonymous referees also provided very valuable comments.     

Redistributive Taxation under Ethical Behaviour*

We consider the implications of ethical behaviour on the effect of a redistributive tax‐transfer system. In choosing their labour supplies, individuals take into account whether their tax liabilities correspond to what they view as ethically acceptable. If tax liabilities are viewed as ethically acceptable, a taxpayer behaves ethically, does not distort her behaviour, and chooses to work as if she were not taxed. On the other hand, if ethical behaviour results in tax liabilities that exceed those that are ethically acceptable, she behaves egoistically (partially or fully), distorts her behaviour, and chooses her labour supply taking into account the income tax. We establish taxpayers' equilibrium behaviour and obtain that labour supply is less elastic when taxpayers may behave ethically than when they act egoistically. We characterise and compare the egoistic voting equilibrium linear tax schedules under potentially ethical and egoistic behaviour. We also compare our results to those obtained under altruism, an alternative benchmark.     

赛珍珠笔下的恋父情结

赛珍珠在《大地》这部小说中，描绘了众多传统中国女性的形象，主要有阿兰、荷花、梨花和杜鹃，每个人又各有自己的境遇，其中梨花的境遇最引人注目，他喜欢上了一个年龄相当于她父亲的男性，这是恋父情结在她身上最直观的体现，即典型的“老夫少妻”型的婚恋模式，所以她往往是通过另外的一次异性的结合，来完成自己恋父情结的终结。     

Ethnic groups and the Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson trade model

Summary In this paper, we report a mode of the Harris-Todaro variety in which the labor force is composed of distinct and easily identifiable ethnic groups and in which capital is intersectorally mobile. We extend the central theorems of Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson trade theory to our model and also relate our results to other work.This work was conceived over several visits to The Pakistan Institute of Development Economics and finished at Berkeley where it was first presented at Professor Bardhan's Workshop in Development Economics. I am grateful to Professor Bardhan and to Director Naqvi and other Officers of the Institute for their hospitality and interest. I am also grateful to Naeem Siddiqui and Ray Reizman for several useful conversations; to S. Broca for many provocative comments on the HOS trade model; and, in particular, to one of three anonymous referees for her/his careful reading and detailed comments.     

Race,Gender, and Familial Status: Discrimination in One US Mortgage Lending Market

This paper, using data from the 1992 Boston Federal Reserve study of mortgage lending, reports preliminary evidence of patterns of gender and familial status discrimination that differ markedly by race in the US. White couples with children experienced familial status discrimination if the female partner was in the labor market, but not if she was at home raising her children. However, African-American or Hispanic couples with children suffered familial status discrimination if she stayed home to raise her children, but much less so, if at all, if she was in the labor market. This pattern of racial differentiation may reflect social norms dating back to slavery that have favored labor force participation for African-American and Hispanic mothers but not white mothers. On the other hand, it was true across racial groups that single women, more than single men, were disadvantaged in the mortgage market by children.     

Technical progress in Joan Robinson's view: an attempt at systematisation and formalisation

This paper deals with Joan Robinson's contributions to the issue of technical progress and her attempts at treating this subject in accordance with the Keynesian theory of employment and income distribution, mainly in the long run. The paper aims to review this aspect of her work and to establish a systematisation and a formalisation of her approach. At the same time, the paper exposes the problems she faced—but did not always solve. Looking through her main contributions, the paper concludes that she used different criteria for the classification of innovations and that they depended on the specific situations described by the models in which she used the classification.     

Team production,endogenous learning about abilities and career concerns

This paper studies career concerns in teams where the support a worker receives depends on fellow team members׳ efforts and abilities. In this setting, by exerting effort and providing support, a worker can influence her own and her teammates׳ project outputs in order to bias the learning process in her favor. To manipulate the market׳s assessment, we argue that in equilibrium, a worker has incentives to help or even sabotage her colleagues in order to signal that she is of higher ability. In a multiperiod stationary framework, we show that the stationary level of work effort is above and help effort is below their efficient levels.     

Job protection laws and agency problems under asymmetric information

Under symmetric information, a job protection law which says that a principal who has hired an agent today must also employ him tomorrow can only reduce the two parties’ total surplus. The law restricts the principal's possibilities to maximize her profit, which equals the total surplus, because she leaves no rent to the agent. However, under asymmetric information, a principal must leave a rent to her agent, and hence profit maximization is no longer equivalent to surplus maximization. Therefore, a job protection law can increase the expected total surplus by restricting the principal's possibilities to inefficiently reduce the agent's rent.     

Compliance leadership: the 17th century model that doesn't work

The world of health care has changed. We can't operate on 17th century models and be successful. We don't have to argue for the movement to committed, inspired leadership models, and the death of compliance leadership. There is abundant research to document this is the way we must go. In reality, we have a moral obligation to provide the kind of work environment that provides the meaningful work that Maslow (1998) tells us makes life meaningful. No one has the right to make people miserable at work because we have failed to create the cultures that create commitment, inspiration, and transformation for our patients, their families, and our staff. It is unfortunate that in times of staff shortages, this message is heard louder. We should be equally committed no matter what the situation, because it is the right thing to do. We do not have the right to be abusive to others in any context.     

Olson's Logic of Collective Action: A Review Article

This comment is offered as a defense of humanistic economics whose feminist credentials have been questioned by Julie Nelson. To her, our contribution is little less than orthodox economics, an ideology enshrining masculine values. We find her arguments based on a clear misreading or misinterpretation of our work. Especially needing correction is her charge that our key notion of a dual self is contaminated by traditional hierarchy and masculinized reason, and the idea of a ‘mushroom man’ operating in a social vacuum. Once her arguments, which we find contrived, are deconstructed it can be readily seen that there remains little difference between her own and our economics.     

“默示同意”：合理博弈与不完善制度——郑百文重组过程中表决规则的经济学分析

当主持者对表决方式有选择余地时,那么他会根据自己的偏好,直接或间接影响表决结果,这是无法避免的,是在现有制度下的一种合理博弈,是有效的。如果他本身就是博弈的一方,则更会充分利用这种影响。而主持人对议案内容的偏好是广泛存在的,不可能通过消除偏好来消除影响。但是如果加强民主和监督,使主持者的选择余地尽可能缩小,即他只能选择社会承认的最优的“公平”规则才符合他自己的成本－－收益平衡,那么这样就使个人的最优选择与社会的最优选择一致,提供了制度上的改进办法。而在未有更高程度的民主和更有效的监督制度之前,只能容忍在现有制度内的博弈行为。所以,只有通过进一步加强民主和健全法制,进行表决规则的制度建设,才有可能得到更优化和更真实的表决结果。     

我国居家养老服务体系建设的难点及其突破

随着我国进入老龄化社会，养老问题成为一个必须面对的严峻课题，建设科学而完善的居家养老服务体系无疑是解决当下我国老龄化所带来的诸多问题的有效途径。目前我国居家养老服务体系建设的难点主要有法律法规不完善、社会支持系统不健全、资金提供不充裕、养老服务项目不齐全、服务人员专业素质不高等。要建构适合中国国情的居家养老服务体系，需要政府、社会、家庭等主体共同努力。     

The market as a social space: On the meaningful extraeconomic conversations that can occur in markets

Prominent economic sociologist Richard Swedberg has argued that economists have failed to develop a theory of the market that recognizes it as a “social phenomenon in its own right.” While this may be true of mainstream economics, the Austrian school’s theory of the market is much richer than the standard view. For Austrians, the market has always been a central concern. And Austrians have always argued that the market is a social structure where both exchange and competition occurs. Still, Austrians give little more than scant attention to the noneconomic sociality that occurs in markets. The market, however, is both a conversation and an arena where meaningful conversations can occur. This paper is an effort to focus attention on the market as a social space where social activity (beyond competition and exchange) takes place and where noneconomic relationships and economic relationships develop.     

Demonstrating group selection: A comment on Janet Landa’s ‘The bioeconomics of homogenous middleman groups as adaptive units’

Janet Landa provides an impressive historical tour of the development of her theory of homogeneous middlemen groups (HMGs), and how she arrived at the group selection approach. Despite her claim that the case studies she presents provide evidence for group selection in human societies, we argue that such a conclusion is premature. We suggest that an evolutionary explanation of HGMs will be strengthened by greater attention to the details of the selective process.