Unintended hedging in ambiguity experiments

We describe an ambiguity hedging problem in Ellsberg experiments, where combinations of individually ambiguous bets eliminate aggregate ambiguity, and which may yield incorrect classifications of ambiguity averse subjects. We propose a new classification consistent with this hedging possibility.     

April 2010 UK Airspace closure: Experience and impact on the UK’s air-travelling public and implications for future travel

Ash emitted from the Eyjafjallajökull Icelandic volcano resulted in the closure UK’s airspace in 2010. This research highlights passengers experience throughout the crisis and it is impacted on their wellbeing. Analysis of a survey shows that just 90% of respondents highlighted the failure of airline, travel agencies and/or government to provide timely and appropriate information. The airspace closure also caused adverse health impacts, with 79% of respondents highlighting this as a concern. Although passengers were greatly inconvenienced and had a negative experience, seventy-nine percent of respondents indicated that the crisis had little or no impact on their decision to fly in the future.     

Lessons from My School

This article presents analyses of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) data and data on other indicators that are made available through the My School website. There are large differences across states and types of schools (independent, Catholic and government) in the Year 3 NAPLAN outcomes, though the differences across states tend to diminish as outcomes for later years of study are examined. Some schools are shown to consistently have academic outcomes better than their characteristics would otherwise indicate; conversely, other schools are shown to consistently have academic outcomes below the levels their characteristics would otherwise indicate. Few of these differences are statistically significant.     

Are Socially Responsible Firms Associated with Socially Responsible Citizens? A Study of Social Distancing During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Journal of Business Ethics - The literature on the interplay between geographic communities and organizations has largely ignored the role of individual residents. In adopting a meso-perspective,...     

Reasonable and Risk‐Based? Replacing NFIP Generally Subsidized Rates with a Means‐Tested Subsidy

The National Flood Insurance Program was created to seek two often conflicting goals: (i) shifting risks from federal taxpayers to those who choose to live in flood plains and (ii) ensuring flood insurance is available to everyone at “reasonable” rates. Efforts to accomplish the second goal currently take the form of subsidies based on location and the date a home was constructed. The resulting revenue from subsidized insurance premiums is not sufficient to cover the true cost of flood insurance, and federal taxpayers have paid the difference: $30 billion to date. Based on a detailed survey of households in the high‐risk flood zones of New York City (NYC), we find that replacing existing premium subsidies with risk‐based prices and a subsidy for low‐income housing‐burdened households could better meet both goals by ensuring low‐income individuals have access to affordable flood insurance while still saving the federal taxpayer up to $183 million per year in NYC alone.     

Making compassion count: equal recognition and authentic involvement in mental health care

Compassionate care within mental health services is often taken for granted as something that can be made visible and authentic. However, recent government reports and policy suggest that we are far from providing compassionate care and may be more focused upon risk and surveillance. This paper will discuss the visibility of compassionate care and explore outcomes that consumers and practitioners could measure in practice. Separating the fact from fiction within compassionate care will make authentic involvement practices more visible and open to discussion around consumer collaboration. In a qualitative analysis of a small study with mental health consumers, compassion was found to be a major factor in whether consumers became more involved in their own health care. Demonstrating compassionate care may therefore also demonstrate consumer participation and engagement. This paper will argue that compassionate care can be observed in the relationships between practitioners and consumers that are collaborative and use presence and persistence as methods of practice. Emancipatory practices can be made more visible in mental health care in order to make compassion measurable and to encourage consumer participation and engagement.     

Alternate signs of life: The growth of biotechnology industries in Shanghai and Bangalore

This paper explores the emergence of biotechnology centers in Shanghai and Bangalore by comparing their development to best practices in the literature for biotechnology cluster growth and development. Interviews with over fifty biotech companies and related institutions in China and India indicate that these regions are developing alternate models of low cost manufacturing and services that build on the current local base of knowledge and expertise. The ability to convert research into successful commercial activity was identified in both regions. The strong research capacity, private sector funding, and entrepreneurial environment deemed critical best practices were limited. New growth theory is used to explain these alternate approaches to technological and social change.     

"Quicker and sicker" under Medicare's prospective payment system for hospitals: new evidence on an old issue from a national longitudinal survey

Medicare's prospective payment system for hospitals (PPS), introduced in the USA in 1983, replaced cost reimbursement with a system of fixed rates which created incentives for hospitals to control costs. Previous studies found that elderly patients were discharged from hospital "quicker and sicker" under PPS and concluded that families were coping at home. We analyse a national longitudinal survey, the first National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and its Epidemiologic Followup Study, which includes data on more outcomes over a longer period than earlier studies. We find that the rate of admission to nursing homes from the community in the first weeks after a hospital discharge more than tripled under PPS, suggesting that families were not always able to cope. As another response to sicker patients, discharges directly to nursing homes from hospitals, which jumped initially under PPS, may have risen further when payment rates were tightened in the early 1990s. Hospital readmissions fell after the first few years. Our findings are strengthened by the fact that we control for patients' health using health information collected independently of hospital admission.