Price discrimination in physician services markets based on race: New test of an old implicit hypothesis

Prior econometric studies of physician fee determination report that fees are positively related to the proportion of the market area that is black and negatively related to the proportion of the market area that is white, but the studies provide only sketchy explanations for these results. This article presents a price discrimination model which explains the empirical results and provides the specific prediction that low income self-pay consumers in the black community constitute the group that pays higher prices for physician services. The study then replicates prior econometric results on a more recent national database, but finds that the results are sensitive to specification. When geographic differences are controlled for in the empirical model, the results fade and a statistical test indicates that the expanded specification is superior to the specification which replicated the price discrimination result. The conclusion is that there is no compelling evidence of price discrimination in physician services markets based on race.     

Utility functions for simple games

This note characterizes the Shapley-Shubik index and the Banzhaf index on the class of simple games as utility functions which reflect different postures toward risk.     

Learning and equilibrium as useful approximations: Accuracy of prediction on randomly selected constant sum games

There is a good deal of miscommunication among experimenters and theorists about how to evaluate a theory that can be rejected by sufficient data, but may nevertheless be a useful approximation. A standard experimental design reports whether a general theory can be rejected on an informative test case. This paper, in contrast, reports an experiment designed to meaningfully pose the question: “how good an approximation does a theory provide on average.” It focuses on a class of randomly selected games, and estimates how many pairs of experimental subjects would have to be observed playing a previously unexamined game before the mean of the experimental observations would provide a better prediction than the theory about the behavior of a new pair of subjects playing this game. We call this quantity the model’s equivalent number of observations, and explore its properties. This research was supported by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the USA–Israel Binational Science Foundation. We are very grateful for helpful conversations with David Budescu, Jerry Busemeyer, Gary Chamberlain, Paul Feigin, Dave Krantz, Jack Porter, Tom Wallsten, Wolfgang Viechtbauer, and Richard Zeckhauser.     

American arts service organisations: Conduits for millions in funding

Although national arts service organisations in the United States existed prior to the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965, the real growth and development of the arts service field owes a large debt to the emergence of government as an official supporter of the cultural industry. As the number of arts organisations multiplied at a frightening pace throughout the mid 'sixties and early 'seventies, the need for concrete data and for new insights into funding and audience development techniques grew quickly. As the need for arts funding increased, private foundations felt a growing strain on their resources. Many larger foundations discovered that in order to make a significant impact with a far-reaching programme in a key area of concern, involving scores of grantees, the logistics could be staggering. An answer to this problem lay in the use of conduits, as potential grant recipients that could best serve the programme's needs. In turning to national arts service organisations to help them administer some of their key programmes foundations found more than willing partners. The following paper surveys some of the interesting, cost-effective and productive programmes that have linked foundations and arts service organisations to meet the needs of the arts industry.     

The food regime in late colonial Philippines: Pathways of appropriation and unpaid work

I argue that food regimes need to take into account the production relations of paid and unpaid work. As an angle of vision, I use the historical geography of late colonial Philippines (1901–1941) to show how paid and unpaid work in food production was not discrete and separated processes but rather conjoined moments of capital accumulation. The colonial regime—in this context, American colonial government, U.S. agribusinesses, and Filipino landed elites—utilized state power, customary land relations, and commodity‐specific characteristics to appropriate vast amounts of unpaid work from agrarian classes of Philippine labour and draft animals towards the exploitation of commodified labour power. These processes not only produced considerable quantities of coconut and sugar products that were exported to the American consumer market, sold at cheaper prices, and contributed to the profitability of U.S. agribusiness elites but also allowed the colonial regime to efficiently expand commodity production across the islands. The more the American capitalists and Philippine elites invested in Philippine agriculture, the more they appropriated unpaid work from the agrarian classes of labour.     

Online and off‐line travel packages preferences: a conjoint analysis

Past research has suggested that a number of travel package attributes impact on people's choices. In the present study the impacts of a number of these elements (price, package characteristics, travel agents and a seal of approval) in online and off‐line environments were examined using conjoint analysis. It was found that price had the biggest impact, although travel agent and airline reputation and trustworthiness also impacted on people's preferences. Interestingly, there were no significant differences in the attributes' impacts in the online and off‐line environments. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.