The Determinants of Price Adjustments in Retail Supermarkets

This paper examines the determinants of price adjustment decisions by supermarkets to increase or decrease prices for 11 different food categories and evaluates the characteristics of these firms that influence these decisions. We use a unique dataset to analyze firm variables and industry variables and their impact on price adjustment in supermarket stores. The study contributes to the price adjustment literature by identifying determinants of price behavior by stores and product category. We find that the rationale for increasing prices differs from that for decreasing prices, retailers make different adjustment decisions based on product category, and market‐level controls have little impact. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Better late than never: a study of late entrants in household electrical equipment

For the most part, studies on timing of entry have attempted to determine the advantages that early entrants may be able to develop and hold over subsequent entrants. Given that a large number of firms attempt to enter at a much later stage in the development of the market, it is particularly surprising that little research has attempted to examine the differences in the ability of late movers to penetrate the market. In this paper, we focus exclusively on late movers and examine the extent to which their early success can be tied to existing market conditions, their resource strengths, and their strategic positioning. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Politics of Evidence-Based Health Policy-Making

Israel's National Health Insurance Law which came into effect in January 1995 required a substantial reform of the country's health-care system. Health care in Israel was decentralized, lightly regulated, dominated by politicised decisions, under-funded and inefficient. Health policy was poorly grounded in data and largely influenced by political considerations. The main thrusts of the reform were to universalize health insurance coverage, increase freedom of choice, depoliticize the system, stabilize the system financially, and decrease service provision by the state by transferring some responsibilities to 'sick funds' to be regulated by the Ministry of Health. Data were to play an important role in de-politicizing and making decision-making more rational. This article gives some encouragement to proponents of evidence-based policy-making but shows that, even where the intention is to use data, political motives are a strong force.     

Real-world treatment patterns and healthcare costs among biologic-naive patients initiating apremilast or biologics for the treatment of psoriasis

Objective: This study compared real-world treatment patterns and healthcare costs among biologic-naive psoriasis patients initiating apremilast or biologics.

Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted using the Optum Clinformatics? claims database. Patients with psoriasis were selected if they had initiated apremilast or biologics between January 1, 2014, and December 31, 2015; had 12?months of pre-index and post-index continuous enrollment in the database; and were biologic-naive. The index date was defined as the date of the first claim for apremilast or biologic, and occurred between January 1, 2014, and December 31, 2015. Treatment persistence was defined as continuous treatment without a?>?60-day gap in therapy (discontinuation) or a switch to a different psoriasis treatment during the 12-month post-index period. Adherence was defined as a medication possession ratio (MPR) of ≥ 80% while persistent on the index treatment. Persistence-based MPR was defined as the number of days with the medication on hand measured during the patients’ period of treatment persistence divided by the duration of the period of treatment persistence. Because patients were not randomized, apremilast patients were propensity score matched up to 1:2 to biologic patients to adjust for possible selection bias. Treatment persistence/adherence and all-cause healthcare costs were evaluated. Cost differences were determined using Wilcoxon rank-sum tests.

Results: In all, 343 biologic-naive patients initiating apremilast were matched to 680 biologic-naive patients initiating biologics. After matching, patient characteristics were similar between cohorts. Twelve-month treatment persistence was similar for biologic-naive patients initiating apremilast vs biologics (32.1% vs 33.2%; p?=?0.7079). While persistent on therapy up to 12?months, per-patient per-month (PPPM) total healthcare costs were significantly lower among biologic-naive cohorts initiating apremilast vs biologics ($2,214 vs $5,184; p?p?p?p?Limitations: Data were limited to individuals with United Healthcare commercial and Medicare Advantage insurance plans, and may not be generalizable to psoriasis patients with other insurance or without health insurance coverage.

Conclusion: Biologic-naive patients with similar patient characteristics receiving apremilast vs biologics had significantly lower PPPM costs, even when they switched to biologics during the 12-month post-index period. These results may be useful to payers and providers seeking to optimize psoriasis care while reducing healthcare costs.     

Integrated data-driven analytics to identify instability signatures in nonstationary financial time series

With the objective of identifying instability signatures of the financial system, this article integrates two classes of data-driven techniques. The first class of techniques is utilized to investigate macroeconomic behaviour by aggregating an ensemble of heterogeneous nonstationary time-series data and the second class of techniques examines the local dynamics of the microstructures in each time series. Moving window principal component analysis (PCA) and functional PCA (fPCA) are shown to extract collective signatures of the financial system for understanding macroeconomic behaviour, and the Synchrosqueezing and Markov switching techniques are used to study local dynamics within each individual time series. The integrated data analytics successfully identifies the diverse events from 1986 to 2012. All events, both major and minor, have been identified by fPCA. The major economic events, especially the 2008 Great Recession, along with several minor events, showed a strong leading indicator in the density index derived from Synchrosqueezing. The capability of this integrated analytics suite is demonstrated in this article, and it motivates further studies encompassing data sets from broader sectors. As a complement to existing model-driven approach, this would lead to achieving a robust and reliable method that can help in taking measures to avoid catastrophic collapse in the constantly evolving financial system.