Onsite concurrent review: impacts on utilization, medical complications and expense

An evaluation of onsite concurrent review over and above the effects of Aetna's precertification program demonstrated reduced utilization and expenses, especially for ancillary services, and no adverse effects on rates of medical complications.     

The subjective expected utility hypothesis and revealed preference

Summary A choice behavior of a decision maker is said to satisfy the subjective expected utility hypothesis if there exist a utility and a subjective probability such that a decision maker chooses acts with the highest expected utility. We present a revealed preference characterization of choice behavior that is consistent with the subjective expected utility hypothesis. Our result applies to any state space and compact sets of prizes and observations (either finite or infinite).     

Information flow,job search,and migration

"In this paper, an individual model of rural-urban migration is studied, emphasizing the effects of information flow and urban wage dispersion. Migration is viewed in the context of a lifetime program of job search. It is shown that migration can occur even when the mean urban wage is no larger than the rural income flow.... Both the shape and spread of the urban wage dispersion are shown to affect migration behavior significantly." The geographical focus is on developing countries.     

The main findings of the district pilot project of labour‐intensive road construction and maintenance in Botswana and the implications for similar projects in South Africa

Unemployment has been identified as one of the main problems confronting South Africa. Recently, in order to improve rural infrastructure and create employment, several pilot projects of rural road construction have been initiated in South Africa. In such a context it is considered that attention should be drawn to a pilot project carried out some time ago in Botswana to examine the potential of labour‐intensive methods in the construction and maintenance of rural roads.

The main conclusion of the pilot project was that labour‐intensive methods were viable, although attention had to be paid to several critical factors. In 1982, following its evaluation of the pilot project, the Government of Botswana decided that over the next five years the technical and organisational methods developed during the pilot project should be replicated throughout Botswana.

After a brief survey of the background to the project, the paper summarises several important features of the pilot project and its main findings. The paper closes with some comments on the implications of this pilot project for those currently underway in South Africa.     

Information processing and innovative choice

In this paper we examine how the information processing of subjects who make an innovative choice (innovators) differs from that of subjects who make a noninnovative choice (noninnovators). The task involves selection of an alternative within a range of prerated product category innovativeness. We propose that subjects who seek 1) impersonal/uncontrollable sources, 2) higher levels of information, 3) more detailed (versus summary) data, and 4) noncomparative (versus comparative) data are more likely to make innovative choices. The research method is a computerized process tracing experiment utilizing Search Monitor (Brucks 1988).The authors wish to express their gratitude to Merrie Brucks for the use of and help with Search Monitor and to Eric Johnson, Dave Schmittlein, and Mita Sujan for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

Basic needs: An assessment of education and nutritional status in two villages of Venda

A basic needs survey was conducted among people living on two agricultural smallholder schemes in Venda. The paper describes the research methodology and assesses the availability of education and the nutritional status of respondents on these two schemes.

Neither the availability of formal schooling nor extension work is satisfactory. The situation regarding primary education has improved over the last few years and almost every child in the survey area goes to school. This seems to be an indication of changing attitudes among parents, increased money available for schooling, as well as greater financial commitments from the Government. However, informal training through extension is carried out only on an irregular basis.

An assessment of the frequency of consumption of various foodstuffs suggests an emphasis on carbohydrates at the expense of proteins, minerals and vitamins. Villagers interviewed indicated that food is in short supply and that allocation of additional land could assist in overcoming these shortages.     

A hospital without walls

Pacific Presbyterian Medical Center has chalked up an impressive string of successes. What's ahead? A $20 million cancer center.