Australian consumer attitudes to health claim – food product compatibility for functional foods

This study with Australian consumers investigated how appealing different health claims combined with particular food carriers were to Australian consumers, and compared the results of a similar study with Dutch consumers. 149 shoppers considered up to 30 different food concepts, rating how ‘attractive’, ‘believable’, and ‘new and different’ they found each concept and their ‘intention to try’. Each variable was significantly related to intention to try (p < 0.001) and together explained 56% of the intention score. Claims and carriers independently had a significant effect on ratings of attractiveness and intention to try but, unlike the Dutch study, the carrier was a more important predictor of intention to purchase than the claim. Implications for regulation of health claims for food are discussed.     

Combating deceptive advertisements and labelling on food products – an exploratory study on the perceptions of teachers

People are becoming more health conscious nowadays, but most of them are not able to adopt a lifestyle with adequate physical exercise and a healthier eating pattern. Many attempt to compensate by taking ‘health foods’. Despite the recent economic recession, the functional food market is expanding rapidly in Asian countries. Recent statistics indicate a huge increase in weight loss and functional food product advertising expenditure in Hong Kong and other Asian countries. In a large scale survey conducted by the Hong Kong Consumer Council on advertisements, it was found that 85% of the medicines, health food and therapies sampled contain questionable claims and misleading messages, which was the second most problematic category of the survey. In addition, young people do not understand much about modern food processing, in particular with regard to low energy and functional foods, and they know very little about modern food marketing strategies. The situation is potentially detrimental to consumer welfare, especially to the younger generation. This study was conducted to reflect critically on implications of the issue on the health and well‐being of young people in Hong Kong. Attempts are made to explore directions for designing relevant and effective education programmes to empower young people's abilities in understanding food advertising strategies and making informed decisions on food choice. This paper begins with a critical review of the current situation with regard to Hong Kong. Then, the results of an interview survey and a questionnaire survey on pre‐service and in‐service teachers’ perception towards misleading food advertising and labelling are reported. The situations at schools are defined and problems faced by teachers in providing relevant consumer education programmes to students are identified. Finally, some prospective foci for further investigation of this important issue, with a view to developing students’ critical skills in evaluating claims offered in food advertisements, will be considered.     

浅析铁路工程调概索赔策略

铁路项目造价控制是通过概算来控制的,设计院出据的经审核的核备概算是在初步设计基础上编制的,但投资检算仅是对设计的一种考核而不是工程造价的控制指标。这就造成由于设计深度不同造成工程造价不能反映最终的工程施工情况,设计院为了不受到处罚,在投检编制过程中出现可能超概算的情况时,采用人为降低造价标准或一些需发生项目不计算费用的办法,来使投检额控制在概算范围内。为此,如何做好铁路工程的调概索赔管理、通过项目经营求得效益最大化更具挑战性。     

Financial markets with volatility uncertainty

We investigate financial markets under model risk caused by uncertain volatilities. To this end, we consider a financial market that features volatility uncertainty. We use the notion of G-expectation and its corresponding G-Brownian motion recently introduced by Peng (2007) to ensure a mathematically consistent framework. Our financial market consists of a riskless asset and a risky stock with price process modeled by geometric G-Brownian motion. We adapt the notion of arbitrage to this more complex situation, and consider stock price dynamics which exclude arbitrage opportunities. Volatility uncertainty results in an incomplete market. We establish the interval of no-arbitrage prices for general European contingent claims, and deduce explicit results in the Markovian case.     

Economic outcomes of exenatide vs liraglutide in type 2 diabetes patients in the United States: results from a retrospective claims database analysis

Abstract

Objective:

The safety and efficacy of the GLP-1 receptor agonists exenatide BID (exenatide) and liraglutide for treating type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) have been established in clinical trials. Effective treatments may lower overall treatment costs. This study examined cost offsets and medication adherence for exenatide vs liraglutide in a large, managed care population in the US.

Methods:

This was a retrospective cohort analysis comprising adult patients with T2DM who initiated exenatide or liraglutide between 1/1/2010 and 6/30/2010 and had 6 months pre-index and post-index continuous eligibility. Patients were propensity score-matched to controls for baseline differences. Medication adherence was measured by proportion of days covered (PDC). Paired t-test and McNemar’s test were used to compare outcomes.

Results:

Matched exenatide and liraglutide cohorts (n?=?1347 pairs) had similar average total 6-month follow-up costs ($6688 vs $7346). However, exenatide patients had significantly lower mean pharmacy costs ($2925 vs $3272, p?<?0.001). Among liraglutide patients, patients receiving the 1.8?mg dose had significantly higher average total costs compared to those receiving the 1.2?mg dose ($8031 vs $6536, p?=?0.026), with higher mean pharmacy costs in the 1.8?mg cohort ($3935 vs $3146, p?<?0.001). There were no significant differences in inpatient or outpatient costs or medication adherence between groups (mean PDC: exenatide 56% vs liraglutide 57%, p?=?0.088).

Limitations:

The study assumed that all information needed for case classification and matching of cohorts was present and not differential across cohorts. The study did not control for covariates that were unavailable, such as HbA1c and duration of diabetes.

Conclusions:

Patients initiating exenatide vs liraglutide for T2DM had similar medication adherence and total healthcare costs; however, exenatide patients had significantly lower total pharmacy costs. Patients prescribed 1.8?mg liraglutide had significantly higher costs compared to those on 1.2?mg.     

Pediatric gastroesophageal reflux disease and acid-related conditions: trends in incidence of diagnosis and acid suppression therapy

Abstract

Objective: To describe the incidence of diagnosis of gastroesophageal reflux disease and acid-related conditions (GERD/ARC) throughout childhood and characterize patterns of diagnosis and treatment with proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) and histamine-2 receptor antagonists (H₂RAs).

Methods: Cohorts of GERD/ARC children (age 0–18 years) were identified from a large US administrative claims database covering 1999–2005 using ICD-9 codes. Incidence, healthcare utilization (HCU), costs, therapy discontinuation and switching rates were compared between various age and patient groups.

Results: Between 2000 and 2005 annual incidence of GERD/ARC diagnosis among infants (age ≤1 year) more than tripled (from 3.4 to 12.3%) and increased by 30% to 50% in other age groups. Patients diagnosed by GI specialists (9.2%) were more likely to be treated with PPIs compared to patients diagnosed by primary care physician (PCP). PPI-initiated patients doubled (from 31.5% in 1999 to 62.6% in 2005) and, when compared with H₂RA-initiated patients, were associated with 30% less discontinuation and 90% less therapy switching in the first month, and with higher comorbidity burden and pre-treatment total HCU and costs when diagnosed by GI specialists.

Limitations: The use of an exploratory definition for GERD/ARC, administrative claims data and potential coding errors in diagnosis codes used in selection process may limit the generalizability of the results.

Conclusions: GERD/ARC incidence increased for children of all ages between 2000 and 2005. PCPs made the majority of diagnoses. PPI initiations have now surpassed H₂RA initiations.     

On financial guarantee insurance under stochastic interest rates

We extend the financial guarantee insurance literature by modeling, under stochastic interest rates, private financial guarantees when the guarantor potentially defaults. By performing numerical simulations under plausible parameters values, we characterize the differential impact of the incorporation of stochasticity of interest rates on the valuation of both public and private guarantees.     

Separation of small and large claims on the basis of collective models

This paper is inspired by two papers of Riegel who proposed to consider the paid and incurred loss development of the individual claims and to use a filter in order to separate small and large claims and to construct loss development squares for the paid or incurred small or large claims and for the numbers of large claims. We show that such loss development squares can be constructed from collective models for the accident years. Moreover, under certain assumptions on these collective models, we show that a development pattern exists for each of these loss development squares, which implies that various methods of loss reserving can be used for prediction and that the chain ladder method is a natural method for the prediction of future numbers of large claims.     

On the discounted aggregate claim costs until ruin in dependent Sparre Andersen risk processes

In this paper, a dependent Sparre Andersen risk process in which the joint density of the interclaim time and the resulting claim severity satisfies the factorization as in Willmot and Woo is considered. We study a generalization of the Gerber–Shiu function (i) whose penalty function further depends on the surplus level immediately after the second last claim before ruin; and (ii) which involves the moments of the discounted aggregate claim costs until ruin. The generalized discounted density with a moment-based component proposed in Cheung plays a key role in deriving recursive defective renewal equations. We pay special attention to the case where the marginal distribution of the interclaim times is Coxian, and the required components in the recursion are obtained. A reverse type of dependency structure, where the claim severities follow a combination of exponentials, is also briefly discussed, and this leads to a nice explicit expression for the expected discounted aggregate claims until ruin. Our results are applied to generate some numerical examples involving (i) the covariance of the time of ruin and the discounted aggregate claims until ruin; and (ii) the expectation, variance and third central moment of the discounted aggregate claims until ruin.     

Claims frequency modeling using telematics car driving data

We investigate the predictive power of covariates extracted from telematics car driving data using the speed-acceleration heatmaps of Gao, G. & Wüthrich, M. V. [(2017). Feature extraction from telematics car driving heatmaps. SSRN ID: 3070069]. These telematics covariates include K-means classification, principal components, and bottleneck activations from a bottleneck neural network. In the conducted case study it turns out that the first principal component and the bottleneck activations give a better out-of-sample prediction for claims frequencies than other traditional pricing factors such as driver's age. Based on these numerical examples we recommend the use of these telematics covariates for car insurance pricing.