When nutritional guidelines and life collide: family fruit and vegetable socialisation practices in low socioeconomic communities

Abstract

Parents play a critical role in promoting fruit and vegetable consumption, for eating patterns established early in life tend to persist into adulthood. Despite this, the factors that facilitate or inhibit parents’ capacity to socialise fruit and vegetable consumption into their children’s daily diets remain poorly defined. Thirty-eight semi-structured interviews with residents, allied healthcare professionals, community leaders, community programme leaders and a local government leader living or working in two low socioeconomic suburbs were consequently conducted to ascertain factors exogenous and endogenous to the family unit that shaped parental food socialisation practices. Budgetary and time constraints emerged as exogenous factors that constrained fruit and vegetable socialisation. Constraining effects were also found for a range of endogenous factors, including commensal experiences, children’s food fussiness and the feeding styles employed by parents. As such, while many caregivers may wish to socialise fruit and vegetable consumption into their children’s daily diets, their capacity to do so is often inhibited by factors beyond their volitional control. Failure to take heed of these factors could therefore result in the development of social marketing campaigns that are ineffective at best or give rise to unintentionally harmful outcomes at worst.     

Management of European fast reactor R&D

Since 1984 government-funded fast reactor R&D in France, Germany and the UK has been run as a collaborative activity, and since 1988 as a unified programme in support of the design and construction of the advanced European Fast Reactor. This paper describes the international management structure which has been set up, and the means used to control the work. It is written from the point of view of those engaged in the project, and makes no attempt at a formal analysis of the structure.
The main difficulty is that control of funding remains with the three governments. The R&D programme has to be managed so that it meets the needs of each government separately as well as the designers' requirements.
To start with the management structure was excessively bureaucratic, but it has become more flexible and efficient. This has happened as the initial nationalistic suspicions have broken down, and the staff engaged in the work have learnt more about each others' ways of working so that an atmosphere of trust and inter-dependence has grown up.
(This paper was written before the changes in UK policy on fast reactor development were announced in November 1992.)     

Three differential variables and their relation to retail strategy and profitability

The primary objective of this study is to evaluate three variables utilized frequently within the retail grocery industry to gain a differential advantage within a target market. These variables are Trading Stamps, Credit, and Delivery. Essentially, the study seeks to determine whether these differential variables are related to retail strategy and retail store profitability for a selected group of retail grocery stores belonging to a retailer cooperative. The study also seeks to determine if the utilization of the differential variables creates any profitability changes within the basic retailing strategy variables of the researched respondents.     

OPTIMAL RULES FOR PATENT RACES*

There are two important rules to patent races: minimal accomplishment necessary to receive the patent and the allocation of the innovation benefits. We study the optimal combination of these rules. A planner, who cannot distinguish between competing firms in a multistage innovation race, chooses the patent rules by maximizing either consumer or social surplus. We show that efficiency cost of prizes is a key consideration. Races are undesirable only when efficiency costs are low, firms are similar, and social surplus is maximized. Otherwise, the optimal policy involves a race of nontrivial duration to spur innovation and filter out inferior innovators.     

Dynamic stochastic games with random moves

We reformulate the quality ladder model of Pakes and McGuire, Rand Journal of Economics, 25(4), 555–589 (1994) as a dynamic stochastic game with random moves in which each period one firm is picked at random to make an investment decision. Contrasting this model to the standard version with simultaneous moves illustrates the computational advantages of random moves. In particular, the quality ladder model with random moves avoids the curse of dimensionality in computing firms’ expectations over all possible future states and is therefore orders of magnitude faster to solve than its counterpart with simultaneous moves when there are more than just a few firms. Perhaps unexpectedly, the equilibria of the quality ladder model with random moves are practically indistinguishable from those of the model with simultaneous moves.

     

Costs of hospital visits among patients with deep vein thrombosis treated with rivaroxaban and LMWH/warfarin

Background:

For many years, the standard of care for patients diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis (DVT) has been low-molecular-weight heparin (LMWH) bridging to an oral Vitamin-K antagonist (VKA). The availability of new non-VKA oral anticoagulants (NOAC) agents as monotherapy may reduce the likelihood of hospitalization for DVT patients.

Objective:

To compare hospital visit costs of DVT patients treated with rivaroxaban and LMWH/warfarin.

Methods:

A retrospective claim analysis was conducted using the MarketScan Hospital Drug Database for care provided between January 2011 and December 2013. Adult patients using rivaroxaban or LMWH/warfarin with a primary diagnosis of DVT during the first day of a hospital visit were identified (i.e., index hospital visit). Based on propensity-score methods, historical LMWH/warfarin patients (i.e., patients who received LMWH/warfarin before the approval of rivaroxaban) were matched 4:1 to rivaroxaban patients. The hospital-visit cost difference between these groups was evaluated for the index hospital visit, as well as for total hospital-visit costs (i.e., including index and subsequent hospital visit costs).

Results:

All rivaroxaban users (n?=?134) in the database were well-matched with four LMWH/warfarin users (n?=?536). The mean hospital-visit costs were $5257 for the rivaroxaban cohort and $6764 in the matched-cohort of patients using LMWH/warfarin. The $1508 cost difference was statistically significant between cohorts (95% CI?=?[?$2296; ?$580]; p-value?=?0.002). Total hospital-visit costs were lower for rivaroxaban compared to LMWH/warfarin users within 1, 2, 3, and 6 months after index visit (significantly lower within 1 and 3 months, p-values <0.05)

Limitations:

Limitations were inherent to administrative-claims data, completeness of baseline characteristics, adjustments restricted to observational factors, and lastly the sample size of the rivaroxaban cohort.

Conclusion:

The availability of rivaroxaban significantly reduced the costs of hospital visits in patients with DVT treated with rivaroxaban compared to LMWH/warfarin.     

Computational suite of models with heterogeneous agents: Incomplete markets and aggregate uncertainty

This paper describes the first model considered in the computational suite project that compares different numerical algorithms. It is an incomplete markets economy with a continuum of agents and an inequality (borrowing) constraint.     

The Sound of One Hand Clapping: The 2010 Merger Guidelines and the Challenge of Judicial Adoption

There is ample justification for the consensus view that the Horizontal Merger Guidelines have proven one of antitrust law??s great successes in the grounding of antitrust doctrine within economic learning. The foundation of the Guidelines?? success has been its widespread adoption by federal courts, which have embraced its rigorous underlying economic logic and analytical approach to merger analysis under the Clayton Act. While some have suggested that the Guidelines?? most recent iteration might jeopardize this record of judicial adoption by downplaying the role of market definition and updating its unilateral effects analysis, we believe that these updates are generally beneficial and include long-overdue shifts away from antiquated structural presumptions in favor of analyzing competitive effects directly where possible. However, this article explores a different reason to be concerned that the 2010 Guidelines may not enjoy widespread judicial adoption: the 2010 Guidelines asymmetrically update economic insights underlying merger analysis. While the 2010 Guidelines?? updated economic thinking on market definition and unilateral effects will likely render the prima facie burden facing plaintiffs easier to satisfy in merger analysis moving forward, and thus have significant practical impact, the Guidelines do not correspondingly update efficiencies analysis, leaving it largely as it first appeared 13 years earlier. We discuss two well-qualified candidates for ??economic updates?? of efficiencies analysis under the Guidelines: (1) out-of-market efficiencies and (2) fixed-cost savings. We conclude with some thoughts about the implications of the asymmetric updates for judicial adoption of the 2010 Guidelines.