Efficiency outcomes of market concentration and managed care

The paper examines how hospital cost efficiency has reacted to extensive horizontal integrations of hospitals and rapid growth of managed care in the US health care industry. Cost efficiency is estimated by using panel data approaches to relax the assumptions for the hospital effects imposed in earlier studies. The paper shows that higher managed care penetration over time is associated with greater hospital efficiency, and higher market concentration is positively associated with efficiency when markets are highly competitive or highly concentrated.     

当前物价运行及其未来发展趋势

2011年8月以来，CPI同比涨幅持续回落，全年CPI上涨5．4％。从2012年物价走势看，受政策滞后效应和上年同期基数效应影响，上半年物价有望延续回落趋势，而随着政策微调和宏观经济回升，下半年物价重拾升势的可能性较大。预计2012年全年CPI涨幅为3．6％左右。综合考虑我国工业化发展阶段、刘易斯拐点与资源品价格市场化改革等因素来看，中长期内物价仍存在上涨压力。     

Singapore＇s Investments More Involved in China＇s Urbanization

<正>Singapore,a nation of merely around 5 million population,invested US＄5.657 billion to China in 2010,according to statistics from Ministry of Commerce of P.R....     

Dynamic routing of time-sensitive air cargo using real-time information

The route planning of time-sensitive air-cargo is becoming more important with the growing air-network congestion and delays. We consider a freight forwarder’s routing of a time-sensitive air-cargo in the presence of real-time and historical information regarding flight availability, departure delays and travel times. A departure delay estimation model is developed to account for real-time information inaccuracy. A novel Markov decision model is formulated and solved with online backward induction. Through synthetic experiments and case studies, we demonstrate that dynamic routing with real-time information can improve delivery reliability and reduce expected cost.     

The Operations Management of the Shanghai Expo Sees Great Success ——Special interview with Mohammed AI Ghamdi,Saudi Arabia Pavilion＇s executive director

The Saudi Arabia Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, is a huge boat-shaped building like a half moon with a fantastic 3D IMAX theater within, and it has attracte＇d a great number of vis＇itors since it-was opened to public. At times it would take 10 hours standing in the queue betore visitors would make it through the doors. Covering a total ＇area of 6,000 square meters, the Saudi Arabia Pavilion ranks second only to the Chinese National Pavilion in terms of total size.