Intense scrutiny of the American healthcare paradigm will alter the activities of patients, providers, and payors. Government reform and marketplace-driven managed care programs create uncertainty. Quality, access, and cost concerns also drive change. Quality is conformity to requirements, and specification of requirements creates policy debate. Variability in utilization creates an accountabil...

BACKGROUND Swedish nursing home care has undergone a transformation, where the previous virtual public monopoly on providing such services has been replaced by a system of mixed provision. This has led to a rapidly growing share of private actors, the majority of which are large, for-profit firms. In the wake of this development, concerns have been voiced regarding the implications for care qua...

After the introduction of public long-term care insurance in 2000, for-profit facilities were allowed to enter the at-home care market in Japan, where nonprofits are dominant. However, according to a popular hypothesis called the “contract failure,” nonprofit centers are preferred over for-profit counterparts due to an asymmetry of information. If this is the case, a change in competition polic...

Unlicensed spectrum has been viewed as a way to increase competition in wireless access and promote innovation in new technologies and business models. However, several recent papers have shown that the openness of such spectrum can also lead to it becoming over congested when used by competing wireless service providers (SPs). This in turn can result in the SPs making no profit and may deter t...

The data sponsored scheme allows the content provider to cover parts of the cellular data costs for mobile users. Thus the content service becomes appealing to more users and potentially generates more profit gain to the content provider. In this paper, we consider a sponsored data market with a monopoly network service provider, a single content provider, and multiple users. In particular, we ...

There have been heated debates on the controversial role of healthcare Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) which negotiate contracts with vendor on the behalf of healthcare providers. These GPOs cover their costs by charging manufacturers ‘‘Contract Admi nistrative Fees,’’ instead of being reimbursed by the providers. This causes conflicts of interests. Therefore, purchasing through GPOs migh...

Cooperative cloud providers in the form of federations can potentially reduce their energy costs by exploiting electricity price fluctuations across different locations. In this environment, on one hand, has a significant influence formed, and, thus, profit earned providers, and other cooperation an inevitable impact performance smart grid. regard, interaction between independent grid is modele...

The heterogeneous networks belonging to different service providers (SPs) form a coalition system for maximizing the profit, where they may either compete or cooperate with each other. In this paper, we introduce Lokta-Volterra model, a differntial dynamics model, to build the competitive and cooperative mechanisms of heterogeneous networks. It considers the natural growth rate of the network i...