In 2009, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts implemented a global budget-based payment system, the Alternative Quality Contract (AQC), in which provider groups assumed accountability for spending. We investigate the impact of global budgets on the utilization of prescription drugs and related expenditures. Our analyses indicate no statistically significant evidence that the AQC reduced the ...

The increasing cost of health care delivery, coupled with reduced investments and budget cuts in European health care systems, has had a severe negative impact on health care delivery in Spain. This reduction in spending has had particularly negative effects on specialties that are heavily reliant on large capital investments to purchase the latest technologies needed to deliver optimal radioth...

This paper examines the effects of time budget pressure, risk associated with the task, and audit test on three reduced audit quality (RAQ) behaviors. Specifically, the study evaluated RAQ acts using three situations, including the perceived likelihood of rejecting awkward items from a sample (Situation A), accepting doubtful audit evidence (Situation B), and failing to test all items in the sa...

An automated market maker is a natural and common mechanism to subsidize information acquisition, revelation, and aggregation in a prediction market. The sought-after prediction aggregate is the equilibrium price. However, traders with budget constraints are restricted in their ability to impact the market price on their own. We give a detailed characterization of optimal trades in the presence...

Introduction: Introducing biosimilar infliximab for the treatment in rheumatology (rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis) and inflammatory bowel disease (Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis) may reduce treatment costs associated with biologics. This study aimed to investigate the budget impact of adopting biosimilar infliximab in five European countries, considering that the budget...

In this paper, we argue that the bulk of EU budget spending can be attributed to measures of the distribution of voting power in the Council of Ministers. Using such estimates, we compare incumbent member states' predicted budget receipts before and after eastern enlargement, and examine the impact of different voting rules in EU-27. According to our estimates eastern enlargement has large effe...

A declared objective of the EU is to provide support for the rural and poor regions of its member states. Recent research shows, however, that past EU budget allocations (in EU-15) can be explained, to a large extent, by measures of the distribution of voting power in the Council of Ministers deciding on the bulk of EU spending. Yet, empirical evidence indicates that also the “needs” of the mem...