his paper investigates the conformity of market participants’ decisions with the Islamic codes of conduct from the economic and philosophical perspectives. At the outset, the contributions of the renowned contemporary Muslim philosophers on the epistemological issues between the “is” and the “ought” are presented. Subsequently, a synthesized construct that would resolve the dichotomy between th...

ARTICLE TEXT The United States Food and Drug Modernization Act (FDAMA) took effect in 1998 with high expectations from the pharmacoeconomics community. Section 114 of the Act stipulated the conditions under which drug companies could promote health economic information to their managed care customers, and seemingly would make it easier for pharmacoeconomic modelers and outcomes researchers to c...

Pharmacoeconomic analysis is aimed at supporting choices between alternatives available for the efficient management of specific conditions. Aim of the paper is to provide an overview of the main features of pharmacoeconomic evaluations, with the objective of providing the reader with the basic tools necessary to read and interpret or to design and conduct a pharmacoeconomic analysis in RA and ...

In the last years, a number of contributions has argued that monetary – and, more generally, economic – policy is finally becoming more of a science. According to these authors, policy rules implemented by central banks are nowadays well supported by a theoretical framework (the New Neoclassical Synthesis) upon which a general consensus has emerged in the economic profession. In other words, sc...

This paper describes an application of agent-based modeling to investigate the effect of a distance-based transaction cost on trade. Long-distance trade is rapidly increasing, but may ultimately be constrained by our ability to move material goods between sellers and buyers. Unlike information exchange, trade in material goods is dependent on the price of oil and vulnerable to future scarcities...

This paper presents a model of influence where agents’ beliefs are based on an objective reality, such as the properties of an environment. The perception of the objective reality is not direct: all agents know is that the more correct a belief, the more successful the actions that are deduced from this belief. A pair of agents can influence eachother when they perform joint action. They are no...

Increasingly, corporate health promotion programs are implementing wellness programs integrating principles of behavioral economics. Employees of a large firm were provided a customized online incentive program to design their own commitments to meet health goals. This study examines patterns of program participation and engagement in health promotion activities. Subjects were US-based employee...

Health economic evaluations have recently become an important part of the clinical and medical research process and have built upon more advanced statistical decision-theoretic foundations. In some contexts, it is officially required that uncertainty about both parameters and observable variables be properly taken into account, increasingly often by means of Bayesian methods. Among these, proba...