The first question addressed in this analysis was, To what extent do hospitals in Miami-Dade County share the burden of providing care to the uninsured? A subsidiary question was, What sources of revenue are accessed by Miami-Dade County hospitals? These questions were raised during a discussion of hospital-specific financial information prepared by the Florida Hospital Association (FHA) for 19...

In social environments, decisions not only determine rewards for oneself but also for others. However, individual differences in pro-social behaviors have been typically studied through self-report. We developed a decision-making paradigm in which participants chose from card decks with differing rewards for themselves and charity; some decks gave similar rewards to both, while others gave high...

We consider utilitarian models of altruism constrained by limited willingness to sacrifice self-interest. By these models donors should strive to maximize the good they do, within the constraint. We describe several departures from predictions of these models and provide new data on some of them, based on studies conducted on the World Wide Web. We find: people focus on minimizing operating cos...

Auctions are a popular way to raise money for charities, but relatively little is known, either theoretically or empirically, about the properties of charity auctions. We conduct field experiments to see which sealed bid format, first price, second price or all-pay, raises the most money. Our experiment suggests that both the all-pay and second price formats are dominated by the first price auc...

Like US Independence Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, disease awareness has made it into the US calendar. In 2012 we have 175 officially designated “national health observances,” including rabies day, sleep awareness week, endometriosis awareness month, and many observances for heart disease and a variety of cancers.None is more prominent than breast cancer awareness month, otherwise known as ...

Médecins Sans Frontières was there at the start of the current Ebola outbreak in west Africa and has played a pivotal role in the global response—building health centres, training care staff, and even advising the United Nations, writes Sophie Arie. The charity has decades of experience in bringing volunteer doctors to where they are needed in emergency situations and for longer term humanitari...

A mammoth project to map the addresses of 200 million people aims to help Médecins Sans Frontières to deliver better medical care worldwide, writes Jane Feinmann.The charity has decades of experience in bringing volunteer doctors to where they are needed in emergency situations and longer term humanitarian projects. This is why The BMJ has chosen MSF for its Christmas charity appeal this year. ...