Short-run subsidies for health products are common in poor countries. How do they affect long-run adoption? A common fear among development practitioners is that one-off subsidies may negatively affect long-run adoption through referencedependence: People might anchor around the subsidized price and be unwilling to pay more for the product later. But for experience goods, one-off subsidies coul...

BACKGROUND Pay-for-performance is an increasingly popular approach to improving health care quality, and the US government will soon implement pay-for-performance in hospitals nationwide. Yet hospital capacity to perform (and improve performance) likely depends on local resources. In this study, we quantify the association between hospital performance and local economic and human resources, and...

www.PunterNet.com Several years ago, we came across the website, www.PunterNet.com. This British website advertises itself as ‘The Online Community for Patrons and Providers of Adult Personal Services in the UK’. The website was launched in 1999 and was described by the London Evening Standard as ‘…the most successful of the prostitute-reviewing internet sites.’ (see www.PunterNet.com). The sit...

A rm whose net earnings are uncertain, and that is subject to the risk of bankruptcy, must choose between paying dividends and retaining earnings in a liquid reserve. Also, diierent operating strategies imply diierent combinations of expected return and variance. We model the rm's cash reserve as the diierence between the cumulative net earnings and the cumulative dividends. The rst is a diiusi...

The paper studies a class of games, “All-Pay Contests”, which captures general asymmetries and sunk investments inherent in scenarios such as lobbying, competition for market power, labor-market tournaments, and R&D races. Players compete for one of several identical prizes by choosing a score. Conditional on winning or losing, it is weakly better to do so with a lower score. This formulation a...

Rapid growth of rural communities in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Macon County, North Carolina has been giving rise to concerns over declining environmental quality and increasing need for land-use policy. This paper examines willingness to pay (WTP) for hypothetical conservation easements as an alternative land-use policy for the county. Despite the fact that Macon County has struggled to adopt...

OBJECTIVE To examine parents' preferences and willingness-to-pay (WTP) for HPV vaccines. METHODS A discrete choice experiment (DCE) was used. Parents with at least one daughter aged 9-13 years residing in Songkhla province were asked to choose one alternative from each DCE choice set describing HPV vaccines by four attributes, including cervical cancer risk reduction, genital warts risk reduc...

Short-run subsidies for health products are common in poor countries. How do they affect long-run adoption? A common fear among development practitioners is that one-off subsidies may negatively affect long-run adoption through reference-dependence: People might anchor around the subsidized price and be unwilling to pay more for the product later. But for experience goods, one-off subsidies cou...

Promoting self-financing healthcare helps restore efficiency and equity to national health systems. This study was conducted in malaria-endemic areas of southern Ethiopia to assess the bednet possession of the community, determine the people's willingness-to-pay for insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs), and identify what factors influence it. The study provided relevant information for programme ...