The framework rules within which either market or political activity takes place must be classified in the non-partitionability set under the Samuelson taxonomy. Therefore there is nothing comparable to the profit-loss dynamic of the market that will insure any continuing thrust toward more desirable rules. ‘Public choice’ has at least partially succeeded in getting economists to remove the rom...

OBJECTIVE In 1992, the American Association for Partial Hospitalization initiated a national survey of partial hospitalization providers to investigate their present status (programming, staffing, and pricing), to track market trends, and to improve advocacy for appropriate utilization and reimbursement. METHOD Instrument development and field testing preceded widespread distribution of the s...

BACKGROUND Low and inconsistent use of contraceptives by young people contributes to unintended pregnancies. This study assessed quality of contraceptive services for young people aged 15-24 in two rural districts in Uganda. METHODS Five female and two male simulated clients (SCs) interacted with 128 providers at public, private not-for-profit (PNFP), and private for profit (PFP) health facil...

We conduct an empirical analysis of quality competition between broadband Internet Service Providers (ISPs), using National Broadband Map data for 2011-2013 for almost a thousand local markets in California. We examine how incumbent ADSL firms respond to competition from CLECs and cable modem service providers. We use an important quality attribute, the downstream data rate, and estimate the st...

Cloud Computing is an emerging style of IT delivery in which applications, data and IT resources are rapidly provisioned and provided as standardized offerings to users called consumers over the web in a flexible pricing model. Cloud provider is responsible for providing quality of services to cloud consumers. A cloud typically contains a significant pool of resources, which could be reallocate...

The public cloud “infrastructure as a service” market possesses unique features that make it difficult to predict longrun economic behavior. On the one hand, major providers buy their hardware from the same manufacturers, operate in similar locations and offer a similar menu of products. On the other hand, the competitors use different proprietary “fabric” to manage virtualization, resource all...

We study a nonatomic congestion game with N parallel links, with each link under the control of a profit maximizing provider. Within this ‘load balancing game’, each provider has the freedom to set a price, or toll, for access to the link and seeks to maximize its own profit. Given prices, a Wardrop equilibrium among users is assumed, under which users all choose paths ofminimal and identical e...

A primary driving force of the recent cloud computing paradigm is its inherent cost effectiveness. As in many basic utilities, such as electricity and water, consumers/clients in cloud computing environments are charged based on their service usage; hence the term ‘pay-per-use’. While this pricing model is very appealing for both service providers and consumers, fluctuating service request volu...

Resource provisioning plays a major role in the cloud computing environment due to increased number of cloud users. The user satisfaction level can be improves in the considerable manner by provisioning the resources to the users which can process them with more profit. In this research work, resource provisioning is done with the consideration of the objective called profit. The profit of clou...

OBJECTIVES The use of external consultants from private and not-for-profit providers in the National Health Service (NHS) is intended to improve the quality of commissioning. The aim of this study was to learn about the support offered to healthcare commissioners, how external consultants and their clients work together and the perceived impact on the quality of commissioning. SETTING NHS com...