n engl j med 366;21 nejm.org may 24, 2012 1949 distributive justice. But in the United States, ethical debate is now shifting from rationing to the avoidance of waste. This little-noticed shift has important policy implications. Whereas the “R word” is a proverbial third rail in politics, ethicists rush in where politicians fear to tread. The ethics of rationing begins with two considerations. ...

Centile values and growth charts for height, weight and arm circumference are presented for school children aged six to 12 years in Shiraz (Iran). The smooth centile values have been derived from the raw data by Healy's nonparametric method. Girls grow faster than boys. Homogeneity of data with population structure and universal rationing imply that these norms are likely to be appropriate...

We consider a seller who can sell her product over two periods, advance and spot. The seller has private information about the product quality, which is unknown to customers in advance and publicly revealed in spot. The question we consider is whether the seller has an incentive to signal quality in advance and, if so, how she can convey a credible signal of product quality. We characterize the...

W study the effect of strategic customer behavior on pricing and rationing decisions of a firm selling a single product over two periods. The seller may limit the availability of the product (that is, ration) in the second (clearance) period. Some customers are strategic and respond to the firm’s decisions by timing their purchases. When capacity is nonconstraining and the seller has pricing fl...

BACKGROUND Evidence internationally suggests that staffing constraints and non-supportive work environments result in the rationing of nursing interventions (that is, limiting or omitting interventions for particular patients), which in turn may influence patient outcomes. In the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), preliminary studies have found that discharge preparation and infant comfort ca...

Society should not accept the inevitability of rationing medical resources, at least not in the short term. Because of the high degree of waste and duplication that characterize the Canadian and, even more, the American healthcare system, the invitation to focus on rationing procedures known to be useful is likely to divert attention from the need to eliminate waste. If and when extensive ratio...

This paper compares and contrasts three different substantive (as opposed to procedural) principles of justice for making health care priority-setting or "rationing" decisions: need principles, maximising principles and egalitarian principles. The principles are compared by tracing out their implications for a hypothetical rationing decision involving four identified patients. This decision has...

D pricing offers the potential to increase revenues. At the same time, it creates an incentive for customers to strategize over the timing of their purchases. A firm should ideally account for this behavior when making its pricing and stocking decisions. In particular, we investigate whether it is optimal for a firm to create rationing risk by deliberately understocking products. Then, the resu...

The saturation of resources ational Airspace System (e.g. runways, fossil fuels, and water and air quality) obliges regulatory authorities to trade off performance and equity parameters to maximize the efficiency of the system as a whole. Researchers have conducted analysis of trade-offs using utility theory. The value of utility theory trade-offs is subject to: (i) the validity of the paramete...