In cost-sharing games with delays, a set of agents jointly uses subset resources. Each resource has fixed cost that to be shared by the players, and each agent nonshareable player-specific delay for resource. A separable protocol determines shares are budget-balanced, separable, guarantee existence pure Nash equilibria (PNE). We provide black-box reductions reducing design such an approximation...

The rapid increase of the proportion of older persons in society has made the problem of medical costs more important. Although medical cost-sharing for those aged 70 or more is decided by their medical costs and by the current proportion of such persons in the Society, it is not constant throughout the Society. The study evaluated the contribution ratio of medical cost-sharing for those aged 7...

This article provides a review of research that has addressed the impact of patient cost sharing on the use of services and resulting health status impacts, among the population age 65 and older. Nearly all of the 22 relevant studies examined that have been published since 1990-16 focusing on cost-sharing for prescription drugs and 6 on cost-sharing for medical services--conclude that increased...

We consider how to design network cost-sharing protocols to induce benign selfish behavior in large networks. We study this issue in network cost-sharing games, where the set of Nash equilibria depends fundamentally on the choice of the underlying edge cost-sharing protocols. We seek cost-sharing protocols that minimize the inefficiency of equilibria in the resulting network design game, as mea...

Using data from 49 states and Washington, D.C., we analyzed changes in cost-sharing under health plans offered to individuals and families through state and federal exchanges from 2014 to 2015. We examined eight vehicles for cost-sharing, including deductibles, copayments, coinsurance, and out-of-pocket limits, and compared findings with cost-sharing under employer-based insurance. We found cos...

As policymakers look for savings from the Medicare program, some have proposed eliminating or discouraging "first-dollar coverage" available through privately purchased Medigap policies. Medigap coverage, which beneficiaries obtain to protect themselves from Medicare's cost-sharing requirements and its lack of a cap on out-of-pocket spending, may discourage the judicious use of medical services...

The allocation of risks among the contracting parties in a contract is an important decision affecting the project success. Some risks in a project are uncontrollable; these are imposed to a project by external factors. Since contracting parties can neither control nor affect the occurrence of such risks, their allocation to a party would be inequitable. Therefore the cost overrun related to un...

In multi-point Internet communication such as multicast, sometimes there is the need to share the cost of communication between the several agents involved in the connection. This work presents some of the most commonly used incentive-compatible, individual-rational mechanisms that select the participating users and their cost share in a multicast transmission, focusing on efficiency and/or bud...