statement of problem: the connector area is the weakest zone of an all-ceramic fixed partial denture (fpd), where most catastrophic failures of the prostheses tend to occur. purpose: the aim of the present study was to assess the effect of the convergence angle of abutments on the fracture resistance of three-unit fixed partial dentures made of ips-empress2. materials and methods: forty extract...

Recent developments, such as privatization and the private finance initiative, have raised the issue of which assets should be owned by the public sector and whether assets have different values in the public and private sectors. In order to answer these questions, we first note that the allocative considerations that usually motivate government intervention need not require the direct provisio...

In an earlier paper, we showed that, in a multi-period setting (but with no multi-period commitment) with two client types (adverse selection) and a competitive insurer environment, a comparasin between periodic repetitions of the classic Rothschild-Stiglitz separating equilibrium contract menu and a second contract based on Bayesian learning (which we identify as a bonus-malus contract) yields...

Suppose that consumers incur fixed shopping costs and choose stores according to advertised discounts. Then, the extent to which a store will discount advertised items should increase with the profit from other regularly-priced items. Bookstores customarily advertise discounts on bestsellers. Among conventional bookstores, we found that the bestseller discount systematically increased with the ...

For developing design envionment for various types of Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor Arrays (DRPAs), the GCI (Graph with Configuration Information) is proposed to represent configurable resource in the target dynamically reconfigurable architecture. The function unit, constant unit, register, and routing resource can be represented in the graph as well as the configuration information. Th...

BACKGROUND Most health technology economic evaluations simulate only the prevalent cohort or the next incident cohort of patients. They therefore do not capture all future patient-related benefits and costs. OBJECTIVE We show how to estimate and aggregate the incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs) for both currently eligible (prevalent) and future (incident) patient cohorts within the ...

The ordering model between single supplier and multi-retailers under the circumstance of non-cooperation supply chain is discussed in this paper, an improved linear price discount strategy is also provided. This strategy considers two situations of incremental discount and decremental discount at the same time. Moreover, Stackelberg game model of both parties’ order on supply and demand is give...

This paper explores the circumstances under which extremely discounted usability engineering techniques produce results that are worthwhile to researchers and practitioners. We present a method for usability analysis where an entire evaluation can be conducted in only thirty minutes, an amount of time we suggest as perhaps the smallest possible unit of analysis (or quantum) for complete usabili...