Background Both rising healthcare costs and the global financial crisis have fueled a search for policy tools in order to avoid unsustainable future financing of essential health benefits. The scope of essential health benefits (the range of services covered) and depth of coverage (the proportion of costs of the covered benefits that is covered publicly) are corresponding variables in determini...

n engl j med 358;4 www.nejm.org january 24, 2008 411 In this issue of the Journal, Trivedi and colleagues1 examine the effect of cost sharing on the use of screening mammography among women enrolled in Medicare managed-care plans from 2001 to 2004. Focusing on more than 350,000 women between the ages of 65 and 69 years, the authors show that cost sharing — either in the form of copayments (in w...

In the real business environment, due to unpredictable market demand or high prediction difficulty and low accuracy, there will be inevitably operational loss in field of e-commerce logistics caused by undersupply oversupply express service capabilities. At present, China is deepening supply-side structural reforms. Confronted with growing for delivery, especially urgent tackling orders piling ...

Information sharing is an important component of cooperation in supply chain management. This paper presents a study to evaluate the impact of information sharing on inventory and expected cost in a two-level supply chain with multiple retailers. Three levels of information sharing are given and the optimal inventory policy under each level is derived. We show that both the inventory level and ...

It is well-known that there is no cost-sharing mechanism that is budget balanced, efficient, and dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC). The Vickrey auction is DSIC and efficient, but raises surplus revenue. In an environment where players have constant marginal values, we introduce the subsidized Vickrey auction (SVA) that uses surplus revenue to offset some of the production costs. By ...

Profit-sharing rules applied together with open-book accounting are a synergetic combination that encourages SME networks to continuous innovation. This paper studies profit-sharing rules that work as incentives for cost reduction in networks. We describe a case study of a steel-roof manufacturing and assembly network, where profit sharing became relevant shortly after open-book accounting was ...

Consider a group of agents located along polluted river where every agent must pay certain cost for cleaning up the river. Following model Ni and Wang (2007), we propose class alpha-Local Responsibility Sharing methods, which generalizes Local (LRS) method Upstream Equal (UES) method. We fi rst show that UES is characterized by relaxing independence upstream costs appearing in (2007). Then prov...

Joint use of resources with usage-dependent cost raises the question: who pays how much? We study cost sharing in resource selection games where the strategy spaces are either singletons or bases of a matroid defined on the ground set of resources. Our goal is to design cost sharing protocols so as to minimize the resulting price of anarchy and price of stability. We investigate three classes o...