Medicare Coverage of Anesthesia Services During Screening Colonoscopies for Patients at LowRisk of Sedation-Related Complications In 2014, theCenters forMedicare&Medicaid Serviceswaived patient cost sharing for anesthesia services during screening colonoscopies.1 The current professional guidelines recommend that sedation be provided by the gastroenterologist-nurse team; a separate anesthesiolo...

An auction type mechanism elicits the valuations for getting a good (service) from the agents, allocates some goods (service) to some agents and charge money only to the served agents. We characterize the mechanisms that are immune to three alternative types of collusion of the agents. Under full collusion, agents can coordinate misreports and transfer money between them. We show that only the ...

The objective of cooperative game theory is to study ways to enforce and sustain cooperation among agents willing to cooperate. A central question in this field is how the benefits (or costs) of a joint effort can be divided among participants, taking into account individual and group incentives, as well as various fairness properties. In this chapter, we define basic concepts and review some o...

This paper investigates the application of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to eliminate the misplacement problems in the supply chain, which consists of a risk-neutral manufacturer and a riskaverse retailer. By considering both fixed cost and tag cost of RFID implementation, we study the agents' incentives to adopt RFID in both uncoordinated and coordinated cases. We focus on a...

BACKGROUND Health insurance and provider payment reforms all over the world beg a key empirical question: what are the potential impacts of patient cost-sharing on health care utilization, cost and outcomes? The unique health insurance system and rich electronic medical record (EMR) data in China provides us a unique opportunity to study this topic. METHODS Four years (2010 to 2014) of EMR da...

With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), access to insurance and coverage of preventive care services has been expanded. By removing the barrier of shared costs for preventive care, it is expected that an increase in utilization of preventive care services will reduce the cost of chronic diseases. Early detection and treatment is anticipated to be less costly than treatment at ...

Resource allocation problems play a key role in many applications, including traffic networks, telecommunication networks and economics. In most applications, the allocation of resources is determined by a finite number of independent players, each optimizing an individual objective function. An important question in all these applications is the degree of suboptimality caused by selfish resour...