Recently, there has been much interest in using the cost-effectiveness acceptability curve (CEAC) to measure the statistical evidence of cost-effectiveness. The CEAC has two well established but fundamentally different interpretations: one frequentist and one Bayesian. As an alternative, we suggest characterizing the statistical evidence about cost-effectiveness using the likelihood function (t...

BACKGROUND The National Department of Health of South Africa decided to start a programme to train mid-level healthcare workers, called clinical associates, as one of the measures to increase healthcare workers at district level in rural areas. Unfortunately, very little is known about the cost effectiveness of clinical associates. AIMS To determine, on a provincial level, the cost effectiven...

We appreciate the efforts of the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to develop economic frameworks and tools for the package of policies necessary to implement California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32) and meet the requirements of the law. These comments are submitted in anticipation of the June 3, 2008 Economic Analysis Technical Stakeholder Working Group meeting, which will f...

In a service environment a service provider needs to determine the amount and kinds of capacity to meet customers’ needs over many periods. To make good decisions, she needs to know the probability distribution of her customers’ demand in each period. We study a situation in which customers’ demand for a given service is random in each period, but inelastic, or modeled well by this assumption, ...

Because of the workings of health care systems, new, important, and cost-effective treatments sometimes do not become routine care while well-marketed products of equivocal value achieve widespread adoption. Should policymakers attempt to influence clinical behavior and correct for these inefficiencies? Implementation methods achieve a certain level of behavioral change but cost money to enact....

This paper analyzes the efficiency of the Brazilian banking sector over the post-privatization period of 2000-2007. We employ a Bayesian stochastic frontier approach, which provides exact efficiency estimates and confidence intervals and thus, allows an accurate comparison across institutions and bank groups. The results suggest that large banks are the most cost and profit efficient, supportin...

The practice of target pricing has been a key factor in the success of Japanese manufacturers. In the more commonly-known demand-side approach, the target price for the supplier equals the manufacturer’s market price less a percent margin for the manufacturer but no cost-improvement expenses are shared. In the supply-side approach, cost-improvement expenses are shared and the target price equal...

Cost awareness and cost efficiency has always been major concerns to organizations from all industries but in the last few years its importance grew due to the global economic and financial crisis. Considering their small size and market exposure, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) need cost awareness and efficiency more than ever. However, efficient and accurate costing methodologies are out ...