T HE inroads of inflation on the living standards of social security beneficiaries have become familiar in many countries and have induced counter-measures of various sorts. The diversity of legislative action undertaken on behalf of retired beneficiaries serves to underline the virtually unanimous approval of higher benefits when they are required. Inspection of individual programs shows some ...

Analysis of the welfare effect of advertising depends critically upon the effect of advertising on market prices. In many circumstances, advertising that leads to higher (lower) market prices is overproduced (underproduced) from society s perspective. This paper demonstrates that these predictions may not hold when consumer search costs are important. A model is developed to show how advertisin...

devote so much of the text to initially amusing but gratuitous and eventually tedious recitations of what the author regards as bizarre therapeutic agents. We hear far too much about such remedies as crocodile dung, dried earthworms, and mummy powder. The overall effect is to trivialize the question why, for example, a practice like bloodletting persisted in use for so long. The reader is invit...

This paper considers the social costs implied by inefficient allocation of contracts in a first price, sealed bid procurement auction with asymmetric bidders. We adopt a constrained (piecewise linear) strategy equilibrium concept and estimate the structural parameters of the bidders’ distribution of costs. We estimate social costs defined as the predicted cost difference between the winning fir...

India lacks a national policy on the prevention and control of genetic disorders. Although the haemoglobinopathies have received some attention, there are scarce data on the epidemiology of other genetic disorders in India. Haemophilia, an inherited single gene disorder with an incidence of 1 per 10,000 births, manifests as spontaneous or trauma-induced haemorrhagic episodes in patients, progre...

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For many years, the major dispute between the tobacco industry and the public health community was over the issue of whether smoking caused morbidity and premature mortality, or whether there was simply a statistical association without a causal connection. In the face of the type of evidence comprehensively surveyed in several recent international and Australian meta-analyses, and particularly...

Over the past ten years the significance of costs burdened by parties not engaged in the contractual agreement (social costs) is gaining growing acknowledgment by city planners, municipal administrators and the engineering community. For many years the trenchless technology industry promoted the consideration of social costs in the project planning process. A key obstacle for such consideration...