This article uses a microsimulation model to estimate how freezing all remaining private-sector and one-third of all public-sector defined benefit (DB) pension plans over the next 5 years would affect retirement incomes of baby boomers. If frozen plans were supplemented with new or enhanced defined contribution (DC) retirement plans, there would be more losers than winners, and average family i...

Self-criticism of physicians and patient participation are the pillars of modern medical ethics and medical programmes. Patients expect risk minimisation from physicians, mostly without realising how much they could actively do themselves in this respect. But what about the willingness of German people to take risks, how high is it really at present? Direct empirical data are not available, but...

The rapid development of communication and information technology has made electronic voting technologically and economically feasible. In this study, we will examine the differential impact of four electronic voting system (EVS) characteristics (privacy, accessibility, mobility, and accuracy) on voter participation intention (i.e., EVS voting) and on preferred EVS mechanism (telephone, Web-bas...

Measuring clinicians' shared decision-making (SDM) performance is a key requirement given the intensity of policy interest in many developed countries - yet it remains one of the most difficult methodological challenges, which is a concern for many stakeholders. In this Viewpoint Article, we investigate the development of existing patient-reported measures (PRMs) of SDM identified in a recent r...

Although the importance of patient participation is acknowledged in today's healthcare, many challenges remain before patient participation can become an integral part of care provision. The ward round has traditionally been the forum for crucial decisions about patient care, but often with limited possibilities for patient participation. As part of the process of improving patient participatio...

Many countries are considering adopting political quotas for under-represented and disadvantaged minorities, but critics of the policy claim that it undermines political competition. Using evidence from India, I examine the impact of mandated political representation for disadvantaged minorities. Aggregate turnout falls by 9% of the baseline, but I find no negative impact on electoral competiti...

For more than three decades cost-benefit analysis (CBA) has been used in many countries as an important tool for evaluating public policies. More recently, participation of stakeholders in CBA processes has become an important issue for governments. However, CBA by itself does not provide a good environment for stakeholder participation. A major reason for this is the lack of spatial disaggrega...

This paper presents the participation of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) to the TREC 2016 Real-Time Summarization track. The two tasks related to Scenario A and Scenario B both focuses on information real-time processing. During the evaluation period, the system monitors the Twitter sample stream with respect to a number of “interest profiles”. We submitted three runs for both scen...