This article introduces the reader to this special issue on Systems Change and highlights six lessons learned about theory, methods, and interventions for systems change that emerged across the included articles. The value of a systems approach to systems change is examined, including the need for frameworks, methods, and change activities that attend to the characteristics of systems.

In their recent work, Matsumura and Ogawa (2012) showed that in the context of a mixed duopoly, equilibrium social welfare is higher in price-setting competition than in quantity-setting competition. We found that when the strength of network effects is sufficiently high, the above result is totally reversed; thus, in a mixed duopoly, the presence of network effects weakens the superiority of p...

Previous literature has mostly considered R&D and licensing activities separately. In this paper we examine the effect of licensing on R&D and social welfare. We show that the effect of licensing on the incentive for doing R&D is ambiguous and depends on the costs of doing R&D. We also show that the possibility of licensing can change the identity of the innovating firm. However, we find that s...

The concentration index is widely used to measure income-related inequality in health. No insight exists, however, whether the concentration index connects with people's preferences about distributions of income and health and whether a reduction in the concentration index reflects an increase in social welfare. We explored this question by testing the central assumption underlying the concentr...

This article describes the problem of homelessness in Japan, and contrasts the status of the problem between the United Kingdom and Japan. Demographic characteristics of the homeless, including age and gender, vary across the two countries (for example, there are very few homeless women in Japan). Factors contributing to the development of homelessness in each country are discussed and contrast...

Two priority-setting frameworks to decide how to allocate limited resources among available treatments were developed, the first one based on cost-effectiveness and the second one based on cost-effectiveness and a social welfare function (SWF). The framework based on cost effectiveness gives a higher priority to therapies with lower average or incremental cost-effectiveness ratios. The framewor...

in this study, the social welfare impacts of the interaction of iranian rice import policies and thai export policies are analyzed using a game theoretic approach in conjunction with econometric supply and demand models. the joint impacts of increasing the world price of rice, resulting from the export policies in thailand along with changes in tariff rates in iran, on social welfare are analyz...

the voluntary worker in the social services What to say and what to do when mostly your friends love reading? Are you the one that don't have such hobby? So, it's important for you to start having that hobby. You know, reading is not the force. We're sure that reading will lead you to join in better concept of life. Reading will be a positive activity to do every time. And do you know our frien...

In this paper, we provide an axiomatic characterization of social welfare functions for uncertain incomes. Our most general result is that a small number of reasonable assumptions regarding welfare orderings under uncertainty rule out pure ex ante as well as pure ex post evaluations. Any social welfare function that satisfies these axioms should lie strictly between the ex ante and the ex post ...