These recommendations provide a data-supported approach. They are based on the following: (1) formal review and analysis of the recently published world literature on the topic (Medline search); (2) the American College of Physicians’ Manual for Assessing Health Practices and Designing Practice Guidelines1; (3) policy guidelines, including the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease...

Recently, overlay network-based collaborative applications such as instant messaging, content sharing, and Internet telephony are becoming increasingly popular. Many of these applications rely upon data-replication to achieve better performance, scalability, and reliability. However, replication entails various costs such as storage for holding replicas and communication overheads for ensuring ...

CCS (carbon dioxide capture and storage) is an issue which has received increasing attention in the debate on climate change over the last several years because of its relative technical simplicity and very large potential in reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The absence of secondary benefits and uncertainties associated with this approach, however, would require analysts to conduct fine costb...

G iven the high prevalence of coronary artery disease in Western countries, selection of the optimal therapeutic strategy for individual cardiac patients has become an issue of utmost costbenefit importance. During the past two decades, large clinical trials have established the respective roles of medical treatment versus coronary artery bypass surgery in the management of patients with corona...

We study the interaction between nonprice public rationing and prices in the private market. Under a limited budget, the public supplier uses a rationing policy. A private firm may supply the good to those consumers who are rationed by the public system. Consumers have different amounts of wealth, and costs of providing the good to them vary. We consider two regimes. First, the public supplier ...

Observers completed a series of simulated medical diagnosis tasks that differed in category discriminability and base-rate/costbenefit ratio. Point, accuracy, and decision criterion estimates were closer to optimal (a) for category d’ = 2.2 than for category d’ = 1.0 or 3.2, (b) when base-rates, as opposed to cost-benefits were manipulated, and (c) when the cost of an incorrect response resulte...