Achievement of the health-related Millennium Development Goals is dependent on increasing take-up of preventive public health services (PHSs) in developing countries. Poor country governments often lack the resources to provide optimal access to preventive services and a great deal of attention is being directed towards the private sector to fill this void. In many developing countries, the pri...

OBJECTIVE Financial incentives may encourage private for-profit providers to perform more caesarean section (CS) than non-profit hospitals. We therefore sought to determine the association of for-profit status of hospital and odds of CS. DESIGN Systematic review and meta-analysis. DATA SOURCES MEDLINE, EMBASE and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews from the first year of records thr...

Sweden and Spain experiment with different provider models to reform healthcare provision. Both models have in common that they extend the role of the for-profit sector in healthcare. As the analysis of Saltman and Duran demonstrates, privatisation is an ambiguous and contested strategy that is used for quite different purposes. In our comment, we emphasize that their analysis leaves questions ...

This article presents sequential and parallel metaheuristics to solve the virtual machines subletting problem in cloud systems, which deals with allocating virtual machine requests into prebooked resources from a cloud broker, maximizing the broker profit. Three metaheuristic are studied: Simulated Annealing, Genetic Algorithm, and hybrid Evolutionary Algorithm. The experimental evaluation over...

The past few decades have been characterized by a growing body of profit-seeking public service areas with the understanding that profit-seeking organizations will deliver public services more efficiently than government can. These sectors include, but are not limited to, health care, corrections, education and garbage collection. Governments have created quasi markets to attract private provid...

Social impact bonds (SIBs) have been welcomed enthusiastically as a new funding tool for social innovation, yet also condemned as an instrument that neglects beneficiaries’ and taxpayers’ interests, opening profit opportunities in the field of social politics for smart private investors. We will shed a more analytical light on SIBs, assuming that, like any contract, SIBs try to align interests ...

In this paper we use the Generalised Population Based Incremental Learning (GPBIL) in order to find profit-maximizing strategies for the Artificial Payment Card Market (APCM). The artificial market has modeled explicitly a multidimensional consumers’ and merchants’ demand for payment instruments. Given the complex shape of the demand, we have found that the GPBIL effectively explores the areas ...

Massive structural change is occurring in health care provision in the United States, significantly reducing the number of not-for-profit suppliers. This trend is fueled in part by government policies. To evaluate these policies one must know about the motives of not-for-profit health care providers. The theory of not-for-profit hospitals suggests buyers may prefer dealing with sellers who are ...