Hospital Choices, Hospital Prices, and Financial Incentives to Physicians

We estimate an insurer-specific preference function which rationalizes hospital referrals for privately insured births in California. The function is additively separable in: a hospital price paid by the insurer, the distance traveled, and plan- and severity-specific hospital fixed effects (capturing hospital quality). We use an inequality estimator that allows for errors in price and detailed hospital-severity interactions and obtain markedly different results than those from a logit. The estimates indicate that insurers with more capitated physicians are more responsive to price. Capitated plans send patients further to utilize similar quality, lower-priced hospitals; but the cost-quality trade-off does not vary with capitation rates. (JEL G22, H51, I11, I13, I18, J44)

Download Full-text

On the Cost-Effective Design of Agglomeration Bonus Schemes for the Conservation of Multiple Competing Species

Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution ◽

10.3389/fevo.2021.695764 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 ◽

Author(s):

Martin Drechsler

Keyword(s):

Financial Incentives ◽

Cost Effective ◽

Spatial Arrangement ◽

Species Traits ◽

Competing Species ◽

Trade Off ◽

Conservation Measures ◽

Trade Offs ◽

The Cost ◽

Agglomeration Bonus

An important mechanism of species co-existence in spatially structured landscapes is the competition-colonisation trade-off which states that co-existence of competing species is possible if, all other things equal, the better competitor is the worse coloniser. The effectiveness of this trade-off for the facilitation of co-existence, however, is likely to depend on the spatial arrangement of the habitat, because too strong agglomeration of the habitat may overly benefit the strong competitor (being the poor disperser), implying extinction of the inferiour competitor, while too much dispersion of the habitat may drive the superiour competitor (being the inferiour coloniser) to extinction. In working landscapes, biodiversity conservation is often induced through conservation payments that offset the forgone profits incurred by the conservation measure. To control the spatial arrangement of conservation measures and habitats in a conservation payment scheme, the agglomeration bonus has been proposed to provide financial incentives for allocating conservation measures in the vicinity of other sites with conservation measures. This paper presents a generic spatially explicit ecological-economic simulation model to explore the ability of the agglomeration bonus to cost-effectively conserve multiple competing species that differ by their competition strengths, their colonisation rates and their dispersal ranges. The interacting effects of the agglomeration bonus and different species traits and their trade-offs on the species richness in the model landscape are analysed. Recommendations for the biodiversity-maximising design of agglomeration bonus schemes are derived.

Download Full-text

Developing Schedule With Linear Programming (Case Study: STTF II Project Komplek Sukamukti Banjaran)

International Journal of Innovation in Enterprise System ◽

10.25124/ijies.v4i02.77 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 4 (02) ◽

pp. 34-45

Author(s):

Naufal Dzikri Afifi ◽

Ika Arum Puspita ◽

Mohammad Deni Akbar

Keyword(s):

Linear Programming ◽

Objective Function ◽

Project Scheduling ◽

Time Limit ◽

Minimum Time ◽

Service Cost ◽

Trade Off ◽

Overtime Work ◽

The Cost

Shift to The Front II Komplek Sukamukti Banjaran Project is one of the projects implemented by one of the companies engaged in telecommunications. In its implementation, each project including Shift to The Front II Komplek Sukamukti Banjaran has a time limit specified in the contract. Project scheduling is an important role in predicting both the cost and time in a project. Every project should be able to complete the project before or just in the time specified in the contract. Delay in a project can be anticipated by accelerating the duration of completion by using the crashing method with the application of linear programming. Linear programming will help iteration in the calculation of crashing because if linear programming not used, iteration will be repeated. The objective function in this scheduling is to minimize the cost. This study aims to find a trade-off between the costs and the minimum time expected to complete this project. The acceleration of the duration of this study was carried out using the addition of 4 hours of overtime work, 3 hours of overtime work, 2 hours of overtime work, and 1 hour of overtime work. The normal time for this project is 35 days with a service fee of Rp. 52,335,690. From the results of the crashing analysis, the alternative chosen is to add 1 hour of overtime to 34 days with a total service cost of Rp. 52,375,492. This acceleration will affect the entire project because there are 33 different locations worked on Shift to The Front II and if all these locations can be accelerated then the duration of completion of the entire project will be effective

Download Full-text

Black Hole Algorithm for Sustainable Design of Counterfort Retaining Walls

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su12072767 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 12 (7) ◽

pp. 2767 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

Víctor Yepes ◽

José V. Martí ◽

José García

Keyword(s):

Black Hole ◽

Sustainable Design ◽

Retaining Walls ◽

The Other ◽

Trade Off ◽

Construction Company ◽

Geometric Variables ◽

The Stability ◽

The Cost ◽

Black Hole Algorithm

The optimization of the cost and CO 2 emissions in earth-retaining walls is of relevance, since these structures are often used in civil engineering. The optimization of costs is essential for the competitiveness of the construction company, and the optimization of emissions is relevant in the environmental impact of construction. To address the optimization, black hole metaheuristics were used, along with a discretization mechanism based on min–max normalization. The stability of the algorithm was evaluated with respect to the solutions obtained; the steel and concrete values obtained in both optimizations were analyzed. Additionally, the geometric variables of the structure were compared. Finally, the results obtained were compared with another algorithm that solved the problem. The results show that there is a trade-off between the use of steel and concrete. The solutions that minimize CO 2 emissions prefer the use of concrete instead of those that optimize the cost. On the other hand, when comparing the geometric variables, it is seen that most remain similar in both optimizations except for the distance between buttresses. When comparing with another algorithm, the results show a good performance in optimization using the black hole algorithm.

Download Full-text

Hybrid last mile delivery fleets with crowdsourcing: A systems view of managing the cost‐service trade‐off

Journal of Business Logistics ◽

10.1111/jbl.12288 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Vincent E. Castillo ◽

John E. Bell ◽

Diane A. Mollenkopf ◽

Theodore P. Stank

Keyword(s):

Service Trade ◽

Trade Off ◽

Last Mile ◽

The Cost ◽

Last Mile Delivery ◽

Systems View

Download Full-text

Aggregation of cohorts for histopathological diagnosis with deep morphological analysis

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-021-82642-1 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Jeonghyuk Park ◽

Yul Ri Chung ◽

Seo Taek Kong ◽

Yeong Won Kim ◽

Hyunho Park ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Cancer Detection ◽

Morphological Analysis ◽

Deep Neural Networks ◽

Large Datasets ◽

Histopathological Diagnosis ◽

Single Model ◽

Trade Off ◽

Detection Model ◽

Optimal Behavior ◽

The Cost

AbstractThere have been substantial efforts in using deep learning (DL) to diagnose cancer from digital images of pathology slides. Existing algorithms typically operate by training deep neural networks either specialized in specific cohorts or an aggregate of all cohorts when there are only a few images available for the target cohort. A trade-off between decreasing the number of models and their cancer detection performance was evident in our experiments with The Cancer Genomic Atlas dataset, with the former approach achieving higher performance at the cost of having to acquire large datasets from the cohort of interest. Constructing annotated datasets for individual cohorts is extremely time-consuming, with the acquisition cost of such datasets growing linearly with the number of cohorts. Another issue associated with developing cohort-specific models is the difficulty of maintenance: all cohort-specific models may need to be adjusted when a new DL algorithm is to be used, where training even a single model may require a non-negligible amount of computation, or when more data is added to some cohorts. In resolving the sub-optimal behavior of a universal cancer detection model trained on an aggregate of cohorts, we investigated how cohorts can be grouped to augment a dataset without increasing the number of models linearly with the number of cohorts. This study introduces several metrics which measure the morphological similarities between cohort pairs and demonstrates how the metrics can be used to control the trade-off between performance and the number of models.

Download Full-text

A trade-off between classical and quantum circuit size for an attack against CSIDH

Journal of Mathematical Cryptology ◽

10.1515/jmc-2020-0070 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 4-17

Author(s):

Jean-François Biasse ◽

Xavier Bonnetain ◽

Benjamin Pring ◽

André Schrottenloher ◽

William Youmans

Keyword(s):

Endomorphism Ring ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Quantum Circuit ◽

List Type ◽

Hard Problem ◽

Trade Off ◽

Classical State ◽

Security Parameter ◽

The Cost ◽

Quadratic Order

AbstractWe propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the underlying hard problem of the CSIDH cryptosystem (and other isogeny-based cryptosystems using elliptic curves with endomorphism ring isomorphic to an imaginary quadratic order 𝒪). Let Δ = Disc(𝒪) (in CSIDH, Δ = −4p for p the security parameter). Let 0 < α < 1/2, our algorithm requires:A classical circuit of size $2^{\tilde{O}\left(\log(|\Delta|)^{1-\alpha}\right)}.$A quantum circuit of size $2^{\tilde{O}\left(\log(|\Delta|)^{\alpha}\right)}.$Polynomial classical and quantum memory.Essentially, we propose to reduce the size of the quantum circuit below the state-of-the-art complexity $2^{\tilde{O}\left(\log(|\Delta|)^{1/2}\right)}$ at the cost of increasing the classical circuit-size required. The required classical circuit remains subexponential, which is a superpolynomial improvement over the classical state-of-the-art exponential solutions to these problems. Our method requires polynomial memory, both classical and quantum.

Download Full-text

Use of past care markers in risk-adjustment: accounting for systematic differences across providers

The European Journal of Health Economics ◽

10.1007/s10198-021-01350-9 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Laura Anselmi ◽

Yiu-Shing Lau ◽

Matt Sutton ◽

Anna Everton ◽

Rob Shaw ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Risk Adjustment ◽

Fixed Effects ◽

Goodness Of Fit ◽

Reporting Quality ◽

Cost Of Care ◽

Local Health ◽

Administrative Records ◽

Practice Level ◽

Improve Model ◽

The Cost

AbstractRisk-adjustment models are used to predict the cost of care for patients based on their observable characteristics, and to derive efficient and equitable budgets based on weighted capitation. Markers based on past care contacts can improve model fit, but their coefficients may be affected by provider variations in diagnostic, treatment and reporting quality. This is problematic when distinguishing need and supply influences on costs is required.We examine the extent of this bias in the national formula for mental health care using administrative records for 43.7 million adults registered with 7746 GP practices in England in 2015. We also illustrate a method to control for provider effects.A linear regression containing a rich set of individual, GP practice and area characteristics, and fixed effects for local health organisations, had goodness-of-fit equal to R2 = 0.007 at person level and R2 = 0.720 at GP practice level. The addition of past care markers changed substantially the coefficients on the other variables and increased the goodness-of-fit to R2 = 0.275 at person level and R2 = 0.815 at GP practice level. The further inclusion of provider effects affected the coefficients on GP practice and area variables and on local health organisation fixed effects, increasing goodness-of-fit at GP practice level to R2 = 0.848.With adequate supply controls, it is possible to estimate coefficients on past care markers that are stable and unbiased. Nonetheless, inconsistent reporting may affect need predictions and penalise populations served by underreporting providers.

Download Full-text

Predicting the cost-quality trade-off for information retrieval queries

Proceedings of the tenth international conference on Information and knowledge management - CIKM'01 ◽

10.1145/502585.502621 ◽

2001 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Henk Ernst Blok ◽

Djoerd Hiemstra ◽

Sunil Choenni ◽

Franciska de Jong ◽

Henk M. Blanken ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Information Retrieval ◽

Trade Off ◽

The Cost

Download Full-text

The financial consequences of human capital disclosure as part of integrated reporting

Journal of Intellectual Capital ◽

10.1108/jic-03-2021-0079 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽

Author(s):

Antonio Salvi ◽

Nicola Raimo ◽

Felice Petruzzella ◽

Filippo Vitolla

Keyword(s):

Human Capital ◽

Firm Value ◽

Fixed Effects ◽

Cost Of Capital ◽

Positive Impact ◽

Firm Risk ◽

Integrated Reporting ◽

Content Type ◽

Financial Consequences ◽

The Cost

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyse the financial consequences of the level of human capital (HC) information disclosed by firms through integrated reports. Specifically, this work examines the effect of HC information on the cost of capital and firm value.Design/methodology/approachA manual content analysis is used to measure the level of HC information contained in integrated reports. A fixed-effects regression model is used to analyse 375 observations (a balanced panel of 125 firms for the period 2017–2019) and test the financial consequences of HC disclosure.FindingsThe empirical outcomes indicate that HC disclosure has a significant and negative effect on the cost of capital and a positive impact on firm value. Our results show that companies can reduce investors' perceived firm risk by improving HC disclosure, leading to a lower cost of capital. Moreover, our findings support the notion that increased levels of HC disclosure are linked to firms' improved access to external financial resources, consequently enhancing firm value.Originality/valueThis study is the first contribution to examine the financial consequences of HC disclosure and is one of the first to examine the level of HC information within integrated reports.

Download Full-text