infonet-economy

This paper examines the effects on national welfare and market access of two public procurement practices, discrimination and nontransparency. Both policies have become prominent in international trade negotiations, including the Doha Round of World Trade Organization (WTO) trade talks. We show that fostering either domestic competition or transparency in state contracting tends to...

The purpose of this contribution is to learn from the theory of evolution in order to improve the design of modeling processes. The aim of the chapter is to advance the understanding of the evolutionary structural characteristics of modeling processes which lead to better models, and to find design rules for systematically achieving higher model quality. We use a simulation approach...

Regulation fostering Managed Care alternatives in health insurance is spreading. This work reports on an experiment designed to measure the amounts of compensation asked by the Swiss population (in terms of reduced premiums) for Managed-Care type restrictions in the provision of health care. It finds that restrictions on the freedom of physician choice would require an average...

It is well known that ex-ante randomization can improve uponnsecond best contracts in principal-agent problems. In this note, we show that even the first-best can be dominated by a random contract. Our example isncast in a standard textbook set-up with two effort levels and two states of nature.

There is growing interest in discrete-choice experiments (DCE) as a method to elicit consumers' preferences in the health care sector. Increasingly this method is used to determine willingness-to-pay (WTP) for health-related goods. However, its external validity in the health care domain has not been investigated until today. This paper examines the external validity of DCE...

Under certain cost conditions the optimal insurance policy offers full coverage above a deductible, as Arrow and others have shown. However, many insurance policies currently provide coverage against several losses although the possibilities for the insured to affect the loss probabilities by several prevention activities (multiple moral hazard) are substantially different. This...

The previous literature on the determinants of individual well-being has failed to fully account for the interdependencies in well-being at the family level. This paper develops an ordered probit model with multiple random effects that allows to identify the intra-family correlation in wellbeing. The parameters of the model can be estimated with panel data using Maximum Marginal...

This article evaluates three measures introduced by the Australian Federal Government in 1999 and 2000 that were designed to encourage private health insurance and relieve financial pressure on the public healthcare sector. These policy changes were (i) a 30% premium rebate, (ii) health insurers offering lifetime enrolment on existing terms and the future relaxation of premium...

We consider asymmetric kernel density estimators and smoothed histograms when the unknown probability density function f is defined on [0,+infinity). Uniform weak consistency on each compact set in [0,+infinity) is proved for these estimators when f is continuous on its support. Weak convergence in L_1 is also established. We further prove that the asymmetric kernel density estimator...