Understanding the role of internal governance units in the process of social innovation: the case of shared lives plus in England

Amid increasing demand for public services and stretched resources policymakers often promote ‘social innovation’ to address these tensions. However, critics argue that social innovation may just be a ‘fashionable concept’ or ‘buzzword’ in public policy discourse and that more empirical research is needed to help improve our understanding of the actors and mechanisms that drive effective social innovations. In response this article draws upon a case study of the development of Shared Lives as an alternative national model of adult social care in England over the past 40 years. Drawing on interviews with 50 individuals carried-out between late-2021 and early-2023, including those involved in four different local schemes, we highlight the positive role played by the organisation Shared Lives Plus, which we conceptualise as an ‘internal governance unit’ (IGU), in terms of establishing and maintaining a ‘community innovation infrastructure’. However, the example of Shared Lives also illustrates the difficult challenges IGUs can face in trying to move social innovations beyond an institutional ‘niche’

Self-reported follow-up care needs can be met in both facility and self-managed abortion: evidence from low- and middle-income countries

Objectives: To understand in-facility follow-up care-seeking behavior among both people who self-managed medication abortions and those who obtained facility-managed care in low-and-middle-income countries. We explore factors that contribute to meeting individual self-reported follow-up care needs, core to person-centered care. Study design: We conducted a qualitative, codebook thematic analysis of 67 in-depth interviews conducted with people who self-managed medication abortions or obtained facility-managed medication abortion care. We first classified individuals as having their follow-up care needs met (not seeking care when the participant felt confident that additional care was not warranted or desired or receiving care if it was desired) or not. Our a priori analytic domains came from the Anderson model of health services utilization - predisposing, enabling, or need factors (perceived and evaluated need for health services) that contributed to having follow-up care needs met or not. We also describe emergent themes within each domain. Results: Most participants (n = 59, 88%) had their follow-up care needs met; half (n = 33, 49%) sought follow-up care in a facility. Prior birth or abortion experiences emerged as predisposing factors for having follow-up care needs met. Having accompaniment support (from activists or hotlines who provide abortion guidance outside of clinical settings), knowing what to expect, and information sources were key enabling factors for having follow-up care needs met. Need factors included flexible follow-up care guidelines. Those who did not have their follow-up care needs met described predisposing negative health system experiences; enabling factors including health system challenges, stigma from providers, and legal risk; and need factors of required follow-up care guidelines. Conclusions: Medication abortion follow-up care experiences are diverse, and individual needs can be met both in and outside of health facilities. Understanding prior experiences, enabling accompaniment support, and considering flexible follow-up care guidelines can support meeting individual follow-up care needs, which is essential to person-centered abortion care. Implications: Follow-up care needs, essential to ensuring access to high-quality abortion services, can be met in both self-managed and in-facility medication abortion models. Policies that require follow-up care when it is not needed or desired by the person can reinforce ideas that self-managed abortion is not safe or effective, despite existing evidence

Developing performance tests to measure digital skills: lessons learned from a cross-national perspective

This article discusses the development of task-based performance tests designed to measure digital skills among children aged between 12 and 17 years old. The tasks reflect authentic everyday situations to evaluate skill levels. The primary objective is to design performance tests that provide a comprehensive understanding of children’s digital skills. The tests cover three distinct skill dimensions: (1) information navigation and processing; (2) communication and interaction; and (3) content creation and production. These include several subdimensions, offering a detailed perspective on children’s digital skills. The development process itself revealed several methodological challenges that needed to be addressed, yielding valuable lessons for future applications. Key lessons from our cross-national experiences include the importance of involving children early in the design process, using a combination of open-ended and closed tasks, and allocating ample time to walk through the coding scheme

Consumer preferences for the visual presentation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of luxury products: the role of perceived authenticity

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are increasingly used to safeguard luxury products from counterfeits. Despite their increasing adoption, limited research has investigated how brands should communicate the use of NFTs—a novel and complex concept for consumers to comprehend—to maximize their benefits. This research aims to examine this gap by highlighting that the ease of visualization is critical for effective communication. Study 1A demonstrated that consumers prefer a visualized NFT to a non-visualized one for authenticating a luxury product. Study 1B further demonstrated that consumers place greater trust in a visualized NFT and are willing to pay higher prices for luxury products that utilize it. Study 2 demonstrated that consumers have more favorable attitudes toward a luxury product that features an easy-to-visualize NFT than those with a difficult-to-visualize NFT and that perceived authenticity mediates this effect. Finally, Study 3 demonstrated that the positive impacts of easy-to-visualize NFT cues were more significant for luxury than non-luxury products. Subsequently, this study suggests an effective communication strategy for NFT use and provides managerial implications for luxury brands aiming to maximize the benefits of using NFTs

An SPDE with Robin-type boundary for a system of elastically killed diffusions on the positive half-line

We consider a system of particles undergoing correlated diffusion with elastic boundary conditions on the half-line in the limit as the number of particles goes to infinity. We establish existence and uniqueness for the limiting empirical measure valued process for the surviving particles, which is a weak form for an SPDE with a noisy Robin boundary condition satisfied by the particle density. We show that this density process has good L 2-regularity properties in the interior of the domain but may exhibit singularities on the boundary at a dense set of times. We make connections to the corresponding absorbing and reflecting SPDEs as the elastic parameter varies

The welfare properties of climate targets

Two approaches are predominant in climate models: cost–benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis. Cost–benefit analysis maximizes welfare, finding a trade-off between climate damages and emission abatement costs. By contrast, cost-effectiveness analysis minimizes abatement costs, omits damages but adds a climate constraint, such as a radiative forcing constraint, a temperature constraint or a cumulative emissions constraint. We analyse the impacts of these different constraints on optimal carbon prices, emissions and welfare. To do so, we fit a model with abatement costs, capital repurposing costs (stranded assets) and technological change on IPCC and NGFS scenarios. For scenarios reaching 1.5 °C in 2100, a constraint on cumulative emissions has the best welfare properties, followed by a temperature constraint with overshoot. A forcing constraint with overshoot has insufficient early abatement and large net negative emissions later on, leading to a substantial welfare loss of $23 Trillion. As to the paths reaching 2 °C, all cost-effectiveness analysis abate too late, but the welfare impact of this dynamic inefficiency is milder. Again, a forcing constraint with overshoot scores worst. We show that large negative emissions at the end of the century are never optimal and an artefact of constraints with overshoot

Self-dual Maxwell fields from Clifford analysis

The study of complex functions is based around the study of holomorphic functions, satisfying the Cauchy-Riemann equations. The relatively recent field of Clifford Analysis lets us extend many results from Complex Analysis to higher dimensions. In this paper, I decompose the Cauchy-Riemann equations for a general Clifford algebra into grades using the Geometric Algebra formalism, and show that for the Spacetime Algebra Cl(3, 1) these equations are the equations for a self-dual source free Maxwell field, and for a massless uncharged Spinor. This shows a deep link between fundamental physics and the Clifford geometry of Spacetime

Better together? Group incentives and the demand for prevention

In a field experiment with 400 groups of informal entrepreneurs in El Salvador, we compare the impact of group incentives (linked to compliance of all members) to equivalent individual ones to encourage cardiovascular check-ups. We test two incentive designs: small rewards and lotteries. Group incentives are as effective as individual ones at increasing demand for prevention, but, unlike individual incentives, they fail to target those with potentially higher health risks. The equal effectiveness of group incentives is linked to more communication, coordination between members and, to some extent, peer pressure. These social dynamics contribute to reduce uncertainty about other group members’ decisions and enhance the perceived net benefit of prevention. Although the preventive check-ups do not induce short-term lifestyle changes, they substantially increase the detection of new risk factors, making all incentives highly cost-effective interventions in this population

The solution to an impulse control problem motivated by optimal harvesting

We consider a stochastic impulse control problem that is motivated by applications such as the optimal exploitation of a natural resource. In particular, we consider a stochastic system whose uncontrolled state dynamics are modelled by a non-explosive positive linear diffusion. The control that can be applied to this system takes the form of one-sided impulsive action. The objective of the control problem is to maximise a discounted performance criterion that rewards the effect of control action but involves a fixed cost at each time of a control intervention. We derive the complete solution to this problem under general assumptions. It turns out that the solution can take four qualitatively different forms, several of which have not been observed in the literature. In two of the four cases, there exist only ε-optimal control strategies. We also show that the boundary classification of 0 may play a critical role in the solution of the problem. Furthermore, we develop a way for establishing the strong solution to a stochastic impulse control problem's optimally controlled SDE

Public support for degrowth policies and sufficiency behaviours in the United States: a discrete choice experiment

Research on degrowth and its policy proposals has rapidly expanded, despite lacking empirical evidence on public perceptions. One conceptual proposition for affluent populations is that lifestyle changes, such as undertaking sufficiency-oriented behaviours, may engender degrowth policy support. Our research empirically investigated U.S. public support for degrowth policies, its relation to sufficiency behaviours, and whether a degrowth framing influenced policy support. In a pre-registered, online discrete choice experiment (N = 1012), we elicited perceptions of four commonly advocated degrowth policies - work time reductions, downscaling fossil fuel production, universal basic services, and advertising restrictions. Analyses revealed significant support for some specification of each alternative policy, especially fossil fuel caps and universal healthcare. We also found a significant positive association between sufficiency engagement and supporting fossil fuel restrictions. However, latent class analysis suggested that the link between behaviour and policy support was less consistent for socially oriented policies, and that those who supported such policies did not engage in sufficiency most frequently. Degrowth framing only significantly influenced preferences for universal healthcare. These findings suggest an appetite for advancing eco-social policies in the United States but point to a nuanced relationship between sufficiency lifestyles and degrowth policy support