Institutional arrangements for private sector involvement in urban solid waste collection: case study of five cities in Ghana

This paper discusses institutional arrangements for private sector involvement in urban solid waste delivery and provides understanding of the institutional gaps in Ghana context. Five cities in Ghana (Accra, Tema, Kumasi, SecondiTakoradi, and Tamale) were selected for the study. This study suggests there were institutional arrangements – legal, regulatory and financial arrangements – for private sector involvement in solid waste collection. These arrangements include both service contracts for communal collection with subsidy paid by local government Assemblies and franchise contracts for housetohouse service with or without subsidy from the Assemblies. The involvement of private sector in solid waste collection had increased the collection rate and the proportion of housetohouse collection service without subsidy from the government. The major constraints were the inadequate capacity of the Assemblies, the long delay in paying for the contracts, low user charges and inadequate monitoring of quality of service

Optimal package pricing in healthcare services

This is the final version. Available on open access from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this recordFixed pricing for healthcare services is emerging as an attractive business model for private healthcare service providers. Under fixed pricing (or flat rate) contract, the patient is charged a fixed price for the healthcare services irrespective of the actual cost incurred by the hospital. Such contracts increase the risks for the healthcare service provider, thus making pricing decision crucial.In this paper, we study uncertainty and analyse the flat rate pricing contractfor a profit maximising hospital to find the optimal price of treatmen tand examined Value–at-Risk (VaR) associated with such contracts for a risk minimising hospital. Bounds on price were derived to support healthcare providers with price negotiations. We extended the basic models by adding constraints to obtain risk-adjusted optimal price. We proved analytically that the optimal price lies between profit maximisation value and risk minimisation value of price, which we refer to as the efficient pricing interval. Our models and insights provide practical support to private healthcare service providers for optimal pricing and keep them informed about their risk position

Main constraints in developing public organic procurement

The present study investigates how to increase and improve school catering supply chains, to understand hindering factors and their perception in order to reveal drivers and constraints for POP. These include policy implementation instruments, changed values and attitudes, healthy nutrition policies, supply chain bottle necks, premium prices (to producers), successful procurement strategies and certification procedures. This work is based on a two-step survey concerning the Italian school food service system. Initially questionnaires were submitted to a qualified group of 50 producers and 50 caterers (managers of national and international companies of food service for school, local administrators who manage food services for the schools). The results of the questionnaires have subsequently been the basis to plan in-depth interviews with few decision makers who could represent both caterers and producers. The aim of this second step being to view how identified problems could be solved. The results show how the understanding and the acceptance of the organic food concept among the catering staff is crucial for the degree of success in each step of public organic procurement. The introduction of organic food in serving outlets needs appropriate support (such as qualification of key actors and a specific financial support). Other key aspects in this regard are laws and regulations promoting the procurement of quality food, policy interventions tackling more than one aspect of the problem, education programs, calls for tenders, negotiated procurement contracts and quality standards

QOS routing source routing problems and solutions

The notion of Quality-of-Service has been proposed to capture qualitatively or quantitatively defined performance contracts between the service provider and the user applications. Integrated network services are designed to support Quality-of-Service (QoS). One of the primary goals for the integrated network services is to find the paths that satisfy given QoS requirements, namely QoS routing. The challenging issue in this area is to route packets subjected to multiple uncorrelated constraints because the problem is inherently NP-complete. This thesis studies the source routing heuristic approaches that bring the time complexity down to the polynomial-time for the multi-constrained path (MCP) problem. A new source routing framework (SRDE) is further proposed to tackle this problem. The theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework is capable of integrating existing source routing algorithms, resulting in better performance in terms of the time complexity and success ratio

Conditions, constraints and contracts: on the use of annotations for policy modeling.

Organisational policies express constraints on generation and processing of resources. However, application domains rely on transformation processes, which are in principle orthogonal to policy specifications and domain rules and policies may evolve in a non-synchronised way. In previous papers, we have proposed annotations as a flexible way to model aspects of some policy, and showed how they could be used to impose constraints on domain configurations, how to derive application conditions on transformations, and how to annotate complex patterns. We extend the approach by: allowing domain model elements to be annotated with collections of elements, which can be collectively applied to individual resources or collections thereof; proposing an original construction to solve the problem of annotations remaining orphan , when annotated resources are consumed; introducing a notion of contract, by which a policy imposes additional pre-conditions and post-conditions on rules for deriving new resources. We discuss a concrete case study of linguistic resources, annotated with information on the licenses under which they can be used. The annotation framework allows forms of reasoning such as identifying conflicts among licenses, enforcing the presence of licenses, or ruling out some modifications of a licence configuration

Should we pay for ecosystem service outputs, inputs or both?

Payments for ecosystem service outputs have recently become a popular policy prescription for a range of agri-environmental schemes. The focus of this paper is on the choice of contract instruments to incentivise the provision of ecosystem service outputs from farms. The farmer is better informed than the regulator in terms of hidden information about costs and hidden-actions relating to effort. The results show that with perfect information, the regulator can contract equivalently on inputs or outputs. With hidden information, input-based contracts are more cost effective at reducing the informational rent related to adverse selection than output-based contracts. Mixed contracts are also cost-effective, especially where one input is not observable. Such contracts allow the regulator to target variables that are “costly-to-fake” as opposed to those prone to moral hazard such as effort. Further results are given for fixed price contracts and input-based contracts with moral hazard. The model is extended to include a discussion of repeated contracting and the scope that exists for the regulator to benefit from information revealed by the initial choice of contract. The models are applied to a case study of contracting with farmers to protect high biodiversity native vegetation that also provides socially-valuable ecosystem services

Model Based Development of Quality-Aware Software Services

Modelling languages and development frameworks give support for functional and structural description of software architectures. But quality-aware applications require languages which allow expressing QoS as a first-class concept during architecture design and service composition, and to extend existing tools and infrastructures adding support for modelling, evaluating, managing and monitoring QoS aspects. In addition to its functional behaviour and internal structure, the developer of each service must consider the fulfilment of its quality requirements. If the service is flexible, the output quality depends both on input quality and available resources (e.g., amounts of CPU execution time and memory). From the software engineering point of view, modelling of quality-aware requirements and architectures require modelling support for the description of quality concepts, support for the analysis of quality properties (e.g. model checking and consistencies of quality constraints, assembly of quality), tool support for the transition from quality requirements to quality-aware architectures, and from quality-aware architecture to service run-time infrastructures. Quality management in run-time service infrastructures must give support for handling quality concepts dynamically. QoS-aware modeling frameworks and QoS-aware runtime management infrastructures require a common evolution to get their integration