An institutional approach to the role of cost accounting in regulated markets: the case of the royal soap factory of Seville (1515-1692)

Regulated markets and state-owned monopolies characterized the economies of many Southern European and Latin American territories around the end of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Strikingly, however, investigation into the functioning of cost accounting in such contexts has been widely neglected in accounting research. In this paper, we examine the role of early cost systems in regulated markets by focusing on the case of the soap production and distribution monopoly in the City of Seville (Spain). In 1423, the King of Castille granted the soap monopoly to the Duke of Alcalá as a reward for his war achievements, but the decision on the price of soap rested in the hands of the local government. Disputes between the Duke of Alcalá and the local government (the parties) about the fair price of a pound of soap were resolved through tests that replicated the soap production process and determined its cost through complex calculations. Drawing on the insights of institutional sociology, we found that the test and its accompanying cost calculations constituted an institution that legitimized the parties both in the public opinion and before the King. Further, our data revealed that the parties engaged in active agency before the King of Spain to shape in their favor the constitutive elements of the institution, such as the use of purpose-purchased or stored materials in the soap test; incorporation into the total cost the rents that would have been earned if the factory buildings were leased; and the salaries of some employees (i.e., slaves, factory administrator and priest)

A comparison of reimbursement recommendations by European HTA agencies : Is there opportunity for further alignment?

Introduction: In Europe and beyond, the rising costs of healthcare and limited healthcare resources have resulted in the implementation of health technology assessment (HTA) to inform health policy and reimbursement decision-making. European legislation has provided a harmonized route for the regulatory process with the European Medicines Agency, but reimbursement decision-making still remains the responsibility of each country. There is a recognized need to move toward a more objective and collaborative reimbursement environment for new medicines in Europe. Therefore, the aim of this study was to objectively assess and compare the national reimbursement recommendations of 9 European jurisdictions following European Medicines Agency (EMA) recommendation for centralized marketing authorization. Methods: Using publicly available data and newly developed classification tools, this study appraised 9 European reimbursement systems by assessing HTA processes and the relationship between the regulatory, HTA and decision-making organizations. Each national HTA agency was classified according to two novel taxonomies. The System taxonomy, focuses on the position of the HTA agency within the national reimbursement system according to the relationship between the regulator, the HTA-performing agency, and the reimbursement decision-making coverage body. The HTA Process taxonomy distinguishes between the individual HTA agency's approach to economic and therapeutic evaluation and the inclusion of an independent appraisal step. The taxonomic groups were subsequently compared with national HTA recommendations. Results: This study identified European national reimbursement recommendations for 102 new active substances (NASs) approved by the EMA from 2008 to 2012. These reimbursement recommendations were compared using a novel classification tool and identified alignment between the organizational structure of reimbursement systems (System taxonomy) and HTA recommendations. However, there was less alignment between the HTA processes and recommendations. Conclusions: In order to move forward to a more harmonized HTA environment within Europe, it is first necessary to understand the variation in HTA practices within Europe. This study has identified alignment between HTA recommendations and the System taxonomy and one of the major implications of this study is that such alignment could support a more collaborative HTA environment in Europe.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Collaborative Verification-Driven Engineering of Hybrid Systems

Hybrid systems with both discrete and continuous dynamics are an important model for real-world cyber-physical systems. The key challenge is to ensure their correct functioning w.r.t. safety requirements. Promising techniques to ensure safety seem to be model-driven engineering to develop hybrid systems in a well-defined and traceable manner, and formal verification to prove their correctness. Their combination forms the vision of verification-driven engineering. Often, hybrid systems are rather complex in that they require expertise from many domains (e.g., robotics, control systems, computer science, software engineering, and mechanical engineering). Moreover, despite the remarkable progress in automating formal verification of hybrid systems, the construction of proofs of complex systems often requires nontrivial human guidance, since hybrid systems verification tools solve undecidable problems. It is, thus, not uncommon for development and verification teams to consist of many players with diverse expertise. This paper introduces a verification-driven engineering toolset that extends our previous work on hybrid and arithmetic verification with tools for (i) graphical (UML) and textual modeling of hybrid systems, (ii) exchanging and comparing models and proofs, and (iii) managing verification tasks. This toolset makes it easier to tackle large-scale verification tasks