College Student Lay Health Information Mediary Behavior: an Examination of eHealth Literacy and Unrequested Health Advice

Lay health information mediary behavior (LHIMB) describes individuals seeking health information to relay to others. The current study examines LHIMB as a relationship between eHealth literacy and unrequested health advice (UHA). 254 undergraduate students completed a survey addressing eHealth literacy levels, general UHA behaviors and specific UHA episodes. Results on general UHA behaviors indicate no significant relationship exists between eHealth literacy and utilizing UHA in health decision-making or frequency of offering UHA. However, self-perceived health status and degree of health worry significantly predict using UHA in health decision-making. Further, as health worry increases, participants appear significantly more likely to receive and offer UHA. Results on specific UHA episodes suggest the majority of UHA occurs within close relationships. Rather than utilizing Internet sources, the majority of UHA employs personal experience as the primary health information source. Though the quality and reliability of online health information may not presently represent a significant concern to college student health, future research should further examine the observed partiality shown toward personal experience and student reliance on lay health sources demonstrated in the current study

Credibility of Health Information and Digital Media: New Perspectives and Implications for Youth

Part of the Volume on Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility. This chapter considers the role of Web technologies on the availability and consumption of health information. It argues that young people are largely unfamiliar with trusted health sources online, making credibility particularly germane when considering this type of information. The author suggests that networked digital media allow for humans and technologies act as "apomediaries" that can be used to steer consumers to high quality health information, thereby empowering health information seekers of all ages

Dynamical Properties of Interaction Data

Network dynamics are typically presented as a time series of network properties captured at each period. The current approach examines the dynamical properties of transmission via novel measures on an integrated, temporally extended network representation of interaction data across time. Because it encodes time and interactions as network connections, static network measures can be applied to this "temporal web" to reveal features of the dynamics themselves. Here we provide the technical details and apply it to agent-based implementations of the well-known SEIR and SEIS epidemiological models.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

Functionality-rich Versus Minimalist Platforms: A Two-sided Market Analysis

Should a new ``platform\u27\u27 target a functionality-rich but complex andexpensive design or instead opt for a bare-bone but cheaper one? This is afundamental question with profound implications for the eventual success ofany platform. A general answer is, however, elusive as it involves a complextrade-off between benefits and costs. The intent of this paper is tointroduce an approach based on standard tools from the fields of marketing andeconomics, which can offer some insight into this difficult question. Wedemonstrate its applicability by developing and solving a generic model thatincorporates key interactions between platform stakeholders. The solutionconfirms that the ``optimal\u27\u27 number of features a platform should offerstrongly depends on variations in cost factors. More interestingly, it revealsa high sensitivity to small relative changes in those costs. The paper\u27scontribution and motivation are in establishing the potential of such across-disciplinary approach for providing qualitative and quantitativeinsights into the complex question of platform design

Correlation dynamics in East Asian financial markets

We examine the dynamic relationship between stock returns and exchange rate changes using daily data from January 1994 to September 2013 for six East Asian countries. We use the multivariate GARCH-DCC model in order to disclose the relationship between stock markets and foreign exchange markets which is important for understanding financial stability. The estimation results reveal time varying correlations in the pre and post Asian crisis and the Global Financial Crisis periods for all countries. The correlations are stronger when the crisis intensifies. The degree of interdependence between both markets reflects a mutually markets response to shocks and changes in policy

How costly is sustained low inflation for the U.S. economy?

The authors study the welfare cost of inflation in a general equilibrium life-cycle model that includes households that live for many periods, production and capital, simple monetary and financial sectors, and a fairly elaborate government sector. The government’s taxation of capital income is not indexed for inflation. They find that a plausibly calibrated version of this model has a steady state that matches a variety of facts about the postwar U.S. economy. They use the model to estimate the welfare cost of permanent, policy-induced changes in the inflation rate and find that most of the costs of inflation are direct and indirect consequences of the fact that inflation increases the effective tax rate on capital income. The cost estimates are an order of magnitude larger than other estimates in the literature.Economic conditions - United States ; Inflation (Finance)