Majority voting leads to unanimity

We consider a situation where society decides, through majority voting in a secret ballot, between the alternatives of ‘reform’ and ‘status quo’. Reform is assumed to create a minority of winners, while being efficient in the Kaldor-Hicks sense. We explore the consequences of allowing binding transfers between voters conditional on the chosen alternative. In particular, we establish conditions under which the winners wish to compensate all losers, thus leading to unanimity for reform, rather than compensating some losers to form a non-maximal majority. The analysis employs concepts from cooperative game theory

High volumes of recent surgical admissions, time to surgery, and 60-day mortality

Aims: Few studies have investigated potential consequences of strained surgical resources. The aim of this cohort study was to assess whether a high proportion of concurrent acute surgical admissions, tying up hospital surgical capacity, may lead to delayed surgery and affect mortality for hip fracture patients. Methods: This study investigated time to surgery and 60-day post-admission death of patients 70 years and older admitted for acute hip fracture surgery in Norway between 2008 and 2016. The proportion of hospital capacity being occupied by newly admitted surgical patients was used as the exposure. Hip fracture patients admitted during periods of high proportion of recent admissions were compared with hip fracture patients admitted at the same hospital during the same month, on similar weekdays, and times of the day with fewer admissions. Results: Among 60,072 patients, mean age was 84.6 years (SD 6.8), 78% were females, and median time to surgery was 20 hours (IQR 11 to 29). Overall, 14% (8,464) were dead 60 days after admission. A high (75th percentile) proportion of recent surgical admission compared to a low (25th percentile) proportion resulted in 20% longer time to surgery (95% confidence interval (CI) 16 to 25) and 20% higher 60-day mortality (hazard ratio 1.2, 95% CI 1.1 to 1.4). Conclusion: A high volume of recently admitted acute surgical patients, indicating probable competition for surgical resources, was associated with delayed surgery and increased 60-day mortality.publishedVersio

Hospitals' discharge tendency and risk of death - An analysis of 60,000 Norwegian hip fracture patients

Purpose: A reduction in the length of hospital stay may threaten patient safety. This study aimed to estimate the effect of organizational pressure to discharge on 60-day mortality among hip fracture patients. Patients and Methods: In this cohort study, hip fracture patients were analyzed as if they were enrolled in a sequence of trials for discharge. A hospital’s discharge tendency was defined as the proportion of patients with other acute conditions who were discharged on a given day. Because the hospital’s tendency to discharge would affect hip fracture patients in an essentially random manner, this exposure could be regarded as analogous to being randomized to treatment in a clinical trial. The study population consisted of 59,971 Norwegian patients with hip fractures, hospitalized between 2008 and 2016, aged 70 years and older. To calculate the hospital discharge tendency for a given day, we used data from all 5,013,773 other acute hospitalizations in the study period. Results: The probability of discharge among hip fracture patients increased by 5.5 percentage points (95% confidence interval (CI)=5.3– 5.7) per 10 percentage points increase in hospital discharges of patients with other acute conditions. The increased risk of death that could be attributed to a discharge from organizational causes was estimated to 3.7 percentage points (95% CI=1.4– 6.0). The results remained stable under different time adjustments, follow-up periods, and age cut-offs. Conclusion: This study showed that discharges from organizational causes may increase the risk of death among hip fracture patients.publishedVersio

How do busy hospital circumstances affect mortality and readmission within 60 days : A cohort study of 680 000 acute admissions in Norway

Author's accepted version (postprint).This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Elsevier in Health Policy on 21/5/2022.Available online: doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2022.05.008acceptedVersio

The effect of emergency department delays on 30-day mortality in Central Norway

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Coordination, Efficiency and Pre-Play Communication with Forgone Costly Messages

We examine communication in a two-player coordination game with Pareto-ranked equilibria. Prior research demonstrates that efficient coordination is difficult without communication but obtains regularly with (mandatory) costless pre-play messages. In a laboratory experiment, we introduce two realistic features of communication by making the sending of messages optional and costly. Even small costs dramatically reduce message use, but efficient coordination of actions occurs with similar frequency to that observed under costless communication. By varying communication costs we corroborate several predictions from a theoretical analysis based on forward induction. Our results indicate that, for some levels of communication costs, explicit communication may be unnecessary for efficient coordination; instead, players simply need to know that the option to send messages was available. Thus, the relationship between communication and coordination is more complex than suggested by prior research

Prior Knowledge and Entrepreneurial Innovative Success

This paper is concerned with the relationship between innovative success of entrepreneurs and their prior knowledge at the stage of firm formation. We distinguish between different kinds of experience an entrepreneur can possess and find evidence that the innovative success subsequent to firm formation is enhanced by entrepreneurs prior technological knowledge but not by prior market and organizational knowledge. Moreover we find that prior technological knowledge gathered through embeddedness within a research community has an additionally positive influence on post start-up innovative success. This is a first hint towards the importance of collective innovation activities

Dictator Games: A Meta Study

Over the last 25 years, more than a hundred dictator game experiments have been published. This meta study summarizes the evidence. Exploiting the fact that most experiments had to fix parameters they did not intend to test, the meta study explores a rich set of control variables for multivariate analysis. It shows that Tobit models (assuming that dictators would even want to take money) and hurdle models (assuming that the decision to give a positive amount is separate from the choice of amount, conditional on giving) outperform mere meta-regression and OLS