Improving Compliance With Preventive Care: Cooperation in Mutual Health Insurance

Preventive care should be subsidized in traditional insurance contracts since policyholders ignore the benefit of their prevention choice on the insurance premium (Ellis and Manning, 2007 JHE). We study participating policies as risk-sharing agreements among policyholders who decide how much to invest in secondary prevention. We explore under which conditions these policies allow partial or even full internalization of prevention benefits in an environment with repeated interactions between policy holders. Welfare generated by the risk-sharing agreement is increasing with the size of the pool, but at the same time the pool size must not be too large for cooperation to sustain the internalization benefits.

With a Little Help from my Enemy: Comparative Advertising

Comparative advertising content differs from generic. We discover that dissipative advertising has consequences depending upon content and cost. Comparison advertising may trigger legal action by rival firms that are named. In the model an entrant signals its product quality. By a comparative ad the entrant refers to the incumbent’s product. We show that comparison can enhance the signaling potential of dissipative advertising. From the viewpoint of the entrant, the choice of comparative advertising empowers the rival with the right to sue; generic does not. Consumers therefore infer that if the entrant uses comparative instead of generic ads it has a strong case

Influence of Textile Structure and Silica Based Finishing on Thermal Insulation Properties of Cotton Fabrics

The aim of this work is to investigate the influence of weave structures and silica coatings obtained via sol-gel process on the thermal insulation properties of cotton samples. For this reason three main weave structures (plain, satin, and piqué) of cotton fabric were selected with different yarn count, threads per cm, and mass per square meter values. Thereafter, only for the plain weave, the samples were padded using silica sol formed by hydrolysis and subsequent condensation of 3-glycidoxypropyltrimethoxysilane under acidic conditions. The silanized plain weave samples were characterized by TGA and FT-IR techniques. The thermal properties were measured with a home-made apparatus in order to calculate thermal conductivity, resistance, and absorption of all the treated fabric samples. The relationship between the thermal insulation properties of the plain weave fabrics and the concentration of sol solutions has been investigated. Fabrics weave and density were found to strongly influence the thermal properties: piqué always shows the lowest values and satin shows the highest values while plain weave lies in between. The thermal properties of treated high-density cotton plain weave fabric were proved to be strongly influenced by finishing agent concentration

Simulation and performance assessment of load-following CSP plants

Paper presented to the 3rd Southern African Solar Energy Conference, South Africa, 11-13 May, 2015.The paper is focused on the modeling of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants based on a steam Rankine cycle combined with two different solar field configurations: Parabolic Trough Collectors (PTC) and Heliostats with Central Receiver (HCR). The system is designed to operate as a load following power plant: a Thermal Energy Storage (TES) system allows to compensate fluctuations in solar energy and in power demand, and to operate also during nighttime hours. Commercial software and in-house developed computer codes are combined together to predict CSP plant performance under real operating conditions. The power block was modeled by Thermoflex® whereas Trnsys® was used to model the solar field operation all over the year. An optimization procedure interacting with Trnsys® model was used to size the two considered solutions for the solar fields. On the base of annual Trnsys® simulations, the optimization algorithm determined the minimum aperture area of the solar field assuring the required Heat Transfer Fluid (HTF) flow rate from TES. Charging and discharging cycles of TES are ruled by the HTF flow rate required for each hour of the year so as to match the electrical demand. Results of annual plant operation on a one hour basis are presented and discussed for Upington (RSA). Then the global results are compared with similar plants based in Sevilla (ES).dc201

Null Models of Economic Networks: The Case of the World Trade Web

In all empirical-network studies, the observed properties of economic networks are informative only if compared with a well-defined null model that can quantitatively predict the behavior of such properties in constrained graphs. However, predictions of the available null-model methods can be derived analytically only under assumptions (e.g., sparseness of the network) that are unrealistic for most economic networks like the World Trade Web (WTW). In this paper we study the evolution of the WTW using a recently-proposed family of null network models. The method allows to analytically obtain the expected value of any network statistic across the ensemble of networks that preserve on average some local properties, and are otherwise fully random. We compare expected and observed properties of the WTW in the period 1950-2000, when either the expected number of trade partners or total country trade is kept fixed and equal to observed quantities. We show that, in the binary WTW, node-degree sequences are sufficient to explain higher-order network properties such as disassortativity and clustering-degree correlation, especially in the last part of the sample. Conversely, in the weighted WTW, the observed sequence of total country imports and exports are not sufficient to predict higher-order patterns of the WTW. We discuss some important implications of these findings for international-trade models.Comment: 39 pages, 46 figures, 2 table

High fidelity copy number analysis of formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded tissues using affymetrix cytoscan HD chip

Detection of human genome copy number variation (CNV) is one of the most important analyses in diagnosing human malignancies. Genome CNV detection in formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues remains challenging due to suboptimal DNA quality and failure to use appropriate baseline controls for such tissues. Here, we report a modified method in analyzing CNV in FFPE tissues using microarray with Affymetrix Cytoscan HD chips. Gel purification was applied to select DNA with good quality and data of fresh frozen and FFPE tissues from healthy individuals were included as baseline controls in our data analysis. Our analysis showed a 91% overlap between CNV detection by microarray with FFPE tissues and chromosomal abnormality detection by karyotyping with fresh tissues on 8 cases of lymphoma samples. The CNV overlap between matched frozen and FFPE tissues reached 93.8%. When the analyses were restricted to regions containing genes, 87.1% concordance between FFPE and fresh frozen tissues was found. The analysis was further validated by Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization on these samples using probes specific for BRAF and CITED2. The results suggested that the modified method using Affymetrix Cytoscan HD chip gave rise to a significant improvement over most of the previous methods in terms of accuracy in detecting CNV in FFPE tissues. This FFPE microarray methodology may hold promise for broad application of CNV analysis on clinical samples. © 2014 Yu et al

The International Postal Network and Other Global Flows as Proxies for National Wellbeing.

The digital exhaust left by flows of physical and digital commodities provides a rich measure of the nature, strength and significance of relationships between countries in the global network. With this work, we examine how these traces and the network structure can reveal the socioeconomic profile of different countries. We take into account multiple international networks of physical and digital flows, including the previously unexplored international postal network. By measuring the position of each country in the Trade, Postal, Migration, International Flights, IP and Digital Communications networks, we are able to build proxies for a number of crucial socioeconomic indicators such as GDP per capita and the Human Development Index ranking along with twelve other indicators used as benchmarks of national well-being by the United Nations and other international organisations. In this context, we have also proposed and evaluated a global connectivity degree measure applying multiplex theory across the six networks that accounts for the strength of relationships between countries. We conclude by showing how countries with shared community membership over multiple networks have similar socioeconomic profiles. Combining multiple flow data sources can help understand the forces which drive economic activity on a global level. Such an ability to infer proxy indicators in a context of incomplete information is extremely timely in light of recent discussions on measurement of indicators relevant to the Sustainable Development Goals.Project LASAGNE Contract No. 318132 (STREP) - funded by the European CommissionThis is the final version of the article. It first appeared from PLOS via http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.015597