On the consideration of potential harm in the award of punitive damages

Multiple empirical studies find that juries/courts take account of potential harm in the determination of punitive damages. The received view in economic theory, however, is that punitive damages should not depend on potential harm. The purpose of this note is to provide an efficiency rationale for the courts'' behavior. Our particular result is that when the punitive damage multiplier decreases as the actual harm increases, the optimal multiplier does depend on the potential harm.Compensatory damages, potential harm, punitive damages

An analytical framework for interpreting appellate court data

The objective of this paper is to present a simple but flexible theoretical model of the adjudication process that can be used to derive implications of various hypotheses about the adjudicators and litigants for the trial win rates, appeal rates and the reversal rates. Such a model can serve as a helpful tool for guiding empirical work on attitudes and competency of adjudicators and litigants. We use the model to study how the appeal and reversal rates are affected by the litigants'' perception that the trial court has a pro-plaintiff bias. We find that such a perception can result in higher appeal and reversal rates for the defendants relative to the plaintiffs, a pattern that is observed in the data.Trial Court Bias, Appeal Rates, Reversal Rates, Adjudication Process, Appellate Courts

A survey on indoor patient satisfaction in a private tertiary level surgical hospital in central India

Background: Patient satisfaction is an extremely important factor responsible for the success and growth of any hospital. Hence this survey was done in a super-speciality Uro-gynaecology hospital in Nagpur, Central India to assess the patient satisfaction for indoor facilities.Methods: The present study was conducted over a period of 4 months in 100 indoor patients. These patients were asked to fill up a questionnaire just before they were discharged.Results: 88% respondents found the service by reception staff as excellent. 64% were admitted and allotted rooms within 30 minutes of arrival. 94% said that the time given by doctors was satisfactory. 96% were extremely satisfied with the disease description, 98% said that the perception of efficiency of doctors and the details of investigations discussed were excellent. 90% felt that the number of visits by doctors were adequate. Availability of medicines in the pharmacy was there for most of the times (98%). Drinking water and availability of toilets, electricity and cleanliness was present (94%). 52% were really satisfied with the final bill.Conclusions: Patients are satisfied regarding the basic amenities of the hospital and the provision for water and cleanliness levels. They are happy with the attitude and communication skills of the doctors, they expressed satisfaction about the availability of in-house pharmacy too

Witnesses of non-classicality for simulated hybrid quantum systems

The task of testing whether quantum theory applies to all physical systems and all scales requires considering situations where a quantum probe interacts with another system that need not obey quantum theory in full. Important examples include the cases where a quantum mass probes the gravitational field, for which a unique quantum theory of gravity does not yet exist, or a quantum field, such as light, interacts with a macroscopic system, such as a biological molecule, which may or may not obey unitary quantum theory. In this context a class of experiments has recently been proposed, where the non-classicality of a physical system that need not obey quantum theory (the gravitational field) can be tested indirectly by detecting whether or not the system is capable of entangling two quantum probes. Here we illustrate some of the subtleties of the argument, to do with the role of locality of interactions and of non-classicality, and perform proof-of-principle experiments illustrating the logic of the proposals, using a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance quantum computational platform with four qubits.Comment: Revised and extende

Efficient Hamiltonian programming in qubit arrays with nearest-neighbour couplings

We consider the problem of selectively controlling couplings in a practical quantum processor with always-on interactions that are diagonal in the computational basis, using sequences of local NOT gates. This methodology is well-known in NMR implementations, but previous approaches do not scale efficiently for the general fully-connected Hamiltonian, where the complexity of finding time-optimal solutions makes them only practical up to a few tens of qubits. Given the rapid growth in the number of qubits in cutting-edge quantum processors, it is of interest to investigate the applicability of this control scheme to much larger scale systems with realistic restrictions on connectivity. Here we present an efficient scheme to find near time-optimal solutions that can be applied to engineered qubit arrays with local connectivity for any number of qubits, indicating the potential for practical quantum computing in such systems.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures. Shortened and clarified from previous versio

A Model Based Framework for Testing Safety and Security in Operational Technology Environments

Todays industrial control systems consist of tightly coupled components allowing adversaries to exploit security attack surfaces from the information technology side, and, thus, also get access to automation devices residing at the operational technology level to compromise their safety functions. To identify these concerns, we propose a model-based testing approach which we consider a promising way to analyze the safety and security behavior of a system under test providing means to protect its components and to increase the quality and efficiency of the overall system. The structure of the underlying framework is divided into four parts, according to the critical factors in testing of operational technology environments. As a first step, this paper describes the ingredients of the envisioned framework. A system model allows to overview possible attack surfaces, while the foundations of testing and the recommendation of mitigation strategies will be based on process-specific safety and security standard procedures with the combination of existing vulnerability databases