Risk adjustment in the Netherlands; an analysis of insurers' health care expenditures

As of 2006, the Dutch healthcare system will be run by regulated competition. An important part of regulated competition is a system of risk adjustment. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the effects of risk adjustment in the Dutch social health insurance system covering the years 1991-2001. By comparing insurers' health care expenditures with their risk adjusted premiums, our analysis estimates the impact of risk adjustment over a number of years. Results indicate that the risk-adjustment system has improved substantially. Whereas in the beginning of the nineties prospective risk adjustment could explain about 20% of the variation in health care expenditure differentials between insurers, this figure rose to 55% in 2001. The explanation of the same variation after retrospective payments did not show a clear upward or downward trend, and has varied since 1995 around 85%. The remaining variation in insurers' health care expenditure differentials are determined more by structural than random factors. One such factor may be related to the low ex-ante projections of the government's total health care expenditures, which favour insurers with a population of relatively good health risks. Results show that new entrants in the Dutch health insurance market had significantly lower health care expenditures. Furthermore, economies of scale do not seem to have played a role during the sample period: the expenditures of large insurers were not significantly lower than those of the smaller insurers.

Delving deeper into color space

So far, color-naming studies have relied on a rather limited set of color stimuli. Most importantly, stimuli have been largely limited to highly saturated colors. Because of this, little is known about how people categorize less saturated colors and, more generally, about the structure of color categories as they extend across all dimensions of color space. This article presents the results from a large Internet-based color-naming study that involved color stimuli ranging across all available chroma levels in Munsell space. These results help answer such questions as how English speakers name a more complex color set, whether English speakers use so-called basic color terms (BCTs) more frequently for more saturated colors, how they use non-BCTs in comparison with BCTs, whether non-BCTs are highly consensual in less saturated parts of the solid, how deep inside color space basic color categories extend, or how they behave on the chroma dimension

From probabilities to categorical beliefs: Going beyond toy models

According to the Lockean thesis, a proposition is believed just in case it is highly probable. While this thesis enjoys strong intuitive support, it is known to conflict with seemingly plausible logical constraints on our beliefs. One way out of this conflict is to make probability 1 a requirement for belief, but most have rejected this option for entailing what they see as an untenable skepticism. Recently, two new solutions to the conflict have been proposed that are alleged to be non-skeptical. We compare these proposals with each other and with the Lockean thesis, in particular with regard to the question of how much we gain by adopting any one of them instead of the probability 1 requirement, that is, of how likely it is that one believes more than the things one is fully certain of

What are natural concepts? A design perspective

Conceptual spaces have become an increasingly popular modeling tool in cognitive psychology. The core idea of the conceptual spaces approach is that concepts can be represented as regions in similarity spaces. While it is generally acknowledged that not every region in such a space represents a natural concept, it is still an open question what distinguishes those regions that represent natural concepts from those that do not. The central claim of this paper is that natural concepts are represented by the cells of an optimally designed similarity space

Local strong D-Monotonicity of the Kalai-Smorodinsky and Nash bargaining solution

bargaining

Convergence and international policy coordination in the EU: A dynamic games approach

Maastricht Treaty;Dynamic Games;EU;Game Theory;International Policy

S.L.I.M., a small linear interdependent model of eight EU-member states, the USA and Japan

International Economics;EU

Rationality: a social-epistemology perspective

Both in philosophy and in psychology, human rationality has traditionally been studied from an "individualistic" perspective. Recently, social epistemologists have drawn attention to the fact that epistemic interactions among agents also give rise to important questions concerning rationality. In previous work, we have used a formal model to assess the risk that a particular type of social-epistemic interactions lead agents with initially consistent belief states into inconsistent belief states. Here, we continue this work by investigating the dynamics to which these interactions may give rise in the population as a whole

Is there room for convergence in the E.C.?

EEC

On the Sensitivity Matrix of the Nash Bargaining Solution

In this note we derive the sensitivity matrix of the Nash bargaining solution w.r.t. the disagreement point d.This first order derivative is completely specified in terms of the Pareto frontier function.We show that whenever one player increases his threatpoint always at least one player will loose utility: i.e. the dual result of Pareto optimality.Furthermore,the dmonotonicity property is easily re-established from this matrix.This matrix also enables us to consider the concept of local strong d-monotonicity.That is,under which conditions on the Pareto frontier function . an infinitesimal increase of di,while for each j = i, dj remains constant,it happens that agent i is the only one who s payoff increases.We show that for the Nash bargaining solution this question is closely related to non-negativity of the Hamiltonian matrix of . at the solution.Nash bargaining solution;d-monotonicity;diagonally dominant Stieltjes matrix