Patient allocations in general practice in case of patients' preferences for gender of doctor and their unavailability

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In some countries every citizen has the right to obtain a designated general practitioner. However, each individual may have preferences that cannot be fulfilled due to shortages of some kind. The questions raised in this paper are: To what extent can we expect that preferences are fulfilled when the patients "compete" for entry on the lists of practitioners? What changes can we expect under changing conditions? A particular issue explored in the paper is when the majority of women prefer a female doctor and there is a shortage of female doctors.</p> <p>Findings</p> <p>The analysis is done on the macro level by the so called gravity model and on the micro level by recent theories of benefit efficient population behaviour, partly developed by two of the authors. A major finding is that the number of patients wanting a doctor of the underrepresented gender is less important than the strength of their preferences as determining factor for the benefit efficient allocation.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We were able to generate valuable insights to the questions asked and to the dynamics of benefit efficient allocations. The approach is quite general and can be applied in a variety of contexts.</p

Loewner evolution driven by a stochastic boundary point

We consider evolution in the unit disk in which the sample paths are represented by the trajectories of points evolving randomly under the generalized Loewner equation. The driving mechanism differs from the SLE evolution, but nevertheless solutions possess similar invariance properties.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure

Rights to notice and reasons for dismissal

URN 99/948Available from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:3737.2351(707/rev10) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Modeling freight markets for coal

In this paper we study bulk shipping of coal between the central regions in the world. We compare the performance of cost-minimizing models with a gravity model approach. The main finding in the paper is that cost minimizing models provide relative poor fits to data. A simple one-parameter gravity model, however, provides very satisfactory fits to observed behavior. Maritime Economics & Logistics (2009) 11, 289–301. doi:10.1057/mel.2009.10