8,341 research outputs found
Cream-Skimming, Parking and Other Intended and Unintended Effects of Performance-Based Contracting in Social Welfare Services
In a growing number of countries, the delivery of social welfare services is contracted out to private providers, and increasingly, using performance-based contracts. Critics of performance-based incentive contracts stress their potential unintended effects, including cream-skimming and other gaming activities intended to raise measured performance outcomes. We analyze the incentive effects of performance-based contracts, as well as their impacts on provider job placement rates, using unique data on Dutch cohorts of unemployed and disabled workers that were assigned to private social welfare providers in 2002-2005. We take advantage of variation in contract design over this period, where procured contracts gradually moved from partial performance-contingent pay to contracts with 100%-performance contingent reward schemes, and analyze the impact of these changes using panel data that allow us to control for cohort types and to develop explicit measures of selection into the programs. We find evidence of cream-skimming and other gaming activities on the part of providers but little impact of these activities on job placement rates. Overall, moving to a system with contract payments fully contingent on performance appears to increase job placements for more readily employable workers, although it does not affect the duration of their jobs.social welfare, performance contracting
Total reaction cross sections from 141Pr(,)Pr elastic scattering and -induced reaction cross sections at low energies
Elastic scattering data for Pr(,)Pr have been
analyzed to derive a new energy-dependent local potential for the
Pr- system. This potential is used successfully to predict the
cross section of the Pr(,n)Pm reaction at low energies
where new experimental data have become available very recently. Contrary to
various global potentials, this new potential is able to reproduce
simultaneously elastic scattering data around and above the Coulomb barrier and
reaction data below the Coulomb barrier for the Pr- system.
Reasons for the partial failure of the global potentials are explained by
intrinsic properties of the scattering matrix and their variation with energy.
The new local potential may become the basis for the construction of a new
global -nucleus potential.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, Phys. Rev. C, accepte
Team incentives in public organisations; an experimental study
Using a simple production game, we investigate whether public firms perform better when they increase the power of their workersĂ¹ùù¹ incentive schemes. In a laboratory experiment, subjects choose between a âpublic firmâ and a âprivate firmâ with team and individual incentives, respectively. When exposed to individual incentives, workers in the public firm increase effort in one parametrisation, but show a decrease in another. One reason for the latter observation is that reciprocators self-select in the public firm, rendering cooperation profitable.
Relativistic Mean Field in 80 nuclei and low energy proton reactions
Relativistic Mean Field calculations have been performed for a number of
nuclei in mass 80 region. Ground state binding energy, charge radius
and charge density values have been compared with experiment. Optical potential
have been generated folding the nuclear density with the microscopic nuclear
interaction DDM3Y. S-factors for low energy () and () reactions
have been calculated and compared with experiment.Comment: To appear in Physical Review
Alpha-particle optical potential proofs at astrophysically relevant energies
and ,n) reaction cross sections recently measured
close to the reaction thresholds are rather well described by a previously
developed regional optical potential. Thus, particular features of the
-particle optical potential at energies below the Coulomb barrier,
besides parameters describing -particle elastic scattering at higher
energies are confirmed. Additional limitations of similar statistical model
calculations for minor reaction channels are shown to be most likely due to an
overlooked process or critical values of statistical model parameters around
closed nuclear shells.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
- âŠ