Regulation and the Provision of Quality to Heterogenous Consumers: The Case of Prospective Pricing of Medical Services

This gaper analyzes the welfare implications of fixed price regulation in a model in which consumers are heterogeneous and a firm can endogenously quality discriminate. The motivation for this analysis is the current move of third party payors (governmental and private insurors) toward prospective pricing of medical services. Our major result is that prospective pricing causes a distributional welfare loss. Specifically, in our model, prospective pricing induces a profit maximizing medical care provider to simultaneously provide a smaller than socially optimal level of quality to more severely ill patients and, surprisingly, a greater than socially optimal amount of quality to less severely ill patients. Further, the distributional welfare loss does not disappear when ethically motivated deviation from profit maximization is allowed. The inefficient distribution of quality occurs because prospective payment regulation fixes the price across patients with different severities of illness but allows providers to quality discriminate. More complicated DRG pricing rules do not appear to be able to completely avoid this problem. Alternatively, vertical integration of third party payors into the direct provision of medical care is shown to be able to bypass the problem completely. This implies that the recent proliferation of vertically integrated health care organizations such health maintenance organizations, preferred provider organizations, and managed care plans by self-insuring employers are welfare improving.

FOOD SAFETY ISSUES, PROTECTION AND TRADE (WITH RESPECT TO MEAT PRODUCTS)

This paper was presented at the INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN LIVESTOCK PRODUCTS SYMPOSIUM in Auckland, New Zealand, January 18-19, 2001. The Symposium was sponsored by: the International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium, the Venture Trust, Massey University, New Zealand, and the Centre for Applied Economics and Policy Studies, Massey University. Dietary changes, especially in developing countries, are driving a massive increase in demand for livestock products. The objective of this symposium was to examine the consequences of this phenomenon, which some have even called a "revolution." How are dietary patterns changing, and can increased demands for livestock products be satisfied from domestic resources? If so, at what cost? What will be the flow-on impacts, for example, in terms of increased demands for feedgrains and the pressures for change within marketing systems? A supply-side response has been the continued development of large-scale, urban-based industrial livestock production systems that in many cases give rise to environmental concerns. If additional imports seem required, where will they originate and what about food security in the importing regions? How might market access conditions be re-negotiated to make increased imports achievable? Other important issues discussed involved food safety, animal health and welfare and the adoption of biotechnology, and their interactions with the negotiation of reforms to domestic and trade policies. Individual papers from this conference are available on AgEcon Search. If you would like to see the complete agenda and set of papers from this conference, please visit the IATRC Symposium web page at: http://www1.umn.edu/iatrc.intro.htmFood Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, International Relations/Trade,

'A test for poetry': an examination of Louis Zukofsky's 'objectivist principles' and poetic practice

My aim in this thesis is to examine Louis Zukofsky's poetry in relation to his stated objectivist principles using those principles and Zukofsky's unpublished statements as a test for his theory and practice. The first chapter introduces Zukofsky's poetic principles and examines the relationship between his work and Ezra Pound's Imagism. My aim here is to put the origins of Zukofsky's principles into an appropriate context, disputing the idea of the `objectivist' as a temporarily revivified Imagist. Chapter II examines Zukofsky's earliest verse, both umpublished juvenilia and the few early poems retained for publication. These poems all predate the `objectivist' statements and a comparison is made between these poems which anticipate the poet's later technique and those which do not. The chapter culminates in a study of `Poem beginning `The'' as the first identifiably objectivist work. Chapter III is concerned with Zukofsky as editor and critic since it was in this dual role that he first expressed his poetic theory. The principles of this theory are examined in detail here and the relationship between Zukofsky's poetry and criticism closely defined. The fourth chapter examines Zukofsky's shorter poems in the light of the critical framework provided by the `objectivist principles'. Individual poems are closely examined to reveal the `mechanism' of `objectivist' poetry and to facilitate a reading of Zukofsky's long poem `A'. Chapters V and VI are concerned with the two halves of `A'. Attention is given to the poem's detailed composition and to its overall structure and movement. This analysis is guided by the overriding question of the application of `objectivist princples' to a long rather than a short poem. The final chapter reviews Zukofsky's sustained critical idiom in both poetry and prose criticism and concludes that this idiom provides a flexible but principled and consistent framework for his life's work

Linear Stability Implies Nonlinear Stability for Faber-Krahn Type Inequalities

For a domain $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^n$ and a small number $\frak{T} > 0$, let $$\mathcal{E}_0(\Omega) = \lambda_1(\Omega) + {\frak{T}} {\text{tor}}(\Omega) = \inf_{u, w \in H^1_0(\Omega)\setminus \{0\}} \frac{\int |\nabla u|^2}{\int u^2} + {\frak{T}} \int \frac{1}{2} |\nabla w|^2 - w$$ be a modification of the first Dirichlet eigenvalue of $\Omega$. It is well-known that over all $\Omega$ with a given volume, the only sets attaining the infimum of $\mathcal{E}_0$ are balls $B_R$; this is the Faber-Krahn inequality. The main result of this paper is that, if for all $\Omega$ with the same volume and barycenter as $B_R$ and whose boundaries are parametrized as small $C^2$ normal graphs over $\partial B_R$ with bounded $C^2$ norm, $$\int |u_{\Omega} - u_{B_R}|^2 + |\Omega \triangle B_R|^2 \leq C [\mathcal{E}_0(\Omega) - \mathcal{E}_0(B_R)]$$ (i.e. the Faber-Krahn inequality is linearly stable), then the same is true for any $\Omega$ with the same volume and barycenter as $B_R$ without any smoothness assumptions (i.e. it is nonlinearly stable). Here $u_{\Omega}$ stands for an $L^2$-normalized first Dirichlet eigenfunction of $\Omega$. Related results are shown for Riemannian manifolds. The proof is based on a detailed analysis of some critical perturbations of Bernoulli-type free boundary problems. The topic of when linear stability is valid, as well as some applications, are considered in a companion paper.Comment: 72 pages, comments welcome

Rectifiability and uniqueness of blow-ups for points with positive Alt-Caffarelli-Friedman limit

We study the regularity of the interface between the disjoint supports of a pair of nonnegative subharmonic functions. The portion of the interface where the Alt-Caffarelli-Friedman (ACF) monotonicity formula is asymptotically positive forms an $\mathcal{H}^{n-1}$-rectifiable set. Moreover, for $\mathcal{H}^{n-1}$-a.e. such point, the two functions have unique blowups, i.e. their Lipschitz rescalings converge in $W^{1,2}$ to a pair of nondegenerate truncated linear functions whose supports meet at the approximate tangent plane. The main tools used include the Naber-Valtorta framework and our recent result establishing a sharp quantitative remainder term in the ACF monotonicity formula. We also give applications of our results to free boundary problems

Sharp quantitative Faber-Krahn inequalities and the Alt-Caffarelli-Friedman monotonicity formula

The objective of this paper is two-fold. First, we establish new sharp quantitative estimates for Faber-Krahn inequalities on simply connected space forms. In these spaces, geodesic balls uniquely minimize the first eigenvalue of the Dirichlet Laplacian among all sets of a fixed volume. We prove that for any open set $\Omega$, $$\lambda_1(\Omega) - \lambda_1(B) \gtrsim |\Omega \Delta B|^2 + \int |u_{\Omega} - u_B|^2,$$ where $B$ denotes the nearest geodesic ball to $\Omega$ with $|B|=|\Omega|$ and $u_\Omega$ denotes the first eigenfunction with suitable normalization. On Euclidean space, this extends a result of Brasco-De Phillipis-Velichkov; the eigenfunction control largely builds upon on new regularity results for minimizers of critically perturbed Alt-Cafarelli type functionals in our companion paper. On the round sphere and hyperbolic space, the present results are the first sharp quantitative results with respect to any distance; here the local portion of the analysis is based on new implicit spectral analysis techniques. Second, we apply these sharp quantitative Faber-Krahn inequalities in order to establish a quantitative form of the Alt-Caffarelli-Friedman (ACF) monotonicity formula. A powerful tool in the study of free boundary problems, the ACF monotonicity formula is nonincreasing with respect to its scaling parameter for any pair of admissible subharmonic functions, and is constant if and only if the pair comprises two linear functions truncated to complementary half planes. We show that the energy drop in the ACF monotonicity formula from one scale to the next controls how close a pair of admissible functions is from a pair of complementary half-plane solutions. In particular, when the square root of the energy drop summed over all scales is small, our result implies the existence of tangents (unique blowups) of these functions.Comment: 39 pages, comments welcome

Economic and psychological approaches to risk-bearing : theory and experimental evidence / BEBR No. 603

Title page includes summary.Includes bibliographical references (p. 44-45)