Harnessing Health Care Markets for the Public Interest: Insights for U.S. Health Reform From the German and Dutch Multipayer Systems

Outlines how the German and Dutch systems offer universal coverage via competing insurance plans and promote effective and efficient care. Highlights insurance exchanges, multipayer policies and group purchasing, information systems, and public reporting

Partial theta functions and mock modular forms as q-hypergeometric series

Ramanujan studied the analytic properties of many $q$-hypergeometric series. Of those, mock theta functions have been particularly intriguing, and by work of Zwegers, we now know how these curious $q$-series fit into the theory of automorphic forms. The analytic theory of partial theta functions however, which have $q$-expansions resembling modular theta functions, is not well understood. Here we consider families of $q$-hypergeometric series which converge in two disjoint domains. In one domain, we show that these series are often equal to one another, and define mock theta functions, including the classical mock theta functions of Ramanujan, as well as certain combinatorial generating functions, as special cases. In the other domain, we prove that these series are typically not equal to one another, but instead are related by partial theta functions.Comment: 13 page

The probability that the number of points on the Jacobian of a genus 2 curve is prime

In 2000, Galbraith and McKee heuristically derived a formula that estimates the probability that a randomly chosen elliptic curve over a fixed finite prime field has a prime number of rational points. We show how their heuristics can be generalized to Jacobians of curves of higher genus. We then elaborate this in genus 2 and study various related issues, such as the probability of cyclicity and the probability of primality of the number of points on the curve itself. Finally, we discuss the asymptotic behavior as the genus tends to infinity.Comment: Minor edits, 37 pages. To appear in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Societ

Almost harmonic Maass forms and Kac-Wakimoto characters

We resolve a question of Kac, and explain the automorphic properties of characters due to Kac-Wakimoto pertaining to sl(m|n)^ highest weight modules, for n \geq 1. We prove that the Kac-Wakimoto characters are essentially holomorphic parts of certain generalizations of harmonic weak Maass forms which we call "almost harmonic Maass forms". Using a new approach, this generalizes prior work of the first author and Ono, and the authors, both of which treat only the case n = 1. We also provide an explicit asymptotic expansion for the characters.Comment: To appear in J. Reine Angew. Math. (Crelle's Journal). This final version updates prior arXiv submission 1112.472

Quantum mock modular forms arising from eta-theta functions

In 2013, Lemke Oliver classified all eta-quotients which are theta functions. In this paper, we unify the eta-theta functions by constructing mock modular forms from the eta-theta functions with even characters, such that the shadows of these mock modular forms are given by the eta-theta functions with odd characters. In addition, we prove that our mock modular forms are quantum modular forms. As corollaries, we establish simple finite hypergeometric expressions which may be used to evaluate Eichler integrals of the odd eta-theta functions, as well as some curious algebraic identities.Comment: 33 page