8,552 research outputs found
New policy experiments using nudges have the potential to make a significant contribution to energy conservation.
Adam Oliver comments on the UK Government’s recently published report on ‘Behaviour Change and Energy Use’, and finds that while some of the proposed interventions are not strictly ‘behavioural economics’, they may provide people with some incentives to reduce the amount of energy they use.
Health economic evaluation in Japan: a case study of one aspect of health technology assessment.
There is a burgeoning literature in health economic evaluation, with this form of analysis becoming increasingly influential at the health policy making level in a number of countries. However, a search of the literature reveals that in Japan, the world's second largest health care market, very little health economic evaluation has been undertaken. The main reason for the lack of interest in economic evaluation is that the fee-for-service and strict price regulation that characterises the system of health care financing in Japan is not conducive to this form of analysis. Moreover, the government and many researchers are satisfied that the current organisation of health care has given long life and low infant mortality at low cost. Even if it is accepted that low health care costs and good health prevail in Japan, slower economic growth rates, an ageing population and the development of new medical technologies will place increasing pressure on health care resources and will necessitate a more rational use of these resources. Good economic evaluation, by weighing benefits against costs, has an important role to play.
A quantitative and qualitative test of the Allais paradox using health outcomes.
There have been many tests of the descriptive validity of the axioms of expected utility theory (EU) using money outcomes. Such tests are relatively uncommon with respect to health outcomes. This is unfortunate, because the standard gamble - considered by many health economists to be the gold standard for cardinal health state value assessment - is implied from the axioms of EU. In this paper, the classic Allais paradox, which predicts a systematic violation of the independence axiom, is tested in the context of health outcomes. Seventeen of 38 participants demonstrated strict violations of independence, with 14 of these violating in the direction predicted by Allais. The violations were thus significant and systematic. Moreover, the participants’ qualitative explanations for their behaviour show seemingly rational and not inconsistent reasoning for the violations. This evidence offers a further challenge to the descriptive validity of EU, and underlines the need to test alternative theories of risk and uncertainty in the context of health outcomes.
Turaev genus, knot signature, and the knot homology concordance invariants
We give bounds on knot signature, the Ozsvath-Szabo tau invariant, and the
Rasmussen s invariant in terms of the Turaev genus of the knot.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure
A Turaev surface approach to Khovanov homology
We introduce Khovanov homology for ribbon graphs and show that the Khovanov
homology of a certain ribbon graph embedded on the Turaev surface of a link is
isomorphic to the Khovanov homology of the link (after a grading shift). We
also present a spanning quasi-tree model for the Khovanov homology of a ribbon
graph.Comment: 30 pages, 18 figures, added sections on virtual links and
Reidemeister move
Extremal Khovanov homology of Turaev genus one links
The Turaev genus of a link can be thought of as a way of measuring how
non-alternating a link is. A link is Turaev genus zero if and only if it is
alternating, and in this viewpoint, links with large Turaev genus are very
non-alternating. In this paper, we study Turaev genus one links, a class of
links which includes almost alternating links. We prove that the Khovanov
homology of a Turaev genus one link is isomorphic to in at least
one of its extremal quantum gradings. As an application, we compute or nearly
compute the maximal Thurston Bennequin number of a Turaev genus one link.Comment: 30 pages, 18 figure
Do unto others: on the importance of reciprocity in public administration
There is an extensive literature across the humanities and social sciences on reciprocity as a fundamental driver of human behaviour, and yet attempts to bring the main arguments from the diverse literatures together in a single interdisciplinary space remain scarce. This article aims to collate many of the main arguments from these literatures with the intention of speculating how reciprocity might be used to inform institutional structures, management practices and public policy. This is significant, because the recent literature on public sector policy design tends to attach import to entirely self-regarding and/or altruistic motivations as fundamental drivers of human action, but, with some notable exceptions, says little directly on the role that reciprocity might have to play in motivating performance improvements. The lack of attention paid to reciprocity in the literature on human motivation and public policy design is problematic if one concludes that reciprocating behaviours are a major determinant of group cooperation and success
- …