The Protection of Patients Under the Clayton Act

The vast consolidation among health-care providers in the aftermath of the Affordable Care Act’s enactment has led to much debate over the benefits of mergers in the health-care industry. In 2016, the Federal Trade Commission filed motions in federal court to enjoin three hospital mergers in various parts of the country. This amounted to more challenges to hospital mergers in a single year than any year in recent history. Though two of these motions succeeded at the district court level, both were overturned on appeal, which led many to wonder what the effect of these decisions would be on future health-care mergers. While many fear that hospital mergers lead to higher prices for consumers, there are also those who contend that mergers lead to efficiencies, which allow merging parties to utilize resources more effectively, increase the quality of patient care and coordination, and potentially save lives. This Note argues that the possibility of quality-enhancing or life-saving efficiencies is worth the risk that consumers see increased prices. To allow mergers that may realize these types of efficiencies, antitrust enforcement agencies and courts must begin placing greater weight on merging parties’ efficiency arguments by easing the current standard. Additionally, in light of new research suggesting that cross-market health-care mergers, or mergers between providers in different geographic markets, affect bargaining dynamics between providers and insurers, this Note argues that parties’ relative bargaining power must be considered in agencies’ and courts’ analyses of the competitive landscape relevant to a merger

Strategies for distributing goals in a team of cooperative agents

This paper addresses the problem of distributing goals to individual agents inside a team of cooperative agents. It shows that several parameters determine the goals of particular agents. The first parameter is the set of goals allocated to the team; the second parameter is the description of the real actual world; the third parameter is the description of the agents' ability and commitments. The last parameter is the strategy the team agrees on: for each precise goal, the team may define several strategies which are orders between agents representing, for instance, their relative competence or their relative cost. This paper also shows how to combine strategies. The method used here assumes an order of priority between strategie

Hawking Radiation as Tunneling

We present a short and direct derivation of Hawking radiation as a tunneling process, based on particles in a dynamical geometry. The imaginary part of the action for the classically forbidden process is related to the Boltzmann factor for emission at the Hawking temperature. Because the derivation respects conservation laws, the exact spectrum is not precisely thermal. We compare and contrast the problem of spontaneous emission of charged particles from a charged conductor.Comment: LaTeX, 10 pages; v2. journal version, added section on relation of black hole radiation to electric charge emission from a charged conducting sphere; v3. restored cut referenc

A time-dependent variational principle for dissipative dynamics

We extend the time-dependent variational principle to the setting of dissipative dynamics. This provides a locally optimal (in time) approximation to the dynamics of any Lindblad equation within a given variational manifold of mixed states. In contrast to the pure-state setting there is no canonical information geometry for mixed states and this leads to a family of possible trajectories --- one for each information metric. We focus on the case of the operationally motivated family of monotone riemannian metrics and show further, that in the particular case where the variational manifold is given by the set of fermionic gaussian states all of these possible trajectories coincide. We illustrate our results in the case of the Hubbard model subject to spin decoherence.Comment: Published versio

New opportunities with spectro-interferometry and spectro-astrometry

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SPIE via the DOI in this record.Latest-generation spectro-interferometric instruments combine a milliarcsecond angular resolution with spectral capabilities, resulting in an immensely increased information content. Here, I present methodological work and results that illustrate the fundamentally new scientific insights provided by spectro-interferometry with very high spectral dispersion or in multiple line transitions (Brackett and Pfund lines). In addition, I discuss some pitfalls in the interpretation of spectro-interferometric data. In the context of our recent studies on the classical Be stars β CMi and ζ Tau, I present the first position-velocity diagram obtained with optical interferometry and provide a physical interpretation for a phase inversion, which has in the meantime been observed for several classical Be-stars. In the course of our study on the Herbig B[e] star V921 Sco, we combined, for the first time, spectro-interferometry and spectro-astrometry, providing a powerful and resource-efficient way to constrain the spatial distribution as well as the kinematics of the circumstellar gas with an unprecedented velocity resolution up to R = λ/Δλ = 100,000. Finally, I discuss our phase sign calibration procedure, which has allowed us to calibrate AMBER differential phases and closure phases for all spectral modes, and derive from the gained experience science-driven requirements for future instrumentation projects.This work was performed in part under contract with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) funded by NASA through the Sagan Fellowship Program

Identifying hybridizing taxa within the Daphnia longispina species complex: a comparison of genetic methods and phenotypic approaches

Daphnia galeata Sars, D. longispina O. F. Muller and D. cucullata Sars (Crustacea: Cladocera) are closely related species which often produce interspecific hybrids in natural populations. Several marker systems are available for taxon determination in this hybridizing complex, but their performance and reliability has not been systematically assessed. We compared results from identifications by three molecular methods. More than 1,200 individuals from 10 localities in the Czech Republic were identified as parental species or hybrids by allozyme electrophoresis and the analysis of the restriction fragment length polymorphism of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS-RFLP); over 440 of them were additionally analyzed and identified by 12 microsatellite loci. Identification by microsatellite markers corresponded well with allozyme analyses. However, consistent discrepancies between ITS-RFLP and other markers were observed in two out of 10 studied localities. Although some marker discrepancies may have been caused by occasional recent introgression, consistent deviations between ITS-RFLP and other markers suggest a long-term maintenance of introgressed alleles. These results warn against its use as a sole identification method in field studies. Additionally, we quantitatively evaluated the discriminatory power of geometric morphometric (elliptic Fourier) analysis of body shapes based on photos of over 1,300 individuals pre-classified by allozyme markers. Furthermore, a randomly selected subset of 240 individuals was independently determined from photos by several experts. Despite a tendency for morphological divergence among parental Daphnia species, some taxa (especially D. galeata, D. longispina, and their hybrids) substantially overlapped in their body shapes. This was reflected in different determination success for particular species and hybrids in discriminant analysis based on shape data as well as from photograph

Forming efficient agent groups for completing complex tasks

In this paper we produce complexity and impossibility results and develop algorithms for a task allocation problem that needs to be solved by a group of autonomous agents working together. In particular, each task is assumed to be composed of several subtasks and involves an associated predetermined and known overall payment (set by the task’s owner) for its completion. However, the division of this payment among the corresponding contributors is not predefined. Now to accomplish a particular task, all its subtasks need to be allocated to agents with the necessary capabilities and the agents’ corresponding costs need to fall within the preset overall task payment. For this scenario, we first provide a cooperative agent system designer with a practical solution that achieves an efficient allocation. However, this solution is not applicable for non-cooperative settings. Consequently, we go on to provide a detailed analysis where we prove that certain design goals cannot be achieved if the agents are self interested. Specifically, we prove that for the general case, no protocol achieving the efficient solution can exist that is individually rational and budget balanced. We show that although efficient protocols may exist in some settings, these will inevitably be setting-specific