Projecting health-care expenditure for Switzerland: further evidence against the 'red-herring' hypothesis

This paper contributes to the debate about the impact of population ageing on health care expenditure. Some health economists claim that the commonly presumed impact of population ageing is a "red herring". Based on empirical studies these authors conclude that proximity to death and not age per se matters. In projecting health care expenditure for Switzerland the present study provides evidence that proximity to death is of marginal importance. These projections suggest that population ageing is still the most important age-related cost-driver. Moreover, morbidity outweighs mortality as a factor of health-care expenditure. But most vital are non-demographic drivers such as medical progress. Thus, from the point of view of cost-benefit analysis one should even ignore costs of dying when projecting health care expenditure. Moreover, regressions might overestimate proximity to death due to systematic biases. Finally, ever-increasing health-care expenditure can be slowed down by appropriate policy measures.health-care expenditure; population ageing; public health-care budget; proximity to death, morbidity

Data depth and floating body

Little known relations of the renown concept of the halfspace depth for multivariate data with notions from convex and affine geometry are discussed. Halfspace depth may be regarded as a measure of symmetry for random vectors. As such, the depth stands as a generalization of a measure of symmetry for convex sets, well studied in geometry. Under a mild assumption, the upper level sets of the halfspace depth coincide with the convex floating bodies used in the definition of the affine surface area for convex bodies in Euclidean spaces. These connections enable us to partially resolve some persistent open problems regarding theoretical properties of the depth

Floating body, illumination body, and polytopal approximation

Let $K$ be a convex body in $\Bbb R^{d}$ and $K_{t}$ its floating bodies. There is a polytope with at most $n$ vertices that satisfies $$K_{t} \subset P_{n} \subset K$$ where $$n \leq e^{16d} \frac{vol_{d}(K \setminus K_{t})}{t\ vol_{d}(B_{2}^{d})}$$ Let $K^{t}$ be the illumination bodies of $K$ and $Q_{n}$ a polytope that contains $K$ and has at most $n$ $d-1$-dimensional faces. Then $$vol_{d}(K^{t} \setminus K) \leq cd^{4} vol_{d}(Q_{n} \setminus K)$$ where $$ n \leq \frac{c}{dt} \ vol_{d}(K^{t} \setminus K) $

Fairness in the Mail and Opportunism in the Internet - A Newspaper Experiment on Ultimatum Bargaining

On 11 May 2001, readers of the Berliner Zeitung were invited to participate in an ultimatum bargaining experiment played in the strategy vector mode: each participant chooses not only how much (s)he demands of the DM1,000 pie but also which of the nine possible offers of DM100, 200,..., 900 (s)he would accept or reject. In addition, participants were asked to predict the most frequent type of behavior. Three randomly selected proposer-responder pairs were rewarded according to the rules of ultimatum bargaining and three randomly chosen participants of those who predicted the most frequent type of behavior received a prize of DM500. Decisions could be submitted by mail, fax or via the internet. Behavior is described, statistically analyzed and compared to the usual laboratory ultimatum bargaining results.Ultimatum bargaining, newspaper experiment, internet experiment, fairness, distribution conflicts