effects of universal health insurance on health care utilization and supply side responses evidence from japan abstract we investigate the effects of a massive expansion in health insurance coverage on health care utilization and supply side responses by focusing on universal health insurance introduced in japan in 1961 there are two major findings first health care utilization measured in terms of admissions inpatient days and outpatient visits to hospitals increased significantly second we also find a supply response but the size of the supply response differs across service types while the number of beds increases effects on the number of medical institutions physicians and nurses are either negligible or inconclusive our results suggest that countries planning a large expansion in health insurance coverage would need to generate sufficient financial resources to cover the surge in health care expenditures both in the short and long run our results also indicate that any slowdown in the supply side response may constrain the ability of the health care system to meet increased demand

when not all conflict is bad manufacturing marketing conflict and strategic incentive design researchers and managers broadly agree that coordination and harmony between manufacturing and marketing improve firm performance by eliminating suboptimal practices within the firm in this paper we present a contrasting view of the manufacturing marketing interface we model a duopoly in which the firms compete on price and quality dimensions the manufacturing and marketing managers within each firm are presented with conflicting incentives focused on cost minimization and revenue maximization respectively these managers bargain with each other before arriving at compromise decisions regarding price and quality while frequently encountered in practice this conflicting objectives puzzle is surprising because one expects that centralized coordination by the owners of the firm towards profit maximization would lead to higher profits in this paper we resolve the conflicting objectives puzzle and demonstrate that surprisingly the firm s resulting profits in this setting of conflict can be higher than those obtained when the decisions of the managers are perfectly coordinated we also analyze the equilibrium in incentive plans when the owners can choose between compromise and perfect coordination our results offer a new interpretation of manufacturing marketing conflict as a strategic tool that can enhance firm profits

evolution of the infant health production function michael grossman s seminal publication on the demand for health and health production grossman 1972 has spawned a substantial body of research focusing on the production of infant health this article provides a systematic review of the published literature to date on infant health production and how it has evolved over the past 3 4 decades as data have become more available computing has improved and econometric methods have become more sophisticated while empirical research in most fields has expanded in corresponding ways the infant health production research has become an important part of the broader and inherently multidisciplinary literature on intergenerational health the strongest and most robust findings are that policies matter for infant health particularly those affecting access to health care and that prenatal smoking and other chemical exposures substantially compromise infant health promising directions for future research include elucidating relevant pathways reconciling the largely inconsistent estimated effects of nutrition and education and exploring the roles of preconceptional and lifetime health care paternal factors social support housing complementarity and substitutability of inputs factors that modify effects of inputs and evolving medical technologies

pricing and the news vendor problem a review with extensions in the newsvendor problem a decision maker facing random demand for a perishable product decides how much of it to stock for a single selling period this simple problem with its intuitively appealing solution is a crucial building block of stochastic inventory theory which comprises a vast literature focusing on operational efficiency typically in this literature market parameters such as demand and selling price are exogenous however incorporating these factors into the mode l can provide an excellent vehicle for examining how operational problems interact with marketing issues to influence decision making at the firm level in this paper we examine an extension of the newsvendor problem in which stocking quantity and selling price are set simultaneously we provide a comprehensive review that synthesizes existing results for the single period problem and develop additional results to enrich the existing knowledge base we also review and develop insight into a dynamic inventory extension of this problem and motivate the applicability of such models

integrated inventory model for deteriorating items under a multi echelon supply chain environment abstract as the industrial environment becomes more competitive supply chain management has become essential the objective of this research is to develop a multi echelon inventory model for a deteriorating item and to derive an optimal joint total cost from an integrated perspective among the supplier the producer and the buyer a computer code is developed to derive the optimal solution a numerical example is given to illustrate the model this paper shows that the integrated approach strategy results in the lowest joint total cost as compared with the independent decision approaches

the costs of low birth weight birth weight has emerged as the leading indicator of infant health and welfare and the central focus of infant health policy this is because low birth weight lbw infants experience severe health and developmental difficulties that can impose enormous costs on society but would the prevention of lbw generate equally sizable cost savings and health improvements estimates of the return to lbwprevention from cross sectional associations may be biased by omitted variables that cannot be influenced by policy such as genetic factors to address this we compare the hospital costs health at birth and infant mortality rates between heavier and lighter infants from all twin pairs born in the united states we also examine the effect of maternal smoking during pregnancy the leading risk factor for lbw in the united states on health among singleton births after controlling for detailed background characteristics both analyses imply substantially smaller effects of lbw than previously thought suggesting two possibilities 1 existing estimates overstate the true costs and consequences of lbw by at least a factor of four and by as much as a factor of 20 or 2 different lbw preventing interventions have different health and cost consequences implying that policy efforts that presume a single return to reducing lbw will necessarily be suboptimal

the single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory model with a generalised policy abstract this note considers a more general type of policy for the single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory model than has hitherto been presented based on successive shipments to the buyer within a single production batch increasing by a fixed factor

revenue sharing and vertical control in the video rental industry revenue sharing contracts in which retailers pay a royalty on sales to their suppliers are now widely used in the video rental industry we show that revenue sharing is valuable in vertically separated industries in which demand is either stochastic unpredictable or variable e g systematically declining downstream inventory is chosen before demand is realized and downstream firms engage in intrabrand competition unlike two part tariffs revenue sharing achieves the first best outcome by softening retail price competition without distorting retailers inventory decisions our theories are also consistent with trends in prices and availability following retailers adoption of revenue sharing contracts

on improving the single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory model with a generalized policy abstract in this note a simple procedure is suggested for modifying shipment size as obtained on applying the procedure given by hill european journal of operational research 97 1997 493 499

advance booking discount programs under retail competition we model a situation in which two retailers consider launching an advance booking discount abd program in this program customers are enticed to precommit their orders at a discount price prior to the regular selling season however these precommitted orders are filled during the selling season while the abd program enables the retailers to lock in a portion of the customer demand and use this demand information to develop more accurate forecasts and supply plans the abd price reduces profit margin we analyze the four possible scenarios wherein each of the two firms offer an abd program or not and establish conditions under which the unique equilibrium calls for launching the abd program at both retailers

the production inventory problem of a product with time varying demand production and deterioration rates abstract in this paper we consider the production inventory problem in which the demand production and deterioration rates of a product are assumed to vary with time shortages of a cycle are allowed to be backlogged partially two models are developed for the problem by employing different modeling approaches over an infinite planning horizon solution procedures are derived for determining the optimal replenishment policies a procedure to find the near optimal operating policy of the problem over a finite time horizon is also suggested

a one vendor multi buyer integrated inventory model abstract we consider a one vendor multi buyer integrated inventory model the vendor seeks to minimize his total annual cost subject to the maximum costs which buyers are prepared to incur in order to implement this model the vendor only needs to know buyer s annual demand and previous order frequency which can be inferred from buyer s past ordering behavior we find the optimal solution for the one vendor one buyer case and present a heuristic approach for the one vendor multi buyer case

rental price and rental duration under retail competition consider a retailer that rents products to customers for a pre specified rental duration by considering the dynamics of uncertain rental demand and return processes we first present a base model that is intended to analyze the impact of rental duration on the stocking level the rental price and the retailer s profit due to the complexity of the base model we develop an approximation scheme to obtain tractable results also we apply the base model to analyze a situation in which a retailer enters a revenue sharing agreement with a distributor moreover we expand our base model to address the issue of competition in rental duration and rental price the analysis of our competitive model in a duopolistic environment suggests that the market equilibrium depends on the market potential and the rental duration sensitivity furthermore we establish conditions under which one firm will charge a lower rental price while the other firm will offer a longer rental duration in equilibrium

socio economic status and child health does public health insurance narrow the drawing on evidence from the u s this paper examines the effects of public health insurance on children recent expansions of american public health insurance programs to previously ineligible children have created a great deal of variation that can be used to identify their effects results indicate that providing public insurance to poor children narrows socio economic gaps in utilization and health among children however inefficiencies and inequities in the allocation of health care remain which suggests that universality and outreach programs are also important components of the public health systems common in europe

an incremental discount pricing schedule with multiple customers and single price break abstract this paper analyzes how a supplier can formulate the terms of a quantity discount pricing schedule assuming a single incremental discount system a model is developed from which an algorithm is derived for an optimal discount schedule the cases are investigated in which both the discount rate and the break point are unknown and either one is prescribed a numerical example is presented to illustrate the algorithm developed

an optimal batch size for integrated production inventory policy in a supply chain abstract this study presents a new integrated production inventory policy under a finite planning horizon and a linear trend in demand we assume that the vendor makes a single product and supplies it to a buyer with a non periodic and just in time jit replenishment policy in a supply chain environment the objective is to minimize the joint total costs incurred by the vendor and the buyer in this study first we develop a mathematical model and prove that it has the optimal solution then we describe an explicit solution procedure for obtaining the optimal solution finally we provide two numerical examples to illustrate both increasing and decreasing demands in our proposed model and we show that the performance of the integrated consideration is better than the performance of any independent decision from either the buyer or the vendor

dynamic pricing in the presence of inventory considerations research overview current practices and future directions the benefits of dynamic pricing methods have long been known in industries such as airlines hotels and electric utilities where the capacity is fixed in the short term and perishable in recent years there has been an increasing adoption of dynamic pricing policies in retail and other industries where the sellers have the ability to store inventory three factors contributed to this phenomenon 1 the increased availability of demand data 2 the ease of changing prices due to new technologies and 3 the availability of decision support tools for analyzing demand data and for dynamic pricing this paper constitutes a review of the literature and current practices in dynamic pricing given its applicability in most markets and its increasing adoption in practice our focus is on dynamic intertemporal pricing in the presence of inventory considerations

estimating a household production function heterogeneity the demand for health inputs and their effects on birth weight the household production literature emphasizes that technical or biological processes condition input selection by households in their production activities along with prices and income exogenous variations in health to the extent that they are perceived by individuals heterogeneity lead to correlations between inputs and health outcomes that cannot be used to derive causal conclusions therefore estimates of health technology must be obtained from a behavioral model in which health inputs are themselves choices consistent estimates are reported of the effect of endogenous inputs such as medical care smoking and fertility on birth weight and fetal growth in the presence of health heterogeneity

an integrated vendor buyer inventory model with order processing cost reduction and permissible delay in payments trade credit plays an important role in financing for many businesses and industries for the buyers purchased inventory can be considered to be financed in whole or in part with permissible delay in payments during the purchasing process on the other hand both the vendor and buyer take part in order processing cost reduction by applying information technologies such as edi electronic data interchange the order processing cost can also be reduced by adding certain capital investments and this will affect the lot size decisions this article develops an integrated inventory model to determine the optimal inventory policy under conditions of order processing cost reduction and permissible delay in payments and shows that the total annual variable cost function possesses some kinds of convexities a solution procedure is provided to determine the optimal order policy finally a numerical example is presented to illustrate the solution procedure

optimal production inventory policy for an integrated multi stage supply chain with time varying demand abstract an integrated multi stage supply chain with time varying demand over a finite planning horizon is considered in this paper the objective is to devise the optimal production inventory policy to minimize the total operational cost the model is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem the problem is represented as a weighted directed acyclic graph the global minimum total operational cost is computed in polynomial time by the developed algorithm two numerical examples of a seasonal product and a product over its life cycle are studied to illustrate the results a sensitivity analysis of the system parameters is conducted to assist the supply chain decision makers

a production inventory model for a deteriorating item with trended demand and shortages abstract a production inventory model is developed for a deteriorating item over a finite planning horizon with a linear time varying demand finite production rate and shortages the resulting nonlinear constrained minimization problem is numerically solved by using the box complex algorithm the optimal number of production cycles that minimizes the average system cost is determined sensitivity analysis of the optimal solution is carried out