efficient mechanisms for bilateral trading we consider bargaining problems between one buyer and one seller for a single object the seller s valuation and the buyer s valuation for the object are assumed to be independent random variables and each individual s valuation is unknown to the other we characterize the set of allocation mechanisms that are bayesian incentive compatible and individually rational and show the general impossibility of ex post efficient mechanisms without outside subsidies for a wide class of problems we show how to compute mechanisms that maximize expected total gains from trade and mechanisms that can maximize a broker s expected profit journal of economic literature classification number 026

the role of offsets in a post kyoto climate agreement the power sector in china abstract this paper considers how an offset scheme specific to the electricity generation sector could incentivize emissions cuts while avoiding the problems encountered by the clean development mechanism cdm it proposes an approach to project evaluation based on measures of additionality economic viability and contribution to sustainable development specific to this sector and re evaluates 460 registered cdm projects in china that generate electricity using wind natural gas or small hydro it concludes that many small hydro schemes would be viable without the cdm subsidy although these projects have zero emissions from operations offsets issued to projects that are viable without subsidy permit increased emissions in developed countries and lead to a net increase in global emissions to provide some indication of the sustainable development benefits that cdm projects bring to their host countries the paper includes estimates of the projects benefit to public health due to the reduced use of coal for generation the paper provides insights into the economics of projects and their value to host countries that are missed by the official cdm methodologies it contributes to the debate over the design of sector specific offset schemes that may be part of a new global agreement on combating climate change

alternative approaches to valuing intangible health losses the evidence for multiple sclerosis abstract this study uses both risk risk and risk dollar approaches to assess intangible health losses associated with multiple sclerosis ms using an estimation approach that adjusts for potential perceptional biases that may affect the expressed risk tradeoffs we estimated parameters of the utility function of persons with and without ms as well as the degree of subjects overestimation of the probability of obtaining ms the sample included subjects from the general population and persons with ms we found that marginal utility of income is lower in the state with ms than without it however the difference in marginal utility in the two states was greater for persons without ms than for those with the disease persons with ms overestimated the probability of acquiring ms to a greater extent than did persons within ms correcting for overestimation of this probability the value of intangible loss of a statistical case of ms derived from responses of the general population was us 350 000 to us 500 000 persons with ms were willing to pay somewhat more than this d80 i18 j17

a note on the estimation of the equity efficiency trade off for qalys abstract in this note the veil of ignorance approach is tested as a basis for empirically determining the shape of the social welfare function for qalys an experiment is carried out where the participants choose between different societies that differ with respect to per capita qalys and the distribution of qalys the answers are analyzed using logistic regression analysis according to the results the respondents are willing to give up 1 qaly in the group with more qalys to gain 0 45 qalys in the group with fewer qalys but this trade off is independent of the size of the difference in qalys between the groups

on aggregating qalys a comment on dolan dolan dolan p 1998 the measurement of individual utility and social welfare journal of health economics vol 17 pp 39 52 in a recent paper suggested an empirical method for estimating the shape of the social welfare function using a simple theoretical model it is shown that dolan s proposed empirical method has no theoretical foundation the main problem with the approach is that it measures only the altruistic values that individuals attach to other peoples health status and ignores the utility that individuals attach to their own health status

an application of the shapley value to fair division with money the author considers fair division when monetary compensations are feasible and utilities are quasi linear four axioms are discussed individual rationality resource monotonicity population solidarity and the stand alone test the latter views the utility from consuming all the goods as an upper bound on every coalition s actual joint utility under efficiency the four axioms show little compatibility however when the goods have enough substitutability in everyone s preferences the shapley value of the surplus sharing game satisfies all four axioms an example is the optimal assignment of indivisible goods when every agent consumes only one good copyright 1992 by the econometric society

inventory management under market size dynamics we investigate the situation where a customer experiencing an inventory stockout at a retailer potentially leaves the firm s market in classical inventory theory a unit stockout penalty cost has been used as a surrogate to mimic the economic effect of such a departure in this study we explicitly represent this aspect of consumer behavior incorporating the diminishing effect of the consumers leaving the market upon the stochastic demand distribution in a time dynamic context the initial model considers a single firm we allow for consumer forgiveness where customers may flow back to the committed purchasing market from a nonpurchasing latent market the per period decisions include a marketing mix to attract latent and new consumers to the committed market and the setting of inventory levels we establish conditions under which the firm optimally operates a base stock inventory policy the subsequent two models consider a duopoly where the potential market for a firm is now the committed market of

innovation and performance evidence at micro level this empirical study aims to shed light on the link between innovation and economic performance at micro level based on a comprehensive survey among dairy and crop farms in the netherlands we estimate a structural multi stage model to deliver evidence on the effect of engagement and investment in innovation on the production of product process and organizational or marketing innovations as well as on the effect of such innovations on farm level productivity the results suggest various market and farm behaviour related factors to stimulate an increase in innovation engagement and production furthermore the study reveals that indeed a greater innovation investment per unit innovation input leads to a higher probability of producing at least one successful product process and or organizational or marketing innovation innovation output the production of process and organizational or marketing related innovation leads to significant productivity gains various recommendations towards a more effective and efficient innovation policy are finally given

discounting of life saving and other nonmonetary effects cost effectiveness analysts generally assume that preferences over time are such that streams of monetary and nonmonetary program effects can be reduced to one discounted sum of monetary costs and another of effects it is known that if the nonmonetary effects can be cashed out in a way that does not vary with time then the rates of discount for monetary and nonmonetary effects have to be equal this paper presents a more compelling argument for the equality of those rates when hard to monetize benefits such as life saving are involved it shows that if the ability to produce the nonmonetary effect does not diminish too quickly over time failure to discount benefits implies that programs are always improved by delay in general discounting benefits and costs at different rates can lead to peculiar results

pooling of spare parts between multiple users how to share the benefits companies that maintain capital goods e g airplanes or power plants often face high costs both for holding spare parts and due to downtime of their technical systems these costs can be reduced by pooling common spare parts between multiple companies in the same region but managers may be unsure about how to share the resulting costs or benefits in a fair way that avoids free riders to tackle this problem we study several players each facing a poisson demand process for an expensive low usage item they share a stock point that is controlled by a continuous review base stock policy with full backordering under an optimal base stock level costs consist of penalty costs for backorders and holding costs for on hand stock we propose to allocate the total costs proportional to players demand rates our key result is that this cost allocation rule satisfies many appealing properties it makes all separate participants and subgroups of participants better off it stimulates growth of the pool it can be easily implemented in practice and it induces players to reveal their private information truthfully to obtain these game theoretical results we exploit novel structural properties of the cost function in our s 1 s inventory model

an ordinal shapley value for economic environments abstract we propose a new solution concept to address the problem of sharing a surplus among the agents generating it the problem is formulated in the preferences endowments space the solution is defined recursively incorporating notions of consistency and fairness and relying on properties satisfied by the shapley value for transferable utility tu games we show a solution exists and call it the ordinal shapley value osv we characterize the osv using the notion of coalitional dividends and furthermore show it is monotone and anonymous

the time trade off a note on the effect of lifetime reallocation of consumption and discounting this paper considers the extent to which responses to time trade off tto questions can provide unbiased estimates of ratios of individual marginal rates of substitution mrs of wealth for risk of various health state impairments relative to the corresponding mrs for risk of death it is shown that if there is reallocation of lifetime consumption and or discounting of future utilities then a tto response that is not adjusted for these effects will unambiguously overestimate the ratios of individual mrs while the effect of reallocation is likely to be very small discounting can lead to significant overestimation the magnitude of which depends in part upon the severity of the health state impairment

dynamic effects in inefficiency evidence from the colombian banking sector firms face a continuous process of technological and environmental changes that requires them to make managerial decisions in a dynamic context however costs and constraints prevent firms from making instant adjustments towards optimal conditions and may cause inefficiency to persist in time we propose a dynamic inefficiency specification that captures differences in the adjustment costs among firms and non persistent effects of inefficiency heterogeneity the model is fitted to a ten year sample of colombian banks the new specification improves model fit and have effects on efficiency estimations overall colombian banks present high inefficiency persistence but important differences between institutions are found in particular merged banks present low adjustment costs that allow them to recover rapidly efficiency losses derived from merging processes

decomposition of productivity growth using distance functions the case of dairy farms in three european countries within an output distance function framework the total factor productivity growth index is decomposed into four components technical change technical and allocative efficiency and scale component we estimate stochastic translog output distance functions using panel data from dairy farms over the period 1991 94 for three european countries germany the netherlands and poland results indicate that the change in the productivity growth index in germany 6 and poland 5 are mainly dictated by the technical change component in contrast the productivity growth index in the netherlands 3 is influenced by allocative efficiency components

competitive and cooperative inventory policies in a two stage supply chain we investigate a two stage serial supply chain with stationary stochastic demand and fixed transportation times inventory holding costs are charged at each stage and each stage may incur a consumer backorder penalty cost e g the upper stage the supplier may dislike backorders at the lower stage the retailer we consider two games in both the stages independently choose base stock policies to minimize their costs the games differ in how the firms track their inventory levels in one the firms are committed to tracking echelon inventory in the other they track local inventory we compare the policies chosen under this competitive regime to those selected to minimize total supply chain costs i e the optimal solution we show that the games nearly always have a unique nash equilibrium and it differs from the optimal solution hence competition reduces efficiency furthermore the two games equilibria are different so the tracking method influences strategic behavior we show that the system optimal solution can be achieved as a nash equilibrium using simple linear transfer payments the value of cooperation is context specific in some settings competition increases total cost by only a fraction of a percent whereas in other settings the cost increase is enormous we also discuss stackelberg equilibria

income effects and the value of health although valuations of risk should increase with income hedonic wage studies have not been well suited to assessing this relationship using survey data on consumer valuations of product safety this paper analyzes the role of income effects for several utility functions the methodology developed in this paper assesses the effect of income on the certainty equivalent value of the health effect income elasticities range from 0 18 to 0 39 and on the risk money tradeoff for small changes in risk income elasticities range from 0 17 to 0 38 health status is a normal economic good

an empirical study on coalition formation and cost savings allocation abstract interest has been raised by the recent identification of potential savings through collaborative planning in logistics operations even though substantial savings can be realized two key questions exist i how should potential savings be divided among a group of collaborating companies and ii among potential collaborating companies how should collaborating group s be formed these two questions are studied in a specific context among potential collaborating companies a subset denoted the leading companies performs collaborative planning on behalf of the others and together they initiate formation of a collaborating group we use the concept of a business model to detail such context based on the literature on network formation where potential savings are modelled by a cooperative game four business models are explored in four different subsets of leading companies we propose a network model as a method to determine the stable collaborating group in each computation a case study including eight forest companies is described and analyzed results show that very different solution characteristics can be achieved depending on the business model selected

qalys versus hyes this paper explores the claim that qalys are liable to misrepresent consumer preferences and hence lead to decision makers choosing options which are not those preferred by the public it also considers the claim that hyes do not suffer from this defect we argue that none of the examples offered to date demonstrate the alleged tendency of qalys to misrepresent preferences we also show that hyes are identical to qaly scores obtained from a time tradeoff experiment and therefore that the assumptions about preferences underlying hyes are just as restrictive as those underlying tto based qalys

inefficiency persistence and heterogeneity in colombian electricity utilities abstract the electricity reform in colombia has exhibited gains in terms of reliability but its effects on firm efficiency and service quality have not been clear previous studies evaluating the performance of distribution companies after the reform have not found evidence of improvements although large differences in efficiency have been found among firms this suggests high inefficiency persistence and heterogeneity in the colombian distribution sector in this paper we propose an extension of dynamic stochastic frontier models that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity in the inefficiency persistence and in the technology the model incorporates total expenses service quality and energy losses in an efficiency analysis of colombian distributors over fifteen years after the reform we identify the presence of high inefficiency persistence in the sector and important differences between firms in particular rural companies and firms with small customers present low persistence and evidence the largest gains in efficiency during the period however increases in efficiency are only manifested during thelast five years when the main improvements in service quality and energy losses are presented overall inefficiency persistence customer density and consumption density are found to be important criteria to be considered for regulatory purposes

multiple public goods lexicographic preferences and single plateaued preference rules abstract we study the problem of providing a menu of identical public goods for a group of agents with single peaked preferences over 0 1 a decision rule selects for each preference profile and for each public good a location in miyagawa 1998a phd dissertation an agent consumes of each menu without rivalry only his most preferred public good we extend preferences from 0 1 to the set of alternatives lexicographically we identify a certain agent who might leave and require population monotonicity only if he leaves the entire population when we provide two public goods we characterize the class of single plateaued preference rules by pareto optimality anonymity and population monotonicity

optimal policies for a capacitated two echelon inventory system this paper demonstrates optimal policies for capacitated serial multiechelon production inventory systems extending the clark and scarf 1960 model to include installations with production capacity limits we demonstrate that a modified echelon base stock policy is optimal in a two stage system when there is a smaller capacity at the downstream facility this is shown by decomposing the dynamic programming value function into value functions dependent upon individual echelon stock variables we show that the optimal structure holds for both stationary and nonstationary stochastic customer demand finite horizon and infinite horizon results are included under discounted cost and average cost criteria

adjusting to changes in health implications for cost effectiveness analysis this article introduces a model in which individuals incur adjustment costs associated with adaptations made following changes in their health with adjustment costs patients preferences for health states depend on their initial health in such a way that improvements have lower values than corresponding deteriorations improvement and deterioration must therefore be treated asymmetrically in cea the inclusion of adjustment costs also has other consequences it produces a more stringent cea criterion and may affect the relative rankings of interventions in addition when health is multi dimensional and adjustment costs are incorporated we show that a consensus on even ordinal rankings of health states becomes impossible

dynamic efficiency estimation the shadow cost approach is developed in the context of the dynamic duality model of intertemporal decision making to formulate theoretical and econometric models of dynamic efficiency the dynamic efficiency model is applied to a panel of 72 u s major investor owned electric utilities using fossil fuel fired steam electric power generation over the period 1986 1999 the major results show that most electric utilities underutilized fuel relative to the aggregated labor and the maintenance input and overutilized capital in production states adopting a deregulation plan improve the performance of utilities in terms of the technical efficiency of variable inputs

willingness to pay and the distribution of risk and wealth willingness to pay wtp most economists believe is an appropriate benefits metric for government expenditure and regulatory policies that reduce risks to human life it depends however on the distribution of risk and wealth currently society s expenditures overemphasize concentrated risks say after the fact treatment as opposed to prevention a dead anyway effect complements excess attention to intense interests in explaining this our normative criterion for spending on risk reduction is what a rational albeit uninsured individual confronting lotteries on future risks to life and wealth would choose for himself this requires correcting wtp to eliminate the dead anyway effect but continues to reflect that wealth enhances the utility of living

dynamic data envelopment analysis modeling intertemporal behavior of a firm in the presence of productive inefficiencies abstract this study extends data envelopment analysis dea to a dynamic framework our dynamic dea not only provides a measure of dynamic productive efficiency but can also be used as a nonparametric alternative to the econometric modeling of the intertemporal behavior of a firm

on markov equilibria in dynamic inventory competition we provide a review of the types of equilibria typically found in operations management inventory papers and a discussion on when the commonly used stationary infinite horizon open loop equilibrium may be sufficient for study we focus particularly on order up to and basestock equilibria in the context of inventory duopolies we give conditions under which the stationary infinite horizon equilibrium is also a markov perfect closed loop equilibrium these conditions are then applied to three specific duopolies the first application is one with stockout based substitution where the firms face independent direct demand but some fraction of a firm s lost sales will switch to the other firm the second application is one where shelf space display stimulates primary demand and reduces demand for the other firm s product the final application is one where the state variables represent goodwill rather than inventory these specific problems have been previously studied in both the single period and or stationary infinite horizon open loop settings but not in markov perfect closed loop settings under the markov perfect setting a variety of interesting dynamics may occur including that there may be a so called commitment value to inventory

uniform externalities two axioms for fair allocation abstract positive resp negative preference externalities say that an agent always prefers his actual welfare to his virtual welfare should other agents share his preferences resp prefers his virtual to his actual welfare negative group externalities say that an agent never prefers his actual welfare to his virtual welfare should he be the sole user of the resources these two axioms unify several familiar fairness properties and yield some new ideas as well in the division of unproduced commodities and the cooperative production of a private or a public good we also discuss their compatibility with no envy and resource monotonicity

dynamic efficiency measurement theory and application nonparametric dynamic measures of production efficiency are developed in the context of an adjustment cost technology and intertemporal cost minimization bounds on each efficiency measure are derived for each firm using a nonparametric revealed preference approach long run efficiency measures indicate the relative efficiency of both variable and dynamic factors while short run measures of efficiency indicate whether variable inputs are employed efficiently in the production process the efficiency measures are temporal in nature by describing the degree of efficiency of the firm at a particular point along its adjustment path the empirical implementation is illustrated for a balanced panel of pennsylvania dairy operators during 1986 1992

economic valuation of health for environmental policy comparing alternative approaches introduction and overview protecting human health is a primary goal of environmental policy and economic evaluation of health can help policy makers judge the relative worth of alternative actions economists use two distinct approaches in normatively evaluating health whereas environmental economists use benefit cost analysis supported by monetary valuation in terms of willingness to pay health economists evaluate interventions based on cost effectiveness or cost utility analysis cea using quality adjusted life years qaly or similar indexes this paper provides background on the controversy about the relative merits of these approaches and introduces the remaining papers in the special issue these papers with one exception were presented at a conference sponsored by the department of economics at the university of central florida with support from the us environmental protection agency although cea might not lead to substantially different implications for environmental policy than benefit cost analysis and qaly may provide a benefit transfer tool to fill gaps in the morbidity valuation literature the papers in this issue raise serious concerns about the suitability of qaly based cea for environmental regulatory analysis qaly does not in general appropriately represent individual preferences for health and cea is neither independent of income distribution nor adequate to assess efficiency

qalys and the equity efficiency trade off as the volume of research on quality adjusted life years qalys has increased concern has begun to be expressed about the equity aspects of resource allocation decisions based on the results of this research this paper suggests that a common theme running through the criticisms of the qaly approach is a concern about inequality it also suggests that the method for incorporating distributional concerns which is currently being pursued by advocates of the qaly approach will only ever capture concerns other than a concern about inequality the paper suggests a method for incorporating both sets of concerns into resource allocation decisions

production inventory games a new class of totally balanced combinatorial optimization games in this paper we introduce a new class of cooperative games that arise from production inventory problems several agents have to cover their demand over a finite time horizon and shortages are allowed each agent has its own unit production inventory holding and backlogging cost cooperation among agents is given by sharing production processes and warehouse facilities agents in a coalition produce with the cheapest production cost and store with the cheapest inventory cost we prove that the resulting cooperative game is totally balanced and the owen set reduces to a singleton the owen point based on this type of allocation we find a population monotonic allocation scheme for this class of games finally we point out the relationship of the owen point with other well known allocation rules such as the nucleolus and the shapley value

is it really possible to build a bridge between cost benefit analysis and cost effectiveness analysis cost benefit analysis cba is a recognised as the economic evaluation technique that accords most with the underlying principles of standard welfare economic theory however due to problems associated with the technique economists evaluating resources allocation decisions in health care have most often used cost effective analysis cea in which health benefits are expressed in non monetary units as a result attempts have been made to build a welfare economic bridge between cost benefit analysis cba and cost effectiveness analysis cea in this paper we develops these attempts and finds that while assumptions can be made to facilitate a constant willingness to pay per unit of health outcome these restrictions are highly unrealistic we develop an impossibility theorem that shows it is not possible to link cba and cea if i the axioms of expected utility theory hold ii the quality adjusted life year qaly model is valid in a welfare economic sense and iii illness affects the ability to enjoy consumption we conclude that within a welfare economic framework it would be unwise to rely on a link between cba and cea in economic evaluations

life cycle preferences over consumption and health when is cost effectiveness analysis equivalent to cost benefit analysis this paper studies life cycle preferences over consumption and health status we show that cost effectiveness analysis is consistent with cost benefit analysis if the lifetime utility function is additive over time multiplicative in the utility of consumption and the utility of health status and if the utility of consumption is constant over time we derive the conditions under which the lifetime utility function takes this form both under expected utility theory and under rank dependent utility theory which is currently the most important nonexpected utility theory if cost effectiveness analysis is consistent with cost benefit analysis it is possible to derive tractable expressions for the willingness to pay for quality adjusted life years qalys the willingness to pay for qalys depends on wealth remaining life expectancy health status and the possibilities for intertemporal substitution of consumption

accounting for future costs in medical cost effectiveness analysis most medical cost effectiveness analyses include future costs only for related illnesses but this approach is controversial this paper demonstrates that cost effectiveness analysis is consistent with lifetime utility maximization only if it includes all future medical and non medical expenditures estimates of the magnitude of these future costs suggest that they may substantially alter both the absolute and relative cost effectiveness of medical interventions particularly when an intervention increases length of life more than quality of life in older populations current methods overstate the cost effectiveness of interventions which extend life compared to interventions which improve the quality of life

economic evaluation of health care programmes is cea better than cba it has been noted earlier that during the same period that the contingent valuation cv method evolved and became the most commonly used method of valuing environmental projects the development in health economics was instead been towards cost effectiveness analysis cea recently there has been a growing interest in the use of cea where qalys quality adjusted life years are used as a measure of effectiveness as the method of evaluation for environmental projects the purpose of this paper is to answer the question is cea a superior method to cba both theoretically and empirically to provide information to decision makers for use in decisions on resource allocation in health the paper deals with the following topics the underlying theoretical foundation for cea is cea free of income distribution considerations is qaly a superior measure to wtp the usefulness of incremental ce ratio icer to determine resource allocation the paper concludes that there is neither theoretical nor practical support for the claim about the superiority of cea

a decomposition approach for a class of capacitated serial systems we study a class of two echelon serial systems with identical ordering production capacities or limits for both echelons demands are assumed to be integer valued for the case where the lead time to the upstream echelon is one period the optimality of state dependent modified echelon base stock policies is proved using a decomposition approach for the case where the upstream lead time is two periods we introduce a new class of policies called two tier base stock policies and prove their optimality some insight about the inventory control problem in n echelon serial systems with identical capacities at all stages and arbitrary lead times everywhere is also provided we argue that a generalization of two tier base stock policies which we call multitier base stock policies are optimal for these systems we also provide a bound on the number of parameters required to specify the optimal policy

inventory games with permissible delay in payments abstract meca et al 2004 studied a class of inventory games which arise when a group of retailers who observe demand for a common item decide to cooperate and make joint orders with the eoq policy in this paper we extend their model to the situation where retailer s delay in payments is permitted by the supplier we introduce the corresponding inventory game with permissible delay in payments and prove that its core is nonempty then a core allocation rule is proposed which can be reached through population monotonic allocation scheme under this allocation rule the grand coalition is shown to be stable from a farsighted point of view

valuing environmental health effects an economic perspective this paper provides an overview of some of the issues involved in comparing benefit cost analysis and cost effectiveness analysis based on quality adjusted life years as alternative approaches to assessing environmental policies that affect human health it concludes that i although qalys have the advantage of reflecting policy impacts on both health status and longevity in a single scalar measure they are not consistent with utility theory unless individuals preferences satisfy some restrictive conditions ii they do not capture other important aspects of the valuation of changes in mortality and morbidity iii cost effectiveness analysis based on qalys as a measure of effectiveness omits non health related effects of environmental policy and iv it leaves unanswered the important question of what level of environmental regulation is appropriate

measurement of dynamic efficiency a directional distance function parametric approach this research proposes a parametric estimation of the structural dynamic efficiency measures proposed by silva and oude lansink 2009 overall technical and allocative efficiency measurements are derived based on a directional distance function and the duality between this function and the optimal value function the applicability of the parametric proposal is illustrated by assessing dynamic efficiency ratings for a sample of dutch dairy farms observed from 1995 to 2005

the competitive newsboy we consider a competitive version of the classical newsboy problem in which a firm must choose an inventory or production level for a perishable good with random demand and the optimal solution is a fractile of the demand distribution and investigate the impact of competition upon industry inventory a splitting rule specifies how initial industry demand is allocated among competing firms and how any excess demand is allocated among firms with remaining inventory we examine the relation between equilibrium inventory levels and the splitting rule and provide conditions under which there is a unique equilibrium our most general result is that if all excess demand is reallocated i e there is perfect substitutability then competition never leads to a decrease in industry inventory

on cost sharing in the provision of a binary and excludable public good we study efficiency and fairness properties of the equal cost sharing with maximal participation ecsmp mechanism in the provision of a binary and excludable public good according to the maximal welfare loss criterion the ecsmp is optimal within the class of strategyproof individually rational and no deficit mechanisms only when there are two agents in general the ecsmp mechanism is not optimal we provide a class of mechanisms obtained by symmetric perturbations of ecsmp with strictly lower maximal welfare loss we show that if one of two possible fairness conditions is additionally imposed the ecsmp mechanism becomes optimal

health utility indices and equity considerations the aim of this paper is to propose methods that incorporate equity concerns into cost utility analysis the focus of the paper is on qalys but the results apply to health utility indices in general two interpretations of qalys are considered qalys as von neumann morgenstern utilities and qalys as measures of health a justification is provided for aggregating consistently scaled qalys as utilities over individuals the conditions underlying unweighted aggregation of qalys are identified these conditions exclude two common types of equity concern algorithms are proposed that take into account equity concerns and that are relatively easy to apply

a reduced form model for dynamic efficiency measurement application to dairy farms in germany and the netherlands the stochastic distance function model is extended to allow for the inefficiency component of the error term to be autocorrelated as implied by a dynamic model of firm behavior the autocorrelation parameter can then be interpreted as a measure of the persistence of inefficiency the model is viewed from a state space perspective and kalman filtering techniques are proposed for estimation the model is applied to two panels of dairy farms from germany and the netherlands the results suggest a very high degree of persistence of inefficiency through time

efficient supply contracts for fashion goods with forecast updating and two production modes we examine the problem of developing supply contracts that encourage proper coordination of forecast information and production decisions between a manufacturer and distributor of high fashion seasonal products operating in a two mode production environment the first production mode is relatively cheap but requires a long lead time while the second is expensive but offers quick turnaround we focus on contracts of the form w1 w2 b wherewi is the wholesale price offered for production modei andb is a return price offered for items left over at the end of the season we find that such a contract can coordinate the manufacturer and distributor to act in the best interest of the channel the pricing conditions needed to ensure an efficient solution vary depending on the degree of demand forecast improvement between periods and the manufacturer s access to forecast information we also examine whether these conditions ensure a pareto optimal solution with respect to two traditional production settings

cooperation on capacitated inventory situations with fixed holding costs in this paper we analyze a situation in which several firms deal with inventory problems concerning the same type of product we consider that each firm uses its limited capacity warehouse for storing purposes and that it faces an economic order quantity model where storage costs are irrelevant and assumed to be zero and shortages are allowed in this setting we show that firms can save costs by placing joint orders and obtain an optimal order policy for the firms besides we identify an associated class of costs games which we show to be concave finally we introduce and study a rule to share the costs among the firms which provides core allocations and can be easily computed

trying to estimate a monetary value for the qaly in this paper we study the feasibility of estimating a monetary value for a qaly mvq using two different surveys of the spanish population total n 892 we consider whether willingness to pay wtp is approximately proportional to the health gains measured in qalys we also explore whether subjects responses are prone to any significant biases we find that the estimated mvq varies inversely with the magnitude of health gain we also find two other ir regularities the existence of ordering effects and insensitivity of wtp to the duration of the period of payment taken together these effects result in large variations in estimates of the mvq if we are ever to obtain consistent and stable estimates we should try to understand better the sources of variability found in the course of this study

anti social welfare functions a reply to hansen et al we could reasonably expect society to give at least the same weight to the marginal utility of the poor as to the rich and to the marginal utility of the ill as compared to the healthy whilst hansen et al journal of health economics 2004 may be said to link cea and cba within a welfarist framework the assumptions they require are inconsistent with these types of ethical preferences thus the degree to which they employ a reasonable social welfare function is doubtful this paper argues that any link between cea and cba will occur not within a welfarist framework but instead within a non welfarist one in which it is unlikely that cba results could be easily transformed into cost effectiveness ratios

population monotonic allocation schemes for cooperative games with transferable utility abstract an allocation scheme for a cooperative game specifies how to allocate the worth of every coalition it is population monotonic if each player s payoff increases as the coalition to which he belongs grows larger we show that essentially a game has a population monotonic allocation scheme pmas if and only if it is a positive linear combination of monotonic simple games with veto control a dual characterization is also provided sufficient conditions for the existence of a pmas include convexity and increasing average marginal contributions if the game is convex its extended shapley value is a pmas classification number 026

wtp and qaly based approaches to valuing health for policy common ground and disputed territory this paper discusses links between two approaches to the value of health the willingness to pay approach of environmental economics and the quality adjusted life year approach of health economics the approaches are used in cost benefit and cost effectiveness analyses of health interventions despite fundamental differences in the decision contexts and conceptual foundations of the two approaches in current practice they are likely to lead to similar policy decisions the paper also shows how research on the quality adjusted life year qaly can be used to fill in gaps in the willingness to pay literature the paper sketches a simple model that shows how to qaly fy the value of a statistical life i e how to combine qaly estimates with estimates of the value of a statistical life to estimate willingness to pay for morbidity risks

monotonicity of social welfare optima abstract this paper considers the problem of maximizing social welfare subject to participation constraints it is shown that for an income allocation method that maximizes a social welfare function there is a monotonic relationship between the incomes allocated to individual agents in a given coalition with at least three members and its participation constraint if and only if the aggregate income to that coalition is always maximized an impossibility result demonstrates that there is no welfare maximizing allocation method in which agents individual incomes monotonically increase in society s income thus for any such allocation method there are situations where some agents have incentives to prevent society in becoming richer

on the possibility of a bridge between cba and cea comments on a paper by dolan and edlin in a recent work by dolan and edlin it is concluded that no link can be established between cost benefit analysis cba and cost effectiveness analysis cea however the conclusion seems to depend rather heavily on what is understood by a link between cba and cea as well as on the exact meaning of the latter two terms we argue that there is at least one approach to cba and cea in which the two are very intimately linked on the other hand the limitations in the access to preference information has consequences for the kind of questions that can be meaningfully addressed in both cba and cea

the friction cost method for measuring indirect costs of disease a new approach for estimating the indirect costs of disease which explicitly considers economic circumstances that limit production losses due to disease is presented the friction cost method for the netherlands the short term friction costs in 1990 amount to 1 5 2 5 of net national income nni depending on the extent to which short term absence from work induces production loss and costs the medium term macro economic consequences of absence from work and disability reduce nni by an additional 0 8 these estimates are considerably lower than estimates based on the traditional human capital approach but they better reflect the economic impact of illness

the friction cost method a comment the friction cost method has been proposed as an alternative to the human capital approach of estimating indirect costs we argue that the friction cost method is based on implausible assumptions not supported by neoclassical economic theory furthermore consistently applying the friction cost method would mean that the method should also be applied in the estimation of direct costs which would mean that the costs of health care programmes are substantially decreased it is concluded that the friction cost method does not seem to be a useful alternative to the human capital approach in the estimation of indirect costs

group strategyproof cost sharing the role of indifferences every agent reports his willingness to pay for one unit of a good a mechanism allocates goods and cost shares to some agents we characterize the group strategyproof gsp mechanisms under two alternative continuity conditions interpreted as tie breaking rules with the maximalist rule max an indifferent agent is always served with the minimalist rule min an indifferent agent does not get a unit of the good gsp and max characterize the cross monotonic mechanisms these mechanisms are appropriate whenever symmetry is required on the other hand gsp and min characterize the sequential mechanisms these mechanisms are appropriate whenever there is scarcity of the good our results are independent of an underlying cost function they unify and strengthen earlier results for particular classes of cost functions

the measurement of individual utility and social welfare it has been suggested by a number of economists that decisions about how to allocate scarce health care resources should be informed by the cost per quality adjusted life years qalys of the different alternatives one of the criticisms of the qaly approach is that it is based on the measurement of individual utility yet the values elicited are used to inform social choice in this respect it is argued that the qaly approach fails to take account of distributional issues that are known to be important in the context of health care this paper addresses this issue and presents an approach grounded in microeconomic theory that is flexible enough to deal with a wide range of efficiency equity trade offs while making the nature of the trade off transparent in addition it is an approach that is relatively simple to investigate empirically and the results of a preliminary study are presented as illustration of this

the normative economics of health care finance and provision whereas in many countries the crisis in medical care has been seen in terms of excess spending on health services in the uk it has been seen at least by most of those who manage and work in the nhs as a crisis of underfunding this has come about as the result of the government s successful attempts to restrain the rate of growth of real spending on the nhs which in turn reflects the government s belief that its principal effective weapon against what it perceives to be inefficiency in the nhs is to challenge management itself reformed and to some extent liberated by systematic financial squeezes the same concern has given rise to a host of proposals for reform of the nhs most of which involve a much greater role for private insurance private finance of other kinds such as out of pocket payments and private provision of health care itself

measurement of health state utilities for economic appraisal health status measurement for use in economic appraisal of health care programmes is reviewed in this paper with particular emphasis on utility measurement a framework for economic appraisal is presented displaying the various components that must be measured and showing how the three forms of analysis cost effectiveness analysis cost benefit analysis and cost utility analysis relate to the framework and to each other one of the components in the framework is health status it can be measured using ad hoc numeric scales willingness to pay receive or health state utilities the determination of health state utilities is reviewed covering the following issues alternative sources of utilities health state descriptions multi attribute utility approach determination of appropriate subjects utility aggregation and accuracy three measurement techniques for health state utilities are described in detail rating scale standard gamble and time trade off the use of these methods is described for both chronic and temporary health states and for both health states considered better than death and those considered worse than death

cooperation and game theoretic cost allocation in stochastic inventory models with continuous review we study cooperation strategies for companies that continuously review their inventories and face poisson demand our main goal is to analyze stable cost allocations of the joint costs these are such that any group of companies has lower costs than the individual companies if such allocations exist they provide an incentive for the companies to cooperate we consider two natural cooperation strategies i the companies jointly place an order for replenishment if their joint inventory position reaches a certain reorder level and ii the companies reorder as soon as one of them reaches its reorder level numerical experiments for two companies show that the second strategy has the lowest joint costs under this strategy the game theoretical shapley value and the distribution rule a cost allocation in which the companies share the procurement cost and each pays its own holding cost are shown to be stable cost allocations these results also hold for situations with three companies

productivity growth measurement and decomposition under a dynamic inefficiency specification the case of german dairy farms abstract standard parametric models for efficiency and total factor productivity growth measurement either impose strict structures on the time evolution of efficiency scores or no structure at all when the data capture a sector in turbulent periods both specifications may be inappropriate the dynamic stochastic frontier model takes a middle way in terms of the time structure it imposes on efficiency scores we apply the dynamic stochastic frontier model to the case of german dairy farms in a period that is characterized by high milk price volatility the model is able to capture time specific efficiency and total factor productivity growth shocks that may have been induced by this high volatility furthermore the dynamic stochastic frontier model is favored by the data when compared to a model that imposes a very restrictive time structure on efficiency and two models that do not impose any time structure at all

life cycle preferences over consumption and health a comment on bleichrodt and quiggin abstract in a recent issue of the journal of health economics bleichrodt and quiggin 1999 developed a model of life cycle preferences over consumption and health to analyze qaly based decision making this analysis is crtically appraised concerning issues of qaly maximization on an individual and on an aggregate level as well as of the role of death in qaly models it is concluded that a more general approach might be useful for the analysis of qalys and life cycle preferences over consumption and health

multi issue allocation situations abstract this paper introduces a new class of transferable utility games called multi issue allocation games these games arise from various allocation situations and are based on the concepts underlying the bankruptcy model as introduced by o neill math social sci 2 1982 345 in this model a perfectly divisible good estate has to be divided amongst a given set of agents each of whom has some claim on the estate contrary to the standard bankruptcy model the current model deals with situations in which the agents claims are multi dimensional where the dimensions correspond to various issues it is shown that the class of multi issue allocation games coincides with the class of non negative exact games the run to the bank rule is introduced as a solution for multi issue allocation situations and turns out to be shapley value of the corresponding game finally this run to the bank rule is characterised by means of a consistency property in the spirit of o neill

optimal pricing and return policies for perishable commodities this paper considers the pricing decision faced by a producer of a commodity with a short shelf or demand life a hierarchical model is developed and the results of the single period inventory model are used to examine possible pricing and return policies the paper shows that several such policies currently in effect are suboptimal these include those where the manufacturer offers retailers full credit for all unsold goods or where no returns of unsold goods are permitted the paper also demonstrates that a policy whereby a manufacturer offers retailers full credit for a partial return of goods may achieve channel coordination but that the optimal return allowance will be a function of retailer demand therefore such a policy cannot be optimal in a multi retailer environment it is proven however that a pricing and return policy in which a manufacturer offers retailers a partial credit for all unsold goods can achieve channel coordination in a multi retailer environment this article was originally published in marketing science volume 4 issue 2 pages 166 176 in 1985

collaborative replenishment in the presence of intermediaries in complex supply chains downstream buyers would often replenish individually from intermediaries instead of directly dealing with original manufacturers although collaborative replenishment from intermediaries might generate benefits significant cost reductions could be achieved when direct replenishments from manufacturers are considered this paper constructs a general model to study collaborative replenishment in multi product chains with alternative sources of supply i e manufacturers and intermediaries a collaborative organization determines the optimal choices of replenishment sources on behalf of its members to minimize collective costs we introduce a class of cooperative games associated with these situations and give sufficient conditions for their concavity we investigate the choice of allocation rule and its effect on supply chain efficiency when buyers strategically participate in the collaborative organization we prove that the shapley value coordinates the supply chain i e it makes complete participation the best strategy for buyers even under asymmetric information this setting is compared with an alternative structure where buyers can only collaborate in source specific replenishment organizations that purchase all requested products either from intermediaries or manufacturers although there are always participation strategies that result in minimum collective cost it is impossible to find allocation rules for source specific replenishment organizations that always motivate the buyers to choose such strategies

managing a noncooperative supply chain with limited capacity we consider a two stage serial supply chain with capacity limits where each installation is operated by managers attempting to minimize their own costs a multiple period model is necessitated by the multiple stages capacity limits stochastic demand and the explicit consideration of inventories with appropriate salvage value functions a markov equilibrium policy is found intuitive profit dominance allows for existence of a unique equilibrium solution which is shown to be a modified echelon base stock policy this equilibrium policy structure is sustained in the infinite horizon a numerical study compares the behavior of the decentralized system with the first best integrated capacitated system the performance of this decentralized system relative to the integrated system across other parameters can be very good over a broad range of values this implies that an acceptable system performance may be attained without the imposition of a contract or other coordinating mechanism which themselves may encounter difficulties in implementation in the form of negotiation execution or enforcement of these agreements we find instances where tighter capacities may actually enhance channel efficiency we also examine the effect of capacity utilization on the system suboptimality

average monotonic cooperative games abstract a subclass of monotonic transferable utility t u games is studied average monotonic games these games are totally balanced we prove that the core coincides with both the bargaining set a la davis and maschler and the bargaining set a la mas colell to obtain this result a technique based on reduced games is used journal of economic literature classification number c71

weakly monotonic solutions for cooperative games abstract the principle of weak monotonicity for cooperative games states that if a game changes so that the worth of the grand coalition and some player s marginal contribution to all coalitions increase or stay the same then this player s payoff should not decrease we investigate the class of values that satisfy efficiency symmetry and weak monotonicity it turns out that this class coincides with the class of egalitarian shapley values thus weak monotonicity reflects the nature of the egalitarian shapley values in the same vein as strong monotonicity reflects the nature of the shapley value an egalitarian shapley value redistributes the shapley payoffs as follows first the shapley payoffs are taxed proportionally at a fixed rate second the total tax revenue is distributed equally among all players

the cost allocation problem for the first order interaction joint replenishment model we consider an infinite horizon deterministic joint replenishment problem with first order interaction under this model the setup transportation reorder cost associated with a group of retailers placing an order at the same time equals some group independent major setup cost plus retailer dependent minor setup costs in addition each retailer is associated with a retailer dependent holding cost rate the structure of optimal replenishment policies is not known thus research has focused on optimal power of two pot policies following this convention we consider the cost allocation problem of an optimal pot policy among the various retailers for this sake we define a characteristic function that assigns to any subset of retailers the average time total cost of an optimal pot policy for replenishing the retailers in the subset under the assumption that these are the only existing retailers we show that the resulting transferable utility cooperative game with this characteristic function is concave in particular it is a totally balanced game namely this game and any of its subgames have nonempty core sets finally we give an example for a core allocation and prove that there are infinitely many core allocations

risk risk versus standard gamble procedures for measuring health state utilities contingent valuation cv has been widely used to measure the potential benefits derived from different policy decisions however doubt now exists about the validity of the cv method and alternative approaches to benefit valuation have been proposed the paper reports on the results of a study which was designed to test the viability of two of the most prominent of the alternatives the risk risk rr and standard gamble sg approaches if individual preferences are consistent with the axioms of von neumann morgenstern expected utility theory eut then the two methods should generate the same interval scales for any given set of health states however the results show that sg utilities are substantially higher than rr ones thus casting doubt on these axioms the paper discusses alternatives to eut which might better expalin the discrepancies found it also considers whether the results might be explained in terms of status quo bias and or by the relative difficulty of rr questions the results presen

design and analysis of mechanisms for decentralized joint replenishment abstract we consider jointly replenishing multiple firms that operate under an eoq like environment in a decentralized non cooperative setting each firm s demand rate and inventory holding cost rate are private information we are interested in finding a mechanism that would determine the joint replenishment frequency and allocate the joint ordering costs to these firms based on their reported stand alone replenishment frequencies if they were to order independently we first provide an impossibility result showing that there is no direct mechanism that simultaneously achieves efficiency incentive compatibility individual rationality and budget balance we then propose a general two parameter mechanism in which one parameter is used to determine the joint replenishment frequency another is used to allocate the order costs based on firms reports we show that efficiency cannot be achieved in this two parameter mechanism unless the parameter governing the cost allocation is zero when the two parameters are same a single parameter mechanism we find the equilibrium share levels and corresponding total cost we finally investigate the effect of this parameter on equilibrium behavior we show that properly adjusting this parameter leads to mechanisms that are better than other mechanisms suggested earlier in the literature in terms of fairness and efficiency

a capacitated production inventory model with periodic demand for a single product single stage capacitated production inventory model with stochastic periodic cyclic demand we find the optimal policy and characterize some of its properties we study the finite horizon the discounted infinite horizon and the infinite horizon average cases a simulation based optimization method is provided to compute the optimal parameters based on a numerical study several insights into the model are also provided

measurement of consumer patient preferences using a hybrid contingent valuation method this study introduces a hybrid two stage contingent valuation method applied to asthma treatment respondents are initially offered a choice between hypothetical medications implying a tradeoff between safety and efficacy stage two elicits willingness to pay wtp for an improvement along a single risk dimension estimates of the value of asthma control based on the initial risk tradeoff stage range from approximately us 1400 to us 2100 per year assuming a us 6 million value of life analysis of the second stage wtp responses yield estimates for the value of a statistical life of approximately us 9 million and for asthma control of approximately us 2200 per year

secession and value abstract a model with random proposals where secession of coalitions is the only threat yields exploitative allocations if proposals for coalition s involve randomization the responders pay off vector consists of shapley values for coalition sizes ranging from 1 to s 1

on the economic foundations of cea ladies and gentlemen take your positions abstract there are still many ongoing debates about several aspects of the methodology of economic evaluations of health care interventions some of the disparities in recommendations on methodological issues may be traced back to different viewpoints on cost effectiveness analysis cea in general two important views are the welfarist approach which aims at embedding cea into traditional welfare economics and the decision maker s approach which takes a broader and more pragmatic view on cea the focus in welfarism may be on utility while that of the decision maker s approach may be considered to be on health in this paper it is examined how these two views differ and how these differences may subsequently lead to debates in methodological areas it is indicated that embedding the practical operationalisation of cea in welfare economics seems impossible in a strict welfarist approach it is necessary to view qalys as being utilities although one may question whether such an approach to qalys is appropriate also equity considerations may play an important role in cost effectiveness analysis and these should preferably be taken into account in a way that reflects societal attitudes towards an equitable distribution of health care these equity considerations may not always be directly related to utility or efficiency furthermore both camps may prefer different methods for cost measurement in areas such as productivity costs and informal care a better recognition of the contents and origins of controversies and disputes may enhance the clarity of discussions

on the aggregation of health status measures in the present paper we address the problem of finding conditions under which aggregation of individual health status measurements e g qalys is meaningful in the sense that there is a universal unit of measurement for health the problem is studied in a model where different aspects of health take the form of lancasterian characteristics to be produced by the individuals using commodities obtained in the market for a meaningful unit of measurement to exist marginal rates of substitution between different aspects of health should not differ among individuals and for this to happen in an equilibrium of the economy considered certain assumptions of separability of technology and or preferences must be satisfied this means that universal measures of health will be meaningful only if there are not too many spillovers in achieving different aspects of health

population monotonicity in a general model with indivisible goods abstract we show that in a model with indivisible goods where each agent can receive more than one indivisible good there are no population monotonic selections from the pareto solution however if substitutability is imposed on preferences the shapley solution satisfies population monotonicity

shipment consolidation who pays for it and how much this paper examines the subject of cost allocation in a multiple product inventory system allowing for consolidation of shipments if we order multiple items using an economic order quantity eoq policy and consolidate shipments part of the ordering cost is shared and part is specific to each item we want to find the consolidation choice with optimal total cost and divide the cost fairly among the individual items such a fair division is central to a costing system in which no group of items subsidizes the others there are no free riders we use a cooperative inventory game to determine when this can be done this game is usually not concave so we want to know what consolidation combinations determine when this cost can be fairly divided using the core of the game we prove that consolidation of all the items is cheaper exactly if there are fair cost allocations core of the game is not empty which happens when the portion of the ordering cost common to all items is not too small we further show how sensitive the nonempty core result is to adjustments in the cost parameters and show how to determine a threshold value for the shared ordering cost which assures the existence of a fair cost allocation

egalitarian equivalent cost sharing of a public good in an economy with one public and one private good egalitarian equivalent cost sharing consists of finding the highest public good level x such that consuming x for free yields a feasible utility distribution the corresponding feasible allocation typically unique called egalitarian equivalent is in the core of the economy conversely any cost sharing method satisfying pareto optimality cost monotonicity nobody suffers a utility loss if the production technology improves upon ceteris paribus and individual rationality no single agent coalition objects or no private transfers no agent receives a positive amount of private good must select an egalitarian equivalent allocation in every economy copyright 1987 by the econometric society

setting the right incentives for global planning and operations we study incentive issues seen in a firm performing global planning and manufacturing and local demand management the stochastic demands in local markets are best observed by the regional business units and the firm relies on the business units forecasts for planning of global manufacturing operations we propose a class of performance evaluation schemes that induce the business units to reveal their private demand information truthfully by turning the business units demand revelation game into a potential game with truth telling being a potential maximizer an appealing refinement of nash equilibrium moreover these cooperative performance evaluation schemes satisfy several essential fairness notions after analyzing the characteristics of several performance evaluation schemes in this class we extend our analysis to include the impact of effort on demand