Natural Incentive Research Articles

Tiny patients, huge impact: a call to action.

The continuation of high-quality care is under threat for the over 70 million children in the United States. Inequities between Medicaid and Medicare payments and the current procedural-based reimbursement model have resulted in the undervaluing of pediatric medical care and lack of prioritization of children's health by institutions. The number of pediatricians, including pediatric subspecialists, and pediatric healthcare centers are declining due to mounting financial obstacles and this crucial healthcare supply is no longer able to keep up with demand. The reasons contributing to these inequities are clear and rational: Medicaid has significantly lower rates of reimbursement compared to Medicare, yet Medicaid covers almost half of children in the United States and creates the natural incentive for medical institutions to prioritize the care of adults. Additionally, certain aspects of children's healthcare are unique from adults and are not adequately covered in the current payment model. The result of decades of devaluing children's healthcare has led to a substantial decrease in the availability of services, medications, and equipment needed to provide healthcare to children across the nation. Fortunately, the solution is just as clear as the problem: we must value the healthcare of children as much as that of adults by increasing Medicaid funding to be on par with Medicare and appreciate the complexities of care beyond procedures. If these changes are not made, the high-quality care for children in the US will continue to decline and increase strain on the overall healthcare system as these children age into adulthood.

Prebaking runtime environments to improve the FaaS cold start latency

Function-as-service (FaaS) platforms promise a simpler programming model for cloud computing, given that providers take care of the overall resource management while the developers can concentrate only on writing their applications in the scope of a function, not having to care about installing or scaling resources. As FaaS users are billed based on the execution of the functions, platform providers have a natural incentive not to keep idle resources running at the platform’s expense. However, this strategy may lead to the cold start issue, in which the execution of a function is delayed because there are no ready resources to host the execution. Despite the time to provision the computational resources, starting the runtime environment that manages the function execution can take hundreds of milliseconds to seconds, a prohibitive non-deterministic overhead to latency-critical applications. This work describes a practical technique, Prebaking, to reduce the function start-up time based on restoring snapshots of previously executed processes. The foundation of the Prebaking technique is that deciding when to create a snapshot of a function is essential. For example, based on a prototype we developed using the CRIU checkpoint/restore Linux tool, the performance improvement on the start-up of a properly snapshotted function is up to 25 times. Fortunately, generating a good function snapshot is easy: One only needs to checkpoint a warm function, that is, a function that has processed a request. To show the feasibility of using the Prebaking technique, we discussed integrating it into OpenFaaS, an open-source FaaS platform, including how to generate and restore function snapshots. We also evaluated our prototype by running a comprehensive set of experiments that compare the function start-up duration and cold start latency against the standard fork-exec procedure. We analyze the JVM, CPython, and Node.js runtimes. The results indicate that the technique can improve the function replica start-up time even for no-warmed functions: we improved the function replica start-up time from 3.5 times for a “do-nothing” function running in Node.js up to 12 times when considering an Image Resizer function running in CPython. Finally, we reinforce the practicability of the proposed technique by comparing our proposal to another snapshot-based technique called SEUSS. That evaluation shows that Prebaking provides better cold start latency even for slightly complex functions like the Markdown Renderer.

Efficiency Evaluation of Water Sector in the Czech Republic: Two-Stage Network Dea

The water and wastewater services, usually provided in a monopoly regime, do not offer the operators natural incentives toward efficiency and innovation. Therefore the main aim of the regulatory institutions is to stimulate a competitive environment. The contribution measures technical efficiency of 21 water and waste water companies in the Czech Repulic. For the period 2018–2020, the two-stage slacked-based model (SBM) by Kaoru Tone and Miki Tsutsui (2009) was applied. The results of this study are heterogeneous. Only one company out of 21 can be identified as an overall technically efficient unit during all three analyzed years. It is Vodohospodárská společnost Olomouc (VSO) followed by Pražské vodovody a kanalizace (PVK) that is very close to full technical efficiency. Our results therefore reveal a strong potential for the decrease of ineficiency of the water sector in the Czech Republic. Another important outcome is the fact that regulation of the water industry in the Czech Republic is highly fragmented.

An Approach for Counting Breeding Eels Using Mathematical Morphology Operations and Boundary Detection

Abstract The Mekong Delta region of Vietnam has great potential for agricultural development thanks to natural incentives. Many livestock industries have developed for a long time and play an important role in the country with many agricultural export products. In the era of breakthrough technologies and advances in information technology, many techniques are used to support the development of smart agriculture. In particular, computer vision techniques are widely applied to help farmers save a lot of labour and cost. This study presents an approach for counting eels based on Mathematical Morphology Operations and Boundary Detection from images of breeding eels captured with the proposed photo box. The proposed method is evaluated using data collected directly from a breeding eel farm in Vietnam. The authors of the research evaluate and investigate the length distribution of eels to select the appropriate size for counting tasks. The experiments show positive results with an average Mean Absolute Error of 2.2 over a tray of more than 17 eels. The contribution of the research is to provide tools to support farmers in eel farms to save time and effort and improve efficiency.

Unemployment insurance, recalls, and experience rating

In the United States, almost half of the workers who separated from their jobs ended their unemployment spell by returning to work for their last employer. In this study, we explore the impact of the experience rating (ER) system on recalls. In states using reserve ratio ER, and for a firm that is not at the minimum or the maximum tax rate, each layoff of a worker receiving unemployment benefits increases the future tax rate while each recall reduces it. This provides a natural incentive for firms to recall former workers receiving unemployment benefits. We use the Quarterly Workforce Indicators dataset, which provides information on recalls at the county level, and exploit the differences in tax schedule across states to estimate the impact of ER on recalls. We show that the recall share from hires increases with the degree of ER. We then develop a search and matching model with different unemployment insurance (UI) status, endogenous UI take-up, endogenous separations, recalls, and new hires. We illustrate that this model reproduces the effects of ER on recalls admirably. We show that an increase in the intensity of ER translates into a higher recall share at the steady state, especially for unemployed workers collecting unemployment benefits. We then use this model to analyze the labor market dynamics under alternative financing schemes. We show that ER has stabilization virtues—the higher the degree of ER, the less volatile the unemployment rate.

Directions for improving the efficiency of internalization of negative external effects of industrial production

It was established that the key factors that reduce the efficiency of internalization of negative external effects of industrial production in Ukraine are: shortcomings of the mechanism of taxation of emissions of polluting substances; an imperfect system of environmental tax redistribution; high transaction costs of the internalization process; conflict of interests of the parties. In addition, the problem of internalization is complicated by the factor of inefficient use of industrial equipment. The purpose of the article is to identify factors that reduce the effectiveness of the internalization of negative external effects of industrial production in Ukraine and to develop proposals for their leveling in the conditions of the spread of modern digital technologies. The environmental tax existing in Ukraine should be calculated taking into account the degree of harmfulness of pollutants, but at the same time, it does not contain references to the methodology of such calculation. Only the actual tax rates for individual types of pollutants can be seen in public access. The study provides arguments that question the objectivity of these tax rates from the point of view of internalization goals. In addition, the very fact of the possibility of adjusting the tax rate by the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine and the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine, prescribed in the law, to some extent reduces the importance of internalization itself. Another factor that reduces the efficiency of internalization is the system of environmental tax redistribution. In Ukraine, the system of distribution of funds collected from producers of pollution is depersonalized, and therefore the direct recipients of the negative impact of pollution, at best, receive certain social services implemented by the state at the expense of the environmental tax. Such a situation calls into question the equivalence of the recipient's damages. No less important for the efficiency of internalization processes is the factor of transaction costs. It is known that both centralized and individual resolution of controversial issues requires the costs of the negotiation process, information search, damage assessment, legal guarantees, etc. Therefore, by themselves, these costs do not create value, but are only transferred to the parties in the form of an additional negative external effect that cannot be internalized. The conflict of interests is the root cause of the problems of internalizing negative external effects, because each of the parties has natural incentives to preserve and increase property. It follows that the producers of external effects will a priori try to deny their negative impact on the environment, while the recipients will try to maximize their own losses in the eyes of society. The above-mentioned factors determine the direction of increasing the efficiency of internalization of negative external effects of industrial production in Ukraine due to: approximation of the amount of the tax to the amount of real damage caused by the producer of pollution; reformatting of the tax redistribution mechanism in order to bring budget allocations closer to the real losses of recipients of negative external effects; reduction of transaction costs of the internalization process; elimination of conflict of interest.

Impact of the Federal Conservation Program Participation on Conservation Practice Adoption Intensity in Louisiana, USA

Conservation practices focusing on improving the soil and water quality of working lands are implemented across the United States, supported partially through the United States Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service cost-share or incentive payment programs. We assess whether participation in federal conservation support programs induces a change in the number of conservation practices adopted by farmers. We also identify the factors that affect the adoption intensity of different best management practices. We use survey data collected from Louisiana farmers and estimate models using the matching method and Poisson quasi-likelihood model. We find that participation in the cost-share or incentive program leads to an increase in the number of conservation practices on the farms. Similarly, the use of precision technology application and farm being integrated are likely to have a higher number of on-farm conservation practices. Results have implications for federal working lands conservation support programs in the United States.

Cache Subsidies for an Optimal Memory for Bandwidth Tradeoff in the Access Network

While the cost of the access network could be considerably reduced by the use of caching, this is not currently happening because content providers (CPs), who alone have the detailed demand data required for optimal content placement, have no natural incentive to use them to minimize access network operator (ANO) expenditure. We argue that ANOs should therefore provide such an incentive in the form of direct subsidies paid to the CPs in proportion to the realized savings. We apply coalition game theory to design the required subsidy framework and propose a distributed algorithm, based on Lagrangian decomposition, allowing ANOs and CPs to collectively realize the optimal memory for bandwidth tradeoff. The considered access network is a cache hierarchy with per-CP central office caches, accessed by all ANOs, at the apex, and per-ANO dedicated bandwidth and storage resources at the lower levels, including wireless base stations, that must be shared by multiple CPs.

Historical Aspects of the Formation of Public Prosecutor's Supervision in the Sphere of Environmental Protection

Based on the analysis of the history of the formation and development of the activities of the prosecutor's office, as well as regulatory legal acts, the article considers the role and significance of this supervisory authority in the field of environmental protection and ensuring environmental safety in the period 1960-2000. The contribution and influence of the Soviet prosecutor's office in the protection of nature of the whole state is analyzed. The Soviet state, despite the significant measures taken in 1950-1970 in order to improve the environmental situation in the country, was not able to achieve high environmental performance indicators in full due to the inconsistency in solving environmental problems. At the same time, the adoption of the Law on the Public Prosecutor's Office of the USSR in 1979 facilitated the expansion of the competence of prosecutors in supervisory and coordinating activities to ensure law and order, as well as strengthening supervision, including in the environmental field. The author gives examples of the practice of prosecutorial activity of environmental prosecutors. It should be noted that the judicial reform of 1991 in the period of formation of a legal democratic state, the powers of the Prosecutor's Office had to be subjected to a significant transformation. Thus, in par. 6 of sec. 4 of the Concepts of Judicial Reform enshrined the following: "The gradual withering away of the public prosecutor's function cannot affect the state of law in the country, if the transition to the market will provide internal natural incentives for compliance with laws". However, as current practice shows, prosecutors, including specialized ones, are one of the tools to ensure and protect the constitutional rights of citizens to a favorable environment in a state governed by the rule of law.

Providing rescue services in remote areas of Estonia

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of delivering rescue services in remote areas, where there is little or no natural incentive to provide this service, taking the case of Estonia as an example.Design/methodology/approachThe case study is based on secondary data obtained via analysis of legal acts, rescripts and strategic documents, as well as (applied) studies. In addition, the transcripts of ten half-structured interviews were analyzed, which were conducted with rescue services experts in December 2012. The benefits and risks pointed out in the literature are discussed against an example of providing rescue services in the remote areas of Estonia.FindingsOutsourcing rescue services has led to cost effectiveness and thereby provides a better-quality service in densely populated areas. The main risks are yet to emerge. It is highly probable that the Estonian Rescue Board has to deal with the issues regarding the lack of control over service, which in turn is caused by the lack of skills and competence to manage the relationships and to design appropriate service-level agreements.Research limitations/implicationsSince the voluntary rescue service provision is rapidly evolving, there have not yet been many studies undertaken to describe the positive and negative aspects of its development. Therefore, the collected data have gaps and are open for discussion.Practical implicationsThe introduction of an extensive network of voluntary fire and rescue service brigades is a paradigm shift in Estonia, where the rescue services have so far been provided publicly. Thus, it gives a guidance to other practitioners, on which aspects they should focus on, while planning a change in service provision/provider.Originality/valueThe novelty of this paper is to systematically analyze the benefits and risks occurred on a shift from public provision of rescue services to providing it in an extensive co-operation with voluntary rescuers.

SESTA and the Teachings of Intermediary Liability

This Stanford Center for Internet and Society White Paper uses proposed US legislation, SESTA, as a starting point for an overview of Intermediary Liability models -- and their consequences. It draws on law and experience from both the US and countries that have adopted different models, and recommends specific improvements for SESTA and similar proposed legislation. Intermediary liability law, which defines platforms' legal responsibility for content posted by Internet users, shapes our real-world exercise of free expression and information rights. Laws that disregard the teachings of intermediary liability -- like SESTA -- will hurt both online speech and small platforms. This harm isn't necessary. Better crafted laws could achieve SESTA's goals with far less collateral damage. * * * SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, would overhaul US intermediary liability law and potentially expose hundreds of thousands of US platforms to new civil and criminal claims. Its exact legal consequences are uncertain, because the bill is so badly drafted that no one can agree on its meaning. But SESTA’s confusing language and poor policy choices, combined with platforms’ natural incentive to avoid legal risk, make its likely practical consequences all too clear. It will give platforms reason to err on the side of removing Internet users’ speech in response to any controversy – and in response to false or mistaken allegations, which are often levied against online speech. It will also make platforms that want to weed out bad user generated content think twice, since such efforts could increase their overall legal exposure. SESTA would fall short on both of intermediary liability law’s core goals: getting illegal content down from the Internet, and keeping legal speech up. It may not survive the inevitable First Amendment challenge if it becomes law. That’s a shame. Preventing online sex trafficking is an important goal, and one that any reasonable participant in the SESTA discussion shares. There is no perfect law for doing that, but there are laws that could do better than SESTA -- and with far less harm to ordinary Internet users. Twenty years of intermediary liability lawmaking, in the US and around the world, has provided valuable lessons that could guide Congress in creating a more viable law.

Natural resources, incentives and human capital: reinterpreting the curse

ABSTRACTWe show that natural resource rents when distributed as lump-sum transfers to individuals distort the incentive to invest in tertiary education. Developing an overlapping generations model for the case of natural resource rents we show that if transfers from natural resource wealth occur when a country's technology level is marginal, the chance that the country will be caught in a low-level equilibrium trap is high. Using data for 46 countries for which data are available over time, we find strong empirical support for the model in both dynamic panel estimates and cross-sectional estimates.

Optimal Merchandise Testing with Limited Inventory

We consider the allocation of inventory to stores in a “merchandise test,” whereby a fashion retailer deploys a new product to stores in limited quantities in order to learn about demand prior to the main selling season. Our problem formulation includes practical considerations like fixed costs and multiperiod inventory considerations but is challenging to analyze directly. Instead, we take a bounding approach that isolates the novel aspect of our problem: the impact of test inventory allocation on demand learning. We specifically examine a trade-off between the quantity of stores tested and the quality of observations, which can be impacted by demand censoring due to inventory stockouts. We find that the visibility into the timing of each sales transaction has a pivotal impact on the allocation decisions that optimize learning. When such timing information is unobservable, the retailer may need to consolidate inventory in few stores to increase service levels during the test and thereby to minimize the negative impacts of demand censoring. When sales timing information is observable, the retailer optimizes learning by maximizing the number of sales during the test period without regard to stockouts in individual stores. In a numerical study, we show that heuristics motivated by our analyses are near optimal and that inefficient allocations can considerably reduce the learning value of the merchandise test. We also examine the interplay between the retailer’s learning incentive and the natural incentives brought by fixed costs and profits earned during the test itself. We find that it is sufficient for the retailer to consider only the learning incentive when the main selling period is relatively long compared with the testing period. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2017.1596 .

Information sharing vs. privacy: A game theoretic analysis

A game model for deciding on level of information sharing when privacy is a concern.Finding threshold in which gain of information sharing outweighs the privacy risk.Two mechanisms for encouraging the firms to reach socially optimal outcome. Sharing cyber security information helps firms to decrease cyber security risks, prevent attacks, and increase their overall resilience. Hence it affects reducing the social security cost. Although previously cyber security information sharing was being performed in an informal and ad hoc manner, nowadays through development of information sharing and analysis centers (ISACs), cyber security information sharing has become more structured, regular, and frequent. This is while, the privacy risk and information disclosure concerns are still major challenges faced by ISACs that act as barriers in activating the potential impacts of ISACs.This paper provides insights on decisions about security investments and information sharing in consideration of privacy risk and security knowledge growth. By the latest concept i.e. security knowledge growth, we mean fusing the collected security information, adding prior knowledge, and performing extra analyses to enrich the shared information. The impact of this concept on increasing the motivation of firms for voluntarily sharing their sensitive information to authorities such as ISACs has been analytically studied for the first time in this paper. We propose a differential game model in which a linear fusion model for characterizing the process of knowledge growth via the ISAC is employed. The Nash equilibrium of the proposed game including the optimized values of security investment, and the thresholds of data sharing with the price of privacy are highlighted. We analytically find the threshold in which the gain achieved by sharing sensitive information outweighs the privacy risks and hence the firms have natural incentive to share their security information. Moreover, since in this case the threshold of data sharing and the security investment levels chosen in Nash equilibrium may be lower than social optimum, accordingly we design mechanisms which would encourage the firms and lead to a socially optimal outcome. The direct impact of the achieved results is on analyzing the way ISACs can convince firms to share their security information with them.

Truth-Telling Mechanism for Two-Way Relay Selection for Secrecy Communications With Energy-Harvesting Revenue

This paper brings the novel idea of paying the utility to the winning agents in terms of some physical entity in cooperative communications. Our setting is a secret two-way communication channel where two transmitters exchange information in the presence of an eavesdropper. The relays are selected from a set of interested parties, such that the secrecy sum rate is maximized. In return, the selected relay nodes’ energy harvesting requirements will be fulfilled up to a certain threshold through their own payoff so that they have the natural incentive to be selected and involved in the communication. However, relays may exaggerate their private information in order to improve their chance to be selected. Our objective is to develop a mechanism for relay selection that enforces them to reveal the truth since otherwise they may be penalized. We also propose a joint cooperative relay beamforming and transmit power optimization scheme based on an alternating optimization approach. Note that the problem is highly non-convex, since the objective function appears as a product of three correlated Rayleigh quotients. While a common practice in the existing literature is to optimize the relay beamforming vector for given transmit power via rank relaxation, we propose a second-order cone programming-based approach in this paper, which requires a significantly lower computational task. The performance of the incentive control mechanism and the optimization algorithm has been evaluated through numerical simulations.

Managing and Pricing Contingent Liquidity within a Banking Operation Using the COLA Framework

Following the financial crisis, the cost of liquidity became prevalent and effectively required banks to take such costs into account in client pricing. A common place practice is still yet to emerge. As such, in this note, we present the Costs of Liquid Assets (COLA) framework. A bank implementing such a framework would be able to provide a genuine incentive for each client towards the types of products that minimize the corresponding contingent liquidity (HQLA).We treat the portfolio of high-quality liquid assets (HQLA) as a scarce resource – in the same way that the bank’s equity is treated as a scarce resource in the Risk-adjusted Return on Capital (RAROC) framework. Via the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) ratio, the HQLA are linked to the balance sheet items (assets as well as liabilities) that produce the liquidity and funding risk. This connection is defined in a proportional way, i.e. assets and liabilities with a higher contribution to the LCR receive a higher allocation of HQLA. HQLA represent a loss of opportunity for the bank; this is referred to as the Cost of Liquid Assets (COLA). By defining a required profit margin on the allocated HQLA – the %COLA hurdle – the framework produces a natural incentive for BUs to manage their business towards a limited contribution to the LCR and make sure to obtain appropriate compensation for the amount of HQLA allocated to the BU.We apply the COLA framework to a hypothetical bank with a stylized balance sheet consisting of a few BUs. Although, we see this framework primarily as a mechanism to allocate HQLA and corresponding COLA on BU level, the framework could be extended to client portfolios, industry classes or even individual clients separately.

Optimal Merchandise Testing with Limited Inventory

We consider the allocation of inventory to stores in a \merchandise test, whereby a fashion retailer deploys a new product to stores in limited quantities in order to learn about demand prior to the main selling season. Our problem formulation includes practical considerations like fixed costs and multiperiod inventory considerations but is challenging to analyze directly. Instead, we take a bounding approach that isolates the novel aspect of our problem: the impact of test inventory allocation on demand learning. We specifically examine a tradeoff between the quantity of stores tested and the quality of observations, which can be impacted by demand censoring due to inventory stockouts. We find that the visibility into the timing of each sales transaction has a pivotal impact on the allocation decisions that optimize learning. When such timing information is unobservable, the retailer may need to consolidate inventory in few stores to increase service levels during the test and thereby to minimize the negative impacts of demand censoring. When sales timing information is observable, the retailer optimizes learning by maximizing the number of sales during the test period without regard to stockouts in individual stores. In a numerical study, we show that heuristics motivated by our analyses are near-optimal and that inefficient allocations can considerably reduce the learning value of the merchandise test. We also examine the interplay between the retailer's learning incentive and the natural incentives brought by fixed costs and profits earned during the test itself. We find that that it is sufficient for the retailer to consider only the learning incentive when the main selling period is relatively long compared with the testing period.

The importance of animals in advancing research on alcohol use disorders.

N RECENT YEARS, members of the nonprofit groupPhysicians Committee for Responsible Medicine haveregularly petitioned the National Institute on Alcohol Abuseand Alcoholism(NIAAA)AdvisoryCounciltoexclude alco-hol research in animals from their portfolio, and to insteadfocus on education and treatment in humans. Indeed, pre-vention and rehabilitation are important steps and strategiesthat are well funded by NIAAA and other groups. The pur-pose of this commentary is to argue for sustained commit-ment to basic research for effective prevention andrehabilitation of alcohol use disorders (AUDs), for whichanimals are required where there are no viable alternatives.As such, the audience for this commentary is alcoholresearchers or physicians, counselors, or anyone with aninterestinadvancingourabilitytotreatAUDs.Alcohol use has long been a dominant aspect of many cul-turesandsocietiesaroundtheworld. Whilemanyindividualsare able to consume alcohol without suffering any adverseeffects, excessive drinking and AUDs can lead to a profoundreduction in the quality of life for individuals, families, andcommunities. Consistent with an aim of NIAAA (nia-aa.nih.gov/about-niaaa), it is our responsibility to use allavailable resources to understand why and how some indi-viduals become addicted, and how to reverse or decrease thecellular pathology mediating this disease and its associatedbehaviors.An AUD currently occurs in about 18 million adults inthe United States, while excessive drinking contributes toapproximately 6% of all deaths worldwide (World HealthOrganization, 2014).Alcohol use directly contributes tomul-tipleorganpathologies(e.g.,cardiovascularandliverdisease;Djousse and Gaziano, 2008; Molina et al., 2014) in a dose-dependentfashionandisamongtheleadingcausesofprema-ture death and disability in the United States (Bauer et al.,2014). AUD is fundamentally a behavioral disease, oftenreferred to as a chronic relapsing disorder (Edwards andGross,1976).Assuch,itcanonlybemodeledbyreproducingobservable characteristics of the disease, such as excessive orimpaired control over drinking, withdrawal symptoms, andrelapse-like behavior (Leeman et al.,2014).Mostphysiologi-cal diseases originate from abnormal cellular processes thatare largely independent of volitional behavior. In contrast,AUD develops through the gradual shaping of alcoholdrinking overyearsasa causeand consequenceofchangesinthe brain, resulting in a shift in the distribution of anindivid-ual’s behavior away from more natural incentives, such asjob and family, toward a focus on obtaining and consumingalcohol. Indeed, AUD diagnoses are almost exclusivelybasedonbehaviorandpatternsofdrinkingovertime(Amer-ican Psychiatric Association, 2013). There remains an urgentneedtodevelopacomprehensiveunderstandingofthe mech-anisms driving AUD and from this to develop a variety ofclinicaltoolstocombatthisdisease.Likeotherneurobehavioraldisorders,AUD resultsfrom acomplex interplay of genetics and environment (Bell et al.,2012). How these variables alter patterns and frequency ofdrinking related to AUD is a central research emphasis atboth clinical and preclinical levels. This emphasis is crucial

Population, community, and public health: measuring the benefits.

Population, community, and public health notions are addressed separately in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), have different foci and stakeholders, build on different frameworks to achieve their aims, and apply different measures to determine the long-term impact of interventions. This paper attempts to clarify each concept and proposes a method of evaluating each of these sets of health-related activities based on the benefits that accrue to the respective stakeholders. In addition to indicating how to affect change and improvements in health, the ecological model of health also provides insight into how the benefits from health-related activities may or may not flow back to the entities sponsoring health interventions. By clearly defining each of the concepts and examining the methods and metrics being used to select activities and measure benefits, a valuation model is developed that measures the financial impact on the targeted population as well as the sponsoring institution. Defining, measuring, and evaluating are important to bring clarity to how individual organizations can contribute to the overall health of the population, as well as the limits of any single organization in doing so. Collective and upstream action will be required to improve the population's health, but identifying and justifying the role of each participating organization is a challenge that still lacks an overarching vision that can be explained and measured to the satisfaction of all stakeholders. VALUE: Decision makers must justify how resources are committed in an era of scarcity and limited financial means. Moreover, methods must be in place to measure the impact of potential collaborations. The proposed valuation framework lays out the natural incentives, the responses to those incentives, and how to select initiatives that maximize value from the perspective of the various stakeholders.

Ensuring domestic supplies of natural gas for Australian businesses and households

Australian gas markets are undergoing a substantial transformation. The development of LNG has resulted in a step-change in gas demand. The lumpy and capital-intensive nature of exporting gas has, however, shifted the natural incentives of some economic participants. These changed incentives have created some concern among large domestic industrial users of natural gas. Some domestic gas users have advocated for the reservation of gas reserves for domestic consumption. This paper assesses whether the reservation of gas is the best public policy response to the issues facing industrial users. Developing new dispersed supplies of natural gas (e.g., NSW CSG) is the most logical way to reduce pricing pressures for industrial users of natural gas. In this context, the public policy interests of domestic gas producers and consumers should be aligned. Public policy makers must remove unnecessary barriers to the exploration and production of new gas reserves. Increasing supply at a time when new LNG loads (beyond those under construction) are unlikely to materialise would alleviate any potential shortages of natural gas. At the same time, domestic suppliers of natural gas must continue to innovate to manage uncertainties on behalf of their customers. This is already occurring through the development of gas storage to manage peak loads.