Objectives: To investigate components of the rapidly increasing trend in hospital spending in the 2000’s and their relationship to market structure. Study Design: Aggregate time series and multivariate analysis are c...Objectives: To investigate components of the rapidly increasing trend in hospital spending in the 2000’s and their relationship to market structure. Study Design: Aggregate time series and multivariate analysis are conducted to test whether hospital spending growth is driven by price or quantity and how recent hospital spending growth is related to health plan and hospital market structure. Method: Hospitals are grouped into strong and weak competitive markets based on the relative concentration of hospital and health plan markets as well as managed care penetration. Results: Inflation adjusted hospital spending grew much faster than gross domestic product (GDP) throughout the 2000s. Regression results show that rapid growth was observed across all hospital markets—even in those markets where price competitive market forces are the strongest and that rising hospital prices, and not utilization explain most of the increases in hospital spending. Conclusions: Hospital spending exceeded the consumer price index (CPI) by a substantial margin in the 2000’s due in part to weakening competitive market forces, which had a dampening effect on spending and especially prices. Unless competition is restored, the cost of health care for consumers, employers and public payers can be expected to increase.展开更多
Grid computing has emerged as an effective mechanism for allocating globally available surplus computational capacity to applications whose requirements exceed local capacity. It is often viewed as a commodity exchang...Grid computing has emerged as an effective mechanism for allocating globally available surplus computational capacity to applications whose requirements exceed local capacity. It is often viewed as a commodity exchange with additional grid computing specific constraints that may arise due to requirements on multiple resources (e.g., disk space) in addition to computing power. These constraints are related to complementarity and substitution effects among resources, and significantly alter the assumptions typically used for demonstrating the existence of market equilibrium. However, prior work in grid computing has simply assumed that market equilibria exist. Our work fills this gap by studying the existence of market equilibrium under the grid computing environment. To do so, we first establish an economic framework that incorporates the grid computing specific constraints into a commodity market. We next derive some intuitive necessary conditions based on the computing requirements of individual agents. We finally establish the existence of regular markets as a competitive equilibrium, given that these necessary conditions are met and that the agents’ utility functions satisfy some minimal requirements. In the process, we also show existence of competitive equilibrium for the special case of grid computing as a pure exchange economy.展开更多
文摘Objectives: To investigate components of the rapidly increasing trend in hospital spending in the 2000’s and their relationship to market structure. Study Design: Aggregate time series and multivariate analysis are conducted to test whether hospital spending growth is driven by price or quantity and how recent hospital spending growth is related to health plan and hospital market structure. Method: Hospitals are grouped into strong and weak competitive markets based on the relative concentration of hospital and health plan markets as well as managed care penetration. Results: Inflation adjusted hospital spending grew much faster than gross domestic product (GDP) throughout the 2000s. Regression results show that rapid growth was observed across all hospital markets—even in those markets where price competitive market forces are the strongest and that rising hospital prices, and not utilization explain most of the increases in hospital spending. Conclusions: Hospital spending exceeded the consumer price index (CPI) by a substantial margin in the 2000’s due in part to weakening competitive market forces, which had a dampening effect on spending and especially prices. Unless competition is restored, the cost of health care for consumers, employers and public payers can be expected to increase.
文摘Grid computing has emerged as an effective mechanism for allocating globally available surplus computational capacity to applications whose requirements exceed local capacity. It is often viewed as a commodity exchange with additional grid computing specific constraints that may arise due to requirements on multiple resources (e.g., disk space) in addition to computing power. These constraints are related to complementarity and substitution effects among resources, and significantly alter the assumptions typically used for demonstrating the existence of market equilibrium. However, prior work in grid computing has simply assumed that market equilibria exist. Our work fills this gap by studying the existence of market equilibrium under the grid computing environment. To do so, we first establish an economic framework that incorporates the grid computing specific constraints into a commodity market. We next derive some intuitive necessary conditions based on the computing requirements of individual agents. We finally establish the existence of regular markets as a competitive equilibrium, given that these necessary conditions are met and that the agents’ utility functions satisfy some minimal requirements. In the process, we also show existence of competitive equilibrium for the special case of grid computing as a pure exchange economy.
