Improving the contributions of technology assessment to the health care system of the U.S.A.

Summary Based on 14 case studies of highly effective therapies and the reasons they succeeded less frequently than they could, we propose a variety of steps to improve the health care system of the U.S.A. Whatever proposal emerges from current national debates until innovations are shown to be safe and effective, they should not be supported; when slightly better technologies are much more expensive than other good ones we need to consider appropriate choices carefully; simplified billing and bookkeping would reduce our costs; when a technology is rapidly introduced cautionnary measures may be needed; tracking immunization and repairing their omissions requires a new system; educational programs such as seen effective in hypertension should be applied in other areas such as vaccination; in organ transplantation the nation should consider “presumed consent”; our payment system sometimes creates perverse incentives and therefore needs review; and the preferences of the public in allocation of health resources need to be discovered once the public is informed about the issues. Research supported by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.     

On the maximal inequalities for the average of pairwise i.i.d. random variables

We obtain two sided inequalities for the tail of the maximal function of the averages of a multiple sequence of pairwise i.i.d. random variables taking values in a separable Banach space. We then use the results to establish a necessary and sufficient con¬dition, in terms of the common distribution of the norm of the random variables, for the maximal function to be in L , 1< p << &z.rdang;     

Survival in the U.S. petroleum refining industry

Of the 324 petroleum refineries operating in the U.S. in 1982, only 149 were still in the hands of their original owners in 2007. Using duration analysis, this paper explores why refineries change ownership or shut down. Plants are more likely to ‘survive’ with their original owners if they are older or larger, but less likely if the owner is a major integrated firm, or the refinery is a more technologically complex one. This latter result differs from existing research on the issue. This paper also presents a split population model to relax the general assumption of the duration model that all refiners will eventually close down; the empirical results show that the split population model converges on a standard hazard model; the log-logistic version fits best. Finally, a multinomial logit model is estimated to analyze the factors that influence the refinery plant's choices of staying open, closing, or changing ownership. Plant size, age and technology usage have positive impacts on the likelihood that a refinery will stay open, or change ownership (rather than close down).     

The variance and the range of i.I.D. random variables

Chew and Teugels (1978) discussed the joint asynptotic behaviour, as n→∞ , of the sum and the maximum of n i.i.d. randan variables. Here it is noted that it is more natural to include also the minimum in the discussion, and that one can extend their argument to allcw this; of course this means that the range can also be dealt with. Moreover the variance, like many U-statistics, can be approximated by a sum of transforms of the basic randan variables, and similar methods can be used to study the joint asynptotic behaviour of, for example, the variance and the maximum and minimum.     

A Survey of the Teaching of Statistics in M.B.A. Programs

A survey of business schools was conducted to obtain information about the current state of the teaching of business statistics to students enrolled in M.B.A. degree programs. The survey was undertaken for and presented at a June 1986 conference on “Making Statistics More Effective in Schools of Business,” held at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. Information was elicited concerning both the required statistics sequence and elective statistics courses for M.B.A. students, as well as computer usage in these courses. This article summarizes the information obtained from the survey.     

C338. Misspecified location and scale. 111. the use of S2

The observed high kurtosis of stock market returns and other variables of a speculative nature has aroused interest in stable law distributions. This paper makes the point that most historical findings that returns indeed follow stable laws may have been caused by conditional heteroskedasticity. This presumption is enhanced by Monte Carlo simulations.