Barriers to Remarriage Among Older People: Viewpoints of Widows and Widowers

We conducted this research based on a qualitative approach to describe the opinions of older widows and widowers on remarriage obstacles. Based on purposive sampling and inclusion criteria, we chose 48 participants on maximum diversity of sex, age, education, employment, and socioeconomic status. Two thirds of the participants were female, 40% had spent more than 10 years widowed, and 65% were living with their children. We collected data individually through semistructured, face-to-face interviews. Based on conventional content analyses, 2 independent researchers implemented data analysis manually. Barriers to remarriage were finally categorized into 4 main themes: personal, normative, interactive, and financial factors. Results of this study showed that older people are more concerned about public opinions and social norms surrounding remarriage. As long as these thoughts and norms are not changed, the concept of remarriage among widows and widowers remains a vital taboo and concern.     

A co-utility approach to the mesh economy: the crowd-based business model

We explore the mesh economy applications of co-utility, a new concept describing self-enforcing and mutually beneficial interactions among self-interested agents. We show that the crowdsourcing market is naturally co-utile (without additional incentives). Furthermore, we analyze the investment crowdfunding industry and propose solutions that can neutralize the fear and mistrust effects underlying its market in order to make it strictly co-utile. Up on our analysis under the co-utility framework, we corroborate that collaboration is always rationally sustainable, as long as the system is co-utile and that all co-utile outcomes are Pareto-optimal; but not all Pareto-optimal outcomes are co-utile. In addition, reciprocity and hybridity equilibrium are compatible with co-utility in specific cases at which they provide Pareto-optimal outcomes. This methodology of analysis within the framework of co-utility can be extended beyond the crowd-based business models and promises to significantly contribute to economic theory.     

Conditional Cash Incentive and Use of Health Care Services: New Evidence from a Household Experiment

Studies have recently provided insights into the effects of incentive modalities in the health care sector. However, there is insufficient evidence on the underlying causes of the partial effectiveness of these strategies in the health systems of developing countries. This study presents results from a large-scale randomized experiment across 6848 households in Afghanistan that evaluates the impact of a conditional incentive pay scheme on health facilities. Supported by the target-income hypothesis framework and relaxing the compliance assumption in the empirical modeling, the estimated coefficients yield causal effects of the supply-side conditional incentive on the utilization for health care services. After 2 years, the conditional incentive increased the use of pre-targeted maternal and children health care services among the households at lower levels and at contracted-out health facilities. Additionally, the incentive scheme is associated with sizable efficiency gains at the facility level. These gains are realized at the expense of deterring service users’ satisfaction with physicians’ communication qualities. This study establishes that margins of improvement do exist in the supply-side performance conditioning on an organizational structure and the service contractual arrangements of health facilities. This work provides a framework for the plausible implementation of incentive policies in the health care sector.