Assessment of hospital services and patient reactions

This paper deals with the study of assessment of hospital services and patient reactions carried out amongst 473 respondents, both in-door (3 wards) and out-door patients in M.L.B. Medical College Hospital, Jhansi (Uttar Pradesh). The patients were from three wards medical, surgical and gynaecological wards and consisted of 373 discharged and 100 out-door patients.     

The Politics of ‘Social Accountability’ in England and Germany: Democratic Control and Moral Imperatives

This article investigates how politicians in England and Germany approach social accountability during the introduction of markets in the national health care systems. It analyses the discourse among members of parliament during the law making process of the 2012 NHS Health Care Act in England and the 2011 Act for Financing of Statutory Health Insurance in Germany. Generally, the new social accountability reform agenda is attractive to policy makers as it foregrounds public engagement and bottom-up participation (Peters 2001). Social accountability refers to institutional practices that favour participatory and horizontal mechanisms that depart from traditional hierarchical Principal-Agent forms.     

WARRANTY COST ESTIMATION: A GOAL PROGRAMMING APPROACH

This paper proposes a goal programming approach to the warranty cost estimation problem. Past research on this topic has mostly dealt with a single objective—the minimization of the warranty reserve cost or the maximization of profit. A more realistic approach to warranty cost problems could, however, involve several goals, some of which might be conflicting to others. In this paper, three goals are prioritized. The goals considered are minimization of warranty reserve cost per unit, offering a minimum level of warranty time based on an allowable proportion of failures within the warranty period, and capturing a minimum specified market share of the product. An example is illustrated using the proposed formulation, and goal achievements are discussed.     

CONSEQUENCES OF OFFSHORING TO DEVELOPING NATIONS: LABOR-MARKET OUTCOMES,WELFARE, AND CORRECTIVE INTERVENTIONS

Our parsimonious two-country (developed country and developing country) model of offshoring provides nuanced results. These include cases where wages monotonically improve, as well as where wages exhibit an inverted-U relationship with offshoring cost reductions. We identify conditions under which these relationships hold. Since global welfare always rises with improvements in offshoring technology, we find that there is a role for a minimum wage (alternatively, wage tax) in the developing country. We derive such a policy's optimal level. There is also the possibility of a developed country optimal offshoring tax for extracting terms-of-trade benefits. We, finally, analyze the two-country Nash equilibrium in policies. (JEL F11, F13, F16, F66, O19, O24)     

Bayesian hierarchical model for protein identifications

In proteomics, identification of proteins from complex mixtures of proteins extracted from biological samples is an important problem. Among the experimental technologies, mass spectrometry (MS) is the most popular one. Protein identification from MS data typically relies on a ‘two-step’ procedure of identifying the peptide first followed by the separate protein identification procedure next. In this setup, the interdependence of peptides and proteins is neglected resulting in relatively inaccurate protein identification. In this article, we propose a Markov chain Monte Carlo based Bayesian hierarchical model, a first of its kind in protein identification, which integrates the two steps and performs joint analysis of proteins and peptides using posterior probabilities. We remove the assumption of independence of proteins by using clustering group priors to the proteins based on the assumption that proteins sharing the same biological pathway are likely to be present or absent together and are correlated. The complete conditionals of the proposed joint model being tractable, we propose and implement a Gibbs sampling scheme for full posterior inference that provides the estimation and statistical uncertainties of all relevant parameters. The model has better operational characteristics compared to two existing ‘one-step’ procedures on a range of simulation settings as well as on two well-studied datasets.     

Combining monotonicity and strong equity: construction and representation of orders on infinite utility streams

This paper studies the nature of social welfare orders (SWO) on infinite utility streams, satisfying the efficiency principle known as monotonicity and the consequentialist equity principle known as strong equity. It provides a complete characterization of domain sets for which there exists such a SWO which is in addition representable by a real valued function. It then shows that for those domain sets for which there is no such SWO which is representable, the existence of such a SWO necessarily entails the existence of a non-Ramsey set, a non-constructive object.     

Multidimensional Human Opportunity Index

One fact that emerges from the evaluation of the Millennium Development Goals is that not all countries met all the goals and there are significant complementaries among failing on specific goals. This paper proposes the Multidimensional Human Opportunity Index (MHOI) that focuses on the complementaries among access to multiple services. We focus on access to services for children, with the aim of capturing equality in opportunity for children from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. This index builds on the Human Opportunity Index of the World Bank that measures children’s access to a basic service, such as access to clean water. However, the MHOI differs from the parent index in that we measure joint access to multiple services or access to a bundle of services. We apply the MHOI on two Himalayan states of South Asia, Nepal and Bhutan, and show that although each basic service is available to a large proportion of the population, only two-thirds in Bhutan and one half in Nepal have access to the bundle of basic services in 2011–2012.     

Synergies Among Monetary,Multidimensional and Subjective Poverty: Evidence from Nepal

In this paper we construct a Nepal specific multidimensional poverty index using the Nepal Longitudinal Sample Survey (NLSS) for the period 1995–2010. The indicators for Nepal Multidimensional Poverty Index (NMP) have been chosen using the goals set by the Government of Nepal and the perceptions of adequacy as reported by households. In doing so this study combines multidimensional and subjective methods of measuring wellbeing. The subjective data is used to guide the choice of dimensions for the multidimensional analysis. Our findings show that Nepal has had a dramatic fall in multidimensional poverty along with the observed fall in consumption poverty in this period. Comparing the extent to which consumption poverty accurately identifies the multidimensionally poor, we find the error has reduced over time but remains large in proportion to the poverty rate implying the need for a multidimensional measure. For the different ethnic groups and regions the patterns of reduction in poverty are not homogenous and are different from those of consumption poverty with the NMP outperforming the consumption poverty in tracking targeted policy actions.     

Order restricted Bayesian inference for exponential simple step-stress model

A step-stress model has received a considerable amount of attention in recent years. In the usual step-stress experiment, a stress level is allowed to increase at each step to get rapid failure of the experimental units. The expected lifetime of the experimental unit is shortened as the stress level increases. Although extensive amount of work has been done on step-stress models, not enough attention has been paid to analyze step-stress models incorporating this information. We consider a simple step-stress model and provide Bayesian inference of the unknown parameters under cumulative exposure model assumption. It is assumed that the lifetime of the experimental units are exponentially distributed with different scale parameters at different stress levels. It is further assumed that the stress level increases at each step, hence the expected lifetime decreases. We try to incorporate this restriction using the prior assumptions. It is observed that different censoring schemes can be incorporated very easily under a general setup. Monte Carlo simulations have been performed to see the effectiveness of the proposed method, and two datasets have been analyzed for illustrative purposes.