THE EFFECT OF PROVIDER CONTROL OF BLUE SHIELD PLANS ON HEALTH CARE MARKETS

Blue Shield plans often are granted regulatory advantages by the states in which they operate. Run efficiently, such not-for-profit firms should use these lower costs to eliminate their less advantaged rivals, the commercial insurers. However, these higher-cost commercial providers have been able to offer insurance coverage at prices competitive with the Blues, as evidenced by the fact that Blue plans have, on average, less than 50 percent market share. Similar prices with lower overall costs implies that economic rents are being earned, rents which a not-for-profit firm cannot distribute to owners. In this paper we argue that when there are competing goals among the groups controlling the Blue Shield plans, the different possible "uses" of the regulatory advantage become endogenously determined, necessitating the use of simultaneous equation estimation. Testing this model we find the major effect of doctor-control of Blue Shield plans is to raise doctors' fees while lowering the amount of rents captured by both consumers and administrators.     

A tool for selecting residential child care workers: an initial report

What strengths and talents make an outstanding child care worker? How can these qualities be measured? How can one predict whether an individual will succeed as a child care worker? The authors attempt to answer these questions by focusing on the "life themes" of highly rated child care workers and using a technique to measure these themes.     

Relationship quality of gay men in closed or open relationships

This study compared gay men in monogamous ("closed") relationships (n = 98) and gay men in nonmonogamous ("open") relationships (n = 34). Partners in open relationships were living together significantly longer than partners in closed relationships. Partners in the two types of relationships did not differ in Psychological Adjustment. Controlling for length of time living together, partners in closed relationships reported higher Affiliation/Dependency, more Favorable Attitudes toward the Relationship, and lower Tension than partners in open relationships. Global relationship quality for both types of couples was related to many Attractions, many Barriers, and few Alternatives to the relationship; few beliefs regarding both Disagreement is Destructive and Partners Cannot Change; high Dyadic Attachment; high Shared Decision Making; and low Psychological Maladjustment. Partners in both types of relationships were more similar to each other than different from each other, especially on the variables of Relationship Quality, a belief in Partner Changeability, and Dyadic Attachment.     

Late fertility decline in the Netherlands: The influence of religious denomination,socioeconomic group and region

Both published results from the 1930, 1947, 1960 and 1971 censuses and unpublished ones are used to examine the influence that religious denomination, socio-economic group and region exerted on the fertility of marriages contracted between 1876 and 1959. A theory formulated by Lesthaeghe and Wilson on the relation between modes of production and secularization and the pace of fertility decline in Western Europe offers — in combination with van Heek's views on the special position of Dutch Roman Catholicism — a starting point for an explanation of why the fertility decline of Roman Catholics, self-employed and agricultural labourers lagged behind.     

Individual behavior under risk and under uncertainty: An experimental study

These experiments are concerned with individual behavior under risk and under uncertainty. By exploiting the isolation effect the experiments were able to offer to 134 subjects the possibility of actually gaining or losing an important sum of money.The experimental data show that under risk as well as under complete ignorance the subjects' attitudes towards prospects of gains and towards prospects of losses are totally unrelated.The data also show that when facing prospects of gains, the subjects generally take the exact probabilities of the events into account, whereas, when facing prospects of losses many of then have only recourse to coarser categories of plausibility, or even no longer use their information at all.     

EXPERIMENTS WITH THE MIDDLE RESPONSE ALTERNATIVE IN SURVEY QUESTIONS

A series of experiments shows (1) that people are significantlymore likely to select the middle response alternative on anissue when it is explicitly offered to them as part of the questionthan when it is omitted; (2) that merely mentioning that thereis a middle alternative, in the preface to the question, makesit more likely that respondents will select it, even thoughit is not offered to them as an explicit choice; (3) that theorder in which the middle alternative is presented in the question—inthe middle or last position—can make a significant differencein the results, but that a "recency bias" does not occur invariably,or consistently; and (4) that people who select a middle responsealternative when it is offered would not necessarily answerthe question in the same way as other respondents if forcedto choose sides on the issue.     

THE PERSISTENCE OF POLITICAL ATTITUDES AMONG 1960s CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS

A scattering of recent research has studied the current politicalbeliefs and attitudes of individuals identified as "1960s activists."In contrast to much of the treatment accorded such people inthe popular media, this research tends to find most of theseactivists currently liberal on a wide variety of political topics.However, in the absence of panel data, most of this researchhas had to assess any change in the activists' attitudes eitherby assuming the activists' past positions or by trusting totheir retrospective reports. In this paper we report on panel data from a large group ofwhite activists, mostly students, who spent the summer of 1965organizing voter registration drives in Southern black communities.In some specific areas on which the activists tended to holdrather extreme positions in 1965, they may have moderated by1984. However, their overall pattern of response on a wide varietyof issues is basically stable over this twenty-year period.     

USING DUAL FRAME DESIGNS TO REDUCE NONRESPONSE IN TELEPHONE SURVEYS

This article reports on the results of a series of experimentsdesigned to improve response rates for telephone surveys. Inthree surveys telephone households were selected using bothstandard random digit dialing (RDD) techniques and lists oftelephone numbers purchased from a commercial firm. In the RDDportions of the samples "cold contact" interviewing methodswere used; in the list frame portions advance letters were mailed,and the listed household name was used in the introduction.Experiments were designed to test the effects on response ratesof the advance letters and use of the listed household nameas a means of establishing rapport. The advance letters increasedresponse rates, but no difference could be attributed to theuse of names. The mixture of RDD and list sampling techniquesis also used to evaluate the effects of relative response rateson substantive findings. The cost consequences of these dualframe designs are assessed along a number of dimensions, andthe cost and error components of these designs are discussed.     

Voting cycles and the structure of individual preferences

Empirical studies have shown that cyclical preferences are infrequent, but they have been less clear about why. Using thermometer ratings from nationally-representative samples of the U.S., we examine preferences for presidential candidates in order to determine what it is about them that leads to few cycles. Single-peaked preferences as usually construed (meaning that all of a set of preferences satisfy single-peakedness criteria) are, of course, rare. Yet we find a high degree of unidimensionality in the sense that for any given set of preferences, a relatively high proportion of the preference orders are consistent with single-peakedness. We also find that the highest amounts of unidimensionality often do not occur along partisan or left/right lines. Strong feelings for or against candidates, often not derived from an issue base, form the basis for the dimensionality discovered.We would like to thank Daniel Severance for programming the random model calculations and three anonymous referees, whose comments were very helpful in clarifying the presentation in this paper.