The Prevalence of Problem Gambling Among U.S. Adolescents and Young Adults: Results from a National Survey

A random telephone survey was conducted with a representative sample of 2,274 U.S. residents aged 14–21. The prevalence of problem gambling, as measured by the SOGS-RA, was 2.1%. Sixty-eight percent (68%) of the respondents had gambled in the past year, and 11% had gambled more often than twice per week. Males had much higher gambling involvement than females, and gambling involvement increased among older respondents. Blacks were less likely than average to have gambled in the past year, but if they gambled, they were more likely to do so frequently. Low SES respondents were less likely to have gambled in the past year, but if they gambled, they were more likely to be problem gamblers. Life transitions that are associated with assuming adult roles (employment, living independently of parents, non-student status) are also associated with greater gambling involvement. The rates of problem and pathological gambling were lower than those in an adult survey conducted earlier, when measured with the same questionnaire.     

Adaptive changes in gait of older and younger adults as responses to challenges to dynamic balance

The study proposed to identify balance strategies used by younger and older adults during gait under proprioceptive, visual, and simultaneous proprioceptive-visual challenges. Participants ambulated under 4 conditions: consistent, noncompliant surface; inconsistent, compliant surface (C); consistent, noncompliant surface with vision obscured (NCVO); and inconsistent, compliant surface with vision obscured (CVO). Balance adaptations were measured as changes in gait velocity, cadence, and gait-stability ratio (GSR). Participants were 5 younger (mean age = 27.2) and 5 older (mean age = 68) healthy adults. Significant age differences were found for GSR (p = .03) on all surfaces. Older adults adopted a more stable gait pattern than younger adults regardless of the challenge presented by surface. Significant condition differences were found for velocity (p < .001) and cadence (p = .001). All participants exhibited significantly decreased velocity and increased cadence on surfaces C and CVO. Gait speed and cadence did not significantly change in NCVO. Younger and older adults exhibited similar adaptive balance strategies, slowing and increasing steps/s, under proprioceptive and proprioceptive-visual challenges to dynamic balance.     

Risk management in a developing country context: improving decisions about point-of-use water treatment among the rural poor in Africa

More than 1 billion people, the vast majority of which live in the developing world, lack basic access to clean water for domestic use. For this reason, finding and promoting effective and sustainable solutions for the provision of reliable clean water in developing nations has become a focus of several public health and international development efforts. Even though several means of providing centrally located sources of clean water in developing communities exist, the severity and widespread nature of the water problem has led most development agencies and sanitation experts to strongly advocate the use of point-of-use treatment systems alongside whatever source of water people regularly use. In doing so, however, development practitioners have been careful to point out that any interventions or infrastructure regarding water safety and human health must also adhere to one of the central principles of international development: to facilitate more democratic and participatory models of decision making and governance. To this end, the research reported here focused on the development of a deliberative risk management framework for involving affected stakeholders in decisions about POU water treatment systems. This research, which was grounded in previous studies of structured decision making, took place in two rural villages in the East African nation of Tanzania.     

Container Scheduling: Complexity and Algorithms

We consider the transport of containers through a fleet of ships. Each ship has a capacity constraint limiting the total number of containers it can carry and each ship visits a given set of ports following a predetermined route. Each container has a release date at its origination port, and a due date at its destination port. A container has a size 1 or size 2; size 1 represents a 1 TEU (20‐foot equivalent unit) and size 2 represents 2 TEUs. The delivery time of a container is defined as the time when the ship that carries the container arrives at its destination port. We consider the problem of minimizing the maximum tardiness over all containers. We consider three scenarios with regard to the routes of the ships, namely, the ships having (i) identical, (ii) nested, and (iii) arbitrary routes. For each scenario, we consider different settings for origination ports, release dates, sizes of containers, and number of ports; we determine the computational complexity of various cases. We also provide a simple heuristic for some cases, with its worst case analysis. Finally, we discuss the relationship of our problems with other scheduling problems that are known to be open.     

Revenue Management with End‐of‐Period Discounts in the Presence of Customer Learning

Consider a firm that sells identical products over a series of selling periods (e.g., weekly all‐inclusive vacations at the same resort). To stimulate demand and enhance revenue, in some periods, the firm may choose to offer a part of its available inventory at a discount. As customers learn to expect such discounts, a fraction may wait rather than purchase at a regular price. A problem the firm faces is how to incorporate this waiting and learning into its revenue management decisions. To address this problem we summarize two types of learning behaviors and propose a general model that allows for both stochastic consumer demand and stochastic waiting. For the case with two customer classes, we develop a novel solution approach to the resulting dynamic program. We then examine two simplified models, where either the demand or the waiting behavior are deterministic, and present the solution in a closed form. We extend the model to incorporate three customer classes and discuss the effects of overselling the capacity and bumping customers. Through numerical simulations we study the value of offering end‐of‐period deals optimally and analyze how this value changes under different consumer behavior and demand scenarios.     

Dynamic Competition With Random Demand and Costless Search: A Theory of Price Posting

This paper studies a dynamic model of perfectly competitive price posting under demand uncertainty. Firms must produce output in advance. After observing aggregate sales in prior periods, firms post prices for their unsold output. In each period, the demand of a new batch of consumers is randomly activated. Existing customers who have not yet bought and then new customers arrive at the market in random order, observe the posted prices, and either purchase at the lowest available price or delay their purchase decision. We construct a sequential equilibrium in which the output produced and its allocation across consumers is efficient. Thus consumers endogenously sort themselves efficiently, with the highest valuations purchasing first. Transaction prices in each period rise continuously, as firms become more optimistic about demand, followed by a market correction. By the last period, prices are market clearing.     

The modest effects of fact boxes on cancer screening

Journal of Risk and Uncertainty - As health care becomes increasingly personalized to the needs and values of individual patients, informational interventions that aim to inform and debias consumer...     

Leaving the parental home in Australia over the generations: Evidence from the Household,Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (Hilda) Survey

The decision to remain in or leave the parental home represents the first housing career choice of young people. In this paper, we examine the parental home leaving outcomes for Australian birth cohorts in the twentieth century using recall questions contained in the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey. The findings from survival analysis and hazard function modelling is that a continuous, gradual reduction in the age of first leaving the parental home in Australia is evident up to the 1947–51 birth cohort, followed by stability and then a rise in age of first leaving home for the most recent birth cohorts. Birth cohort effects remain significant even after other measured determinants of parental home leaving are taken into account. The paper confirms the strong roles that education, family background and ethnicity have on parental home leaving outcomes.     

Decomposing change in life expectancy: A bouquet of formulas in honor of Nathan Keyfitz’s 90th birthday

We extend Nathan Keyfitz's research on continuous change in life expectancy over time by presenting and proving a new formula for decomposing such change. The formula separates change in life expectancy over time into two terms. The first term captures the general effect of reduction in death rates at all ages, and the second term captures the effect of heterogeneity in the pace of improvement in mortality at different ages. We extend the formula to decompose change in life expectancy into age-specific and cause-specific components, and apply the methods to analyze changes in life expectancy in Sweden and Japan.     

Asset Accumulation And Family Size

Utilizing panel data on families, estimates are made of the effects of children on asset accumulation, asset composition, consumption, and family income. Young children are found to depress savings for young families but to increase savings for marriages of duration greater than five years. The principal channel through which children act to reduce savings is the decline in female earnings associated with the child-induced withdrawal of wives from the labor force. Family consumption actually decreases with the birth of a child, but this reduction is insufficient, for young families, to offset the fall in income. For families in which the wife does not work the estimates suggest that savings may actually increase with children.