Coordination of benefits reduces double payments.

As a means of reducing the cost of duplicate health care coverage, the health insurance industry utilizes a mechanism called coordination of benefits (COB). The main purposes of COB are to limit recovery to 100 percent of actual charges and to assign insurers primary and secondary responsibilities to pay these charges. Nearly all health plans, including HMOs, Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans, and commercial insurers, coordinate benefits, mostly for group coverage, often on the basis of procedures found in state insurance codes. While COB provides an effective cost reduction mechanism to health insurers, several issues remain in its administration, including difficulties that arise when carriers refuse to pay, when HMO members self-refer, and when coordination is attempted with an uninsured plan.     

Enjoyment of destruction: The role of uncertainty

Enjoyment is frequently associated with acts of destruction. It is posited that enjoyment derived from observing or engaging in destruction is related to the stimulus characteristics of the object being destroyed. Specifically, the factors that determine a person's enjoyment of aesthetic stimuli should also affect one's response to destruction. In the present experiment one stimulus characteristic was studied—uncertainty concerning the breaking of a pane of glass. Subjects observed a film in which three panes of glass broke immediately upon being struck, but the fourth pane of glass broke on either the first strike (low uncertainty) or the third strike (high uncertainty). Results indicated that subjects enjoyed the breaking more in the high-uncertainty condition, that is, when they were more uncertain about when the glass would break. The findings support the aesthetic theory of destruction and also have implications for design.     

Optimal bid-ask price strategies

Economic analysis has begun to focus on the implications of transaction costs to trading in capital assets. Specifically, the economics of market making and the price of liquidity has received considerable attention. This paper formulates the market maker's bid-ask price decision as a semi-Markov decision process with the reward being a function of expected return and risk. Risk is intimately related to dealer inventory and hence the solution of the analysis specifies bid-ask price strategies which are inventory dependent. Numerical examples indicate the market maker's optimal bid-ask prices will tilt around the ‘assets’ equilibrium price to control inventory as well as influence expected profit.     

Dwelling Space: Expectations and the Housing System

The average person-per-room ratio in Australia is low by international standards. But there are marked inequalities in the distribution of dwelling space, and the question is examined of whether the current allocation of dwelling space within the housing system constitutes a social problem on a national scale. The examination is based partly on an analysis of published census data, partly on existing literature, and partly on raw data derived from two recent housing surveys.     

Abstracts

Beal, E. W. Current trends in the training of family therapists.
Bryson, R. B., Bryson, J. B., Licht, M. H., & Licht, B. G. The professional pair.
Cromwell, R. E., Olson, D. H. L., & Founier, D. G. Tools and techniques for diagnosis and evaluation in marital and family therapy.
Hartley, D., Roback, H. B., & Abramowitz, S. I. Deterioration effects in encounter groups.
Jones, W. P. Some implications of the sixteen personality factor questionnaire for marital guidance.
Kelly, G. F. The counselor and human sexuality.
Mace, D., & Mace, V. The selection, training, and certification of facilitators for marriage enrichment programs.
Masters, W. H. & Johnson, V. E. Principles of the new sex therapy.
McConnell, L. G. An examination of the counselor's skills when counseling with sexual problems.
Meyer, J. K. Training and accreditation for the treatment of sexual disorders.
Robertielle, R. C. The decline and fall of sex.
Rubin, Z., & Mitchell, C. Couples research as couples counseling.
Sager, C. J. The role of sex therapy in marital therapy.
Whittaker, J. K. Causes of childhood disorders: New findings.     

An axiomatic derivation of subjective probability,utility, and evaluation functions

Subjective expected utility maximization is derived from four axioms, using an argument based on the separating hyperplane theorem. It is also shown that the first three of these axioms imply a more general maximization formula, involving an evaluation function, which can still serve as a basis for decision analysis.     

The nature of the connection between life course and satisfaction with community services

Research on satisfaction with community services has used both age and life cycle stage as predictors of satisfaction. As both age and life cycle stage are indicators of life course, their relative advantages in service satisfaction research need to be assessed. The authors correlated both age and life cycle stage with twenty service satisfaction items and with item non-response (a measure of the salience of a service). Results were: (1) associations with service satisfaction were linear, (2) some associations with salience were markedly curvilinear, and (3) as predictors of service satisfaction, age and life cycle performed similarly. The choice between age and life cycle as predictors of service satisfaction appears to involve conceptual as well as empirical issues.     

Occupational status attainments of university graduates: individual attributes and labour market effects compared

Ce document analyse le processus de realisation d'un statut professionnel pour cinq cohortes de diplômés d'université, hommes et femmes, durant la période s'étendant de 1960 à 1976. Après avoir reçu leurs diplômés, les hommes, comparés à leurs homologues féminins, sont parvenus, en general, à un statut professionnel plus élevé, réparti sur une échelle plus large. Les conséquences des differences socio-économiques sur la réalisation d'un statut professionnel se sont avèrées minimes ou insignifiantes pour les deux sexes. Les effets des différences de l'enseignement reçu sur le statut professionnel sont plus grands. Les rendements pour l'étudiant avec une moyenne académique élevée sont les mêmes pour les hommes que pour les femmes. Les hommes qui ont poursuivi de hautes études supérieures ont éprouvé un meilleur rendement de méme que les femmes qui se sont spécialisées en sciences. La condition du marché du travail au moment ou ces étudiants ont obtenu leurs diplômes s'est avérée le facteur le plus déterminant dans la réalisation d'un statut professionnel. L'on maintient que la recherche sur la réalisation d'un statut professionnel a largement négligé les facteurs structurels tels que les conséquences du marché du travail, et sa concentration sur le prestige professionnel a entretenu le déguisement des differences entre les sexes dans la réalisation d'un statut professionnel. This paper analyzes the occupational status attainment process for five cohorts of male and female university graduates spanning the time period 1960 to 1976. When compared to their female counterparts, males on the whole achieve higher occupational status after graduation and experience a wider distribution of status. The effect of socioeconomic variables on occupational attainment are found to be either small or insignificant for both sexes. The effects of educational variables on occupational attainment are greater. The returns to a high undergraduate academic average are similar for males and females; males experience a higher return to graduate study while females experience a larger return to majoring in science. The state of the labour market at time of graduation is found to have the largest effect on occupational status attainment. It is argued that occupational status attainment research has largely neglected such structural factors as labour market effects, and its focus on occupational prestige has tended to mask sex differences in occupational status attainment.