Job Development in a Veterans Administration Hospital

This department provides a showcase for actual practices. Effective and ineffective procedures or techniques are displayed, as well as successful and unsuccessful programs or projects. Reports, not to exceed six typed, double-spaced pages, are to include a succinct, summary sentence of up to 30 words and are to be submitted in triplicate. Authors may wish to make longer reports available to interested readers.     

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.