Integrating ethical enquiry and health technology assessment: limits and opportunities for efficiency and equity

This paper aims at discussing some contributions, limitations and opportunities that efficiency and equity studies could make to form a better understanding of ethical issues involved in health technology assessment (HTA). Prenatal detection of Down syndrome is used as a case study for further discussions regarding efficiency and equity, as well as other ethical principles including beneficence, non-maleficence and autonomy. The development and use of adequate methods and the need for context appraisal are two imperative issues in this field of knowledge. The analysis of ethical implications in HTA should account for both. Economic evaluation methodologies have great potential in the assessment of some key ethical principles such as efficiency and equity but are of limited use concerning other fundamental principles. Social and individual values play a prominent role in this respect.     

Quality strategies in supply chain alliances of disposable items

This paper studies a single-product distribution channel where a supplier manufactures items of a given type, some of which are defective, that are sold by a retailer who only detects a subset of the defective items, passing the rest along to customers. We conjecture the structure of the demand and cost functions, assuming customers to have a decreasing marginal aversion to bad quality while both the supplier and the retailer make marginally increasing efforts to avoid bad quality. This allows us to deduce several implicit parameters of a cost model based on observable data, such as the share of the channel margin. Once the parameters of the model are available, we analyze the result of vertical integration. Although we confirm the well-known fact that vertical integration improves the quality perceived by the customer, we characterize the supplier's decision of whether or not to provide a better quality in terms of the individual channel margins. As an alternative, we derive the conditions under which the supplier and the retailer may devise a mutually beneficial transfer contract that simultaneously increases their profit and improves quality.     

Retracted Article: The victorious counterrevolution: the nationalist effort in the Spanish Civil War

We, the Editors and Publisher of National Identities, have retracted the following book review:

Pedro García-Guirao (2019)

Book Review of The victorious counterrevolution: the nationalist effort in the Spanish Civil War. National Identities, published online on 14^th February 2019, DOI:10.1080/14608944.2018.1563986

The above-mentioned book review contained some inaccuracies in quotations and some statements which may be misleading as to the contents of the book. The book review was subsequently revised and re-published as DOI: 10.1080/14608944.2018.1563986

We have been informed in our decision-making by our policy on publishing ethics and integrity and the COPE guidelines on retractions.

The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as “Retracted”.     

Regularization with Maximum Entropy and Quantum Electrodynamics: The Merg(E) Estimators

It is well-known that under fairly conditions linear regression becomes a powerful statistical tool. In practice, however, some of these conditions are usually not satisfied and regression models become ill-posed, implying that the application of traditional estimation methods may lead to non-unique or highly unstable solutions. Addressing this issue, in this paper a new class of maximum entropy estimators suitable for dealing with ill-posed models, namely for the estimation of regression models with small samples sizes affected by collinearity and outliers, is introduced. The performance of the new estimators is illustrated through several simulation studies.     

Assessing the relevance of higher education courses

The establishment of the European Higher Education Area has involved specifying lists of professional competencies that programs are expected to develop, and with this the need for procedures to measure how every course within a higher education program is aligned with the program's competencies. We propose an instrument for characterizing this alignment, a process that we call assessing the relevance of a course. Using information from the course syllabus (objectives, contents and assessment scheme), our instrument produces indicators for characterizing the syllabus in terms of a competence list and for assessing its coherence. Because assessment involves quality, the results obtained can also be used to revise and improve the course syllabus. We illustrate this process with an example of a methods course from a mathematics teacher education program at a Spanish university.     

Comparative Perspectives on Social Indicators

Social Indicators Research -     

Surveillances,Social Management,and Architectural Morphologies: An approach to the Prison and the Hospital in 19th Century Spain

Surveillance is one of the key aspects of the economic and social system in which we live. Its relevance is growing, due in part to technical advances and in part to complex social dynamics and the magnitude of certain conflicts. In this article we discuss the analytical framework formulated by Bauman, in which he contrasts the concepts of liquid and solid surveillance, and we introduce the concepts of inquisitive and coercive surveillance. We examine the genesis and evolution of both types of surveillance by analyzing public health and penitentiary strategies, particularly in 19th century Spain, as well as those of their respective institutions—the hospital and the prison—with special focus on their spatial manifestations and the divergence between the paths taken in the health‐care and penitentiary spheres.