We explore in this paper the implications of ethical and operational principles for the evaluation of population health. We formalize those principles as axioms for social preferences over distributions of health for a given population. We single out several focal population health evaluation...

In the minimum cost spanning tree model we consider decentralized pricing rules, i.e. rules that cover at least the efficient cost while the price charged to each user only depends upon his own connection costs. We define a canonical pricing rule and provide two axiomatic characterizations....

In this paper, we consider finite normal form games satisfying transference of decisionmaker indifference. We show that any set of strategies surviving k rounds of elimination of some weakly dominated strategies can be reduced to a set of strategies equivalent to the set of strategies surviving...

In the present paper we describe the structure of the Chinese health care system and sketch its future development. We analyse issues of provider incentives and the actual burden sharing between government, enterprises and people. We further aim to identify a number of current problems and link...

The increasing serial cost sharing rule of Moulin and Shenker [Econometrica 60 (1992) 1009] and the decreasing serial rule of de Frutos [Journal of Economic Theory 79 (1998) 245] have attracted attention due to their intuitive appeal and striking incentive properties. An axiomatic...

Models of preferences between outcomes over continuous time are important for individual, corporate, and social decision making, e.g., medical treatment, infrastructure development, and environmental regulation. This paper presents a foundation for such models. It shows that conditions on...

Solutions for cooperative games with side-payments can be manipulated by merging a coalition of players into a single player, or, conversely, splitting a player into a number of smaller players. This paper establishes some (im-)possibility results concerning merging- or splitting-proofness of...

In a recent paper Happich and Mühlbacher [Eur J Health Econom (2003) 4:292-294] proposed an axiom of constant absolute trade-off in life years, and studied the family of QALY models satisfying this axiom under expected utility and mutual utility independence between life years and health state....

This paper characterizes the principle of first order stochastic dominance in a multivariate discrete setting. We show that a distribution f first order stochastic dominates distribution g if and only if f can be obtained from g by iteratively shifting density from one outcome to another that is...

In the first part of the paper, we consider various QALY (quality-adjusted life year) models in situations where health varies over time, and provide a theoretical analysis of model identification and parameter estimation from time trade-off and standard gamble scores. We investigate...