The European Community (EC) has embarked on a program popularly referred to as Europe 1992. The aim of the program is to achieve a unified European market that will overcome the economic stagnation and unemployment of the early 1980s and improve the position of EC members in the global economy....

Queues for in-patient surgery are commonplace in universal health care systems. Clinicians and hospitals usually manage these waiting lists with informal criteria for determining patient priority--a form of implicit rationing. To understand the workings of implicit rationing by queue, we took...