Karolin Becker, Peter Zweifel, Age and choice in health insurance: evidence from a discrete choice experiment, The Patient: Patient-Centered Outcomes Research, Vol. 1 (1), 2008. (Journal Article)
Background: A uniform package of benefits and uniform cost sharing are elements of regulation inherent in most social health insurance systems. Both elements risk burdening the population with a welfare loss if preferences for risk and insurance attributes differ. This suggests the introduction of more choice in social health insurance packages may be advantageous; however, it is widely believed that this would not benefit the elderly.
Objective: To examine the relationship between age and willingness to pay (WTP) for additional options in Swiss social health insurance.
Methods: A discrete choice experiment was developed using six attributes (deductibles, co-payment, access to alternative medicines, medication choice, access to innovation, and monthly premium) that are currently in debate within the context of Swiss health insurance. These attributes have been shown to be important in the choice of insurance contract. Using statistical design optimization procedures, the number of choice sets was reduced to 27 and randomly split into three groups. One choice was included twice to test for consistency. Two random effects probit models were developed: a simple model where marginal utilities and WTP values were not allowed to vary according to socioeconomic characteristics, and a more complex model where the values were permitted to depend on socioeconomic variables.
A representative telephone survey of 1000 people aged >24 years living in the German- and French-speaking parts of Switzerland was conducted. Participants were asked to compare the status quo (i.e. their current insurance contract) with ten hypothetical alternatives. In addition, participants were asked questions concerning utilization of healthcare services; overall satisfaction with the healthcare system, insurer and insurance policy; and a general preference for new elements in the insurance package. Socioeconomic variables surveyed were age, sex, total household income, education (seven categories ranging from primary school to university degree), place of residence, occupation, and marital status.
Results: All chosen elements proved relevant for choice in the simple model. Accounting for socioeconomic characteristics in the comprehensive model reveals preference heterogeneity for contract attributes, but also for the propensity to consider deviating from the status quo and choosing an alternative health insurance contract.
Conclusion: The findings suggest that while the elderly do exhibit a stronger status quo bias than younger age groups, they require less rather than more specific compensation for selected cutbacks, indicating a potential for contracts that induce self-rationing in return for lower premiums. |
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Ernst Fehr, Jean R Tyran, Limited rationality and strategic interaction: the impact of the strategic environment on nominal inertia, Econometrica, Vol. 76 (2), 2008. (Journal Article)
Much evidence suggests that people are heterogeneous with regard to their abilities to make rational, forward-looking decisions. This raises the question as to when the rational types are decisive for aggregate outcomes and when the boundedly rational types shape aggregate results. We examine this question in the context of a long-standing and important economic problem: the adjustment of nominal prices after an anticipated monetary shock. Our experiments suggest that two types of bounded rationality – money illusion and anchoring – are important behavioral forces behind nominal inertia. However, depending on the strategic environment, bounded rationality has vastly different effects on aggregate price adjustment. If agents’ actions are strategic substitutes, adjustment to the new equilibrium is extremely quick, whereas under strategic complementarity, adjustment is both very slow and associated with relatively large real effects. This adjustment difference is driven by price expectations, which are very flexible and forward-looking under substitutability but adaptive and sticky under complementarity. Moreover, subjects’ expectations are also considerably more rational under substitutability. KEYWORDS: Bounded rationality, strategic substitutes, strategic complements, money illusion, anchoring, nominal rigidity, sticky prices. |
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Peter Zweifel, Christoph Auckenthaler, On the feasibility of insurers' investment policies, Journal of Risk and Insurance, Vol. 75 (1), 2008. (Journal Article)
This article calls attention to a difficulty with insurers' investment policies that seems to have been overlooked so far. There is the distinct possibility that insurers cannot satisfy the demands of different stakeholders in terms of expected returns and volatility. While using the capital asset pricing model as the benchmark, this article distinguishes two groups of stakeholders that impose additional constraints. One is “income security” in the interest of current beneficiaries and older workers; the other is “predictability of contributions” in the interest of contributing younger workers and sponsoring employers. It defines the conditions for which the combination of these constraints results in a lack of feasibility of investment policy. Minimum deviation from the capital market line is proposed as the performance benchmark in these situations. |
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Maria Ines Hofmann, Thomas Böni, Kurt Alt, Ulrich Woitek, Frank J Rühli, Paleopathologies of the vertebral column in medieval skeletons, Anthropologischer Anzeiger, Vol. 66 (1), 2008. (Journal Article)
Paleopathological data provide valuable information about health, longevity and mortality in earlier human populations. We investigated the incidence of spinal pathologies on 54 individuals (1045 vertebrae and 18 sacral bones) that belong to a medieval skeletal series discovered in the Dalheim monastery (Northwest Germany) and compared them with contemporary and recent populations. The skeletons were analyzed with anthropological methods (sex and age determination), by macroscopic inspection, and, if pathologies of the spine and the sacrum were visible, also by X-ray. We investigated evidence of trauma, specific and nonspecific infectious diseases, joint diseases, tumors, and congenital as well as metabolic disorders. Radiocarbon determination of four samples of different specimens was also undertaken revealing a historic dating of ca. 1050 AD. The most common pathological findings were degenerative changes of the spine found in 29 individuals (53.3%). Examples of infections of the spine were rare (0.8% of all vertebrae). There were no cases of traumatic injuries of the spine. The prevalence of spondylosis deformans, the most commonly found type of pathology was found to be higher in the lumbar region, in males as well as in individuals of low stature. |
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Maria Saez Marti, Anna Sjögren, Peers and culture, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Vol. 110 (1), 2008. (Journal Article)
We analyze the evolution of cultural traits when parents purposefully invest resources in order to socialize their children to the cultural variants that maximize child lifetime utility. We assume that children are not passive in their adoption of traits from peers. Instead they are guided by an evaluation of the merit of variants. We show that such evaluation is likely to render this process of "oblique transmission" biased. We then show that when transmission of traits from society is biased or frequency dependent, cultural diversity is sustainable even when all parents strive to transmit the same trait. We also show that demand for cultural pluralism on the part of parent does not guarantee cultural diversity. |
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Pavlo R Blavatskyy, Ganna Pogrebna, Risk aversion when gains are likely and unlikely: evidence from a natural experiment with large stakes, Theory and Decision, Vol. 64 (2-3), 2008. (Journal Article)
In the television show Deal or No Deal a contestant is endowed with a sealed box, which potentially contains a large monetary prize. In the course of the show the contestant learns more information about the distribution of possible monetary prizes inside her box. Consider two groups of contestants, who learned that the chances of their boxes containing a large prize are 20% and 80% correspondingly. Contestants in both groups receive qualitatively similar price offers for selling the content of their boxes. If contestants are less risk averse when facing unlikely gains, the price offer is likely to be more frequently rejected in the first group than in the second group. However, the fraction of rejections is virtually identical across two groups. Thus, contestants appear to have identical risk attitudes over (large) gains of low and high probability. |
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C Windischberger, R Cunnington, C Lamm, R Lanzenberger, H Langenberger, L Deecke, H Bauer, E Moser, Time-resolved analysis of fMRI signal changes using Brain Activation Movies, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, Vol. 169 (1), 2008. (Journal Article)
Conventional fMRI analyses assess the summary of temporal information in terms of the coefficients of temporal basis functions. Based on established finite impulse response (FIR) analysis methodology we show how spatiotemporal statistical parametric maps may be concatenated to form Brain Activation Movies (BAMs), dynamic activation maps representing the temporal evolution of brain activation throughout task performance. These BAMs enable comprehensive assessment of the dynamics in functional topology without restriction to predefined regions and without detailed information on the stimulus paradigm. We apply BAM visualization to two fMRI studies demonstrating the additional spatiotemporal information available compared to standard fMRI result presentation. Here we show that BAMs allow for unbiased data visualization providing dynamic activation maps without assumptions on the neural activity except reproducibility across trials. It may thus be useful in proceeding from static to dynamic brain mapping, widening the range of fMRI in neuroscience. In addition, BAMs might be helpful tools in visualizing the temporal evolution of activation in "real-time" for better and intuitive understanding of temporal processes in the human brain. |
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Patrick Hämmerle, eXtreme Programming in der Praxis, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2008. (Master's Thesis)
The author has led for three months a software project with four students, that worked as interns for the project, at the University of Zurich. At the same time he studied the the principles of agile software development and eXtreme Programming (XP) which are presented tightly in this diploma thesis. The core of the thesis is an aggregation of relevant experiences made with XP during the project. It should give a quick start into XP for project managers with low experience while, at the same time, some issues that arise in the environment of a university ,are addressed in particular. |
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Martin Roth, A Service Architecture for Evolizer - Integrating Software Analysis by Means of Service-Orientation, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2008. (Master's Thesis)
The EVOLIZER PLATFORM is a collection of tools to analyze the evolution of a software project. Members of the software evolution and architecture lab (s.e.a.l) at the University of Zurich developed these tools. The goal of this thesis is to develop a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for EVOLIZER. This shall simplify the access to the tools and open possibilities to combine the EVOLIZER functions with other analysis tools. The EVOLIZER tools are implemented as plug-ins for the ECLIPSE PLATFORM and rely on its functionality. Though, ECLIPSE is a indispensable base for these tools. This thesis proposes an architecture and presents a reference implementation to expose the
EVOLIZER plug-ins as services. Our approach is limited to plug-ins that do not need user interaction during their execution and deliver results that can be stored in a database. The correctness of the service results and the extensibility of the architecture developed were proven by qualitative analysis. The prototype implemented confirms the feasibility to expose plug-ins of the ECLIPSE PLATFORM as services by starting a new process with a new instance of the platform for each service requested. Using our approach, a reasonable number of concurrent service requests can be operated with high-performance hardware only. The findings of this thesis do not reveal a elegant way out of the dilemma between using the ECLIPSE PLATFORM with all its strengths and constraints and the re-implementation of the functionality currently collected in EVOLIZER. |
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Experiments with a Peltier-Based Freeze-Thaw Connector for Waterborne Self-Assembly Systems, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2008. (Master's Thesis)
Self-assembly is a process through which an organized structure can spontaneously form from simple parts. In this thesis, we present a novel type of inter-module connection mechanism for self-assembling, waterborne, modular robotic systems. The proposed mechanism relies on the thermoelectric effect to freeze/thaw the water between two modules causing them to attach/detach. To demonstrate the functionality of our freeze/thaw connector, we integrate it in three modular robots consisting of up to 18 self-driven plastic tiles. Our experimental results show that this simple, robust, and scalable bindingmethodmight provide a promising alternative to current connector implementations, opening up fascinating new vistas in the realization of self-assembly
systems. |
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Petra Meier, Implementierung einer webbasierten Variante des psychologischen Tests MFFT20 und eines Rahmenwerks dafür, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2008. (Master's Thesis)
In our modern society the possibility for companies to publish software or functionality
over the internet gets more important than ever before. The internet allows access to
completely new clients and because of that to an explosively increasing number of
users. Comfortable usage of services at your home, for example to book a flight to
holiday is just one of the possibilities of these online services. The increasing
numbers of internet applications speak a clear language. Also in the field of psychological research this trend is the same. Since the midnineties of the last century a growing community of researchers established, that used to exploit the internet for psychological research purposes. This thesis is trying to orientate on this trend. On the basis of a psychological test (MFFT20) a software module will be implemented to allow it to execute the test over the internet. That software module will again be integrated into a framework for researchers that will allow them to access and make use of this web service in a simple way. It will be possible for researchers to create their own research project and access the collected data. |
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Daniel Buchmüller, Ubidas - A Novel P2P Backup System, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2008. (Master's Thesis)
This diploma thesis introduces Ubidas, a novel p2p backup system. The goal of Ubidas is to offer a distributed secure and cost-efficient platform for both individual and corporate backups by distributing copies intelligently across multiple participating nodes. New concepts such as the prioritization of local and close resources, an automated connection establishment algorithm and a highly redundant, distributed hash table (DHT) algorithm are presented and evaluated. |
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Alex Cejka, IT-Governance an deutschsprachigen Hochschulen in Österreich und in der Schweiz, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2008. (Master's Thesis)
In this diploma thesis, IT-Governance is analyzed at 16 universities in Austria, and in Switzerland. In every university the IT/business alignment is shown based on five different decision-making processes. The formal processes are distinguished from the informal processes. Through a situation analysis, the strengths and the weaknesses of IT-governance are examined. The opportunities that can be used are looked into and the relevant threats are considered. Furthermore, the thesis explores how the universities will fulfill the requirements of the different stakeholder and the future development of the IT-Systems at the universities. Finally the universities are categorized by means of their IT-Governance and the decision-making processes applied to matrices. |
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Jakub Steiner, Coordination of mobile labor, Journal of Economic Theory, Vol. 139 (1), 2008. (Journal Article)
We study coordination failures in many simultaneously occurring coordination problems. Players encounter one of the problems but have the outside option of migrating to one of the remaining ones. Drawing on the global games approach, we show that such a mobile game has a unique equilibrium that allows us to examine comparative statics. The endogeneity of the outside option value and of the migration activity leads to non-monotonicity of welfare with respect to mobility friction; high mobility may hurt players. We apply these “general equilibrium” findings to the problem of the labor market during industrialization as described by Matsuyama [Increasing returns, industrialization and indeterminacy of equilibrium, Quart. J. Econ. 106(1991) 617–650]. |
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Gregory S. Crawford, The discriminatory incentives to bundle in the cable television industry, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, Vol. 6 (1), 2008. (Journal Article)
An influential theoretical literature supports a discriminatory explanation for product bundling: it reduces consumer heterogeneity, extracting surplus in a manner similar to second-degree price discrimination. This paper tests this theory and quantifies its importance in the cable television industry. The results provide qualified support for the theory. While bundling of general-interest cable networks is estimated to have no discriminatory effect, bundling an average top-15 special-interest cable network significantly increases the estimated elasticity of cable demand. Calibrating these results to a simple model of bundle demand with normally distributed tastes suggests that such bundling yields a heterogeneity reduction equal to a 4.7% increase in firm profits (and 4.0% reduction in consumers surplus). The results are robust to alternative explanations for bundling. |
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D Frohberg, B Schenk, Einen Sack voll Flöhe hüten: Lernsteuerung beim mobilen Lernen, In: Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik (MKWI 2008), 2008-02-26. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Mobile Learning bietet innovative Möglichkeiten, Teile der
Lernsteuerung während der Durchführung über den elektronischen Kanal zu realisieren. Wesentlich sind in diesem Zusammenhang jedoch die Fragen, wie die Lernsteuerung erfolgt und welche Zusammenhänge zwischen den Zielaspekten
bestehen, um wirkungsvoll eingreifen zu können. In diesem Artikel wird ein entsprechendes Rahmenmodell zur Analyse der Lernsteuerung bei der Durchführung mobiler Settings vorgestellt. |
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S Hauske, Gerhard Schwabe, Abraham Bernstein, Flexible (Wieder-)Verwendung multimedialer und online verfügbarer Selbstlernmodule in der Wirtschaftsinformatik: Designprinzipien und Lessons Learned, In: Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik (MKWI 2008), 2008-02-26. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Die Wiederverwendbarkeit von digitalen Lehrinhalten war eine zentrale Frage in dem E-Learning-Projekt „Foundations of Information Systems (FOIS)“, einem Verbundprojekt von fünf Schweizer Universitäten. Während der Projektlaufzeit wurden zwölf multimediale und online verfügbare Selbstlernmodule produziert, die ein breites Spektrum an Wirtschaftsinformatikthemen abdecken und die primär in einführenden Lehrveranstaltungen der Wirtschaftsinformatik gemäß dem Blended-Learning-Ansatz genutzt werden. In dem Artikel beschreiben wir, wie die für die Wiederverwendung von E-Learning-Inhalten und -materialien wesentlichen Aspekte Flexibilität, Kontextfreiheit, inhaltliche und didaktische Vereinheitlichung sowie Blended-Learning-Einsatz in dem Projekt umgesetzt worden sind. Im zweiten Teil gehen wir auf die Erfahrungen ein, die wir und unsere Studierenden mit den FOIS-Module in der Lehre an der Universität Zürich gesammelt haben, und stellen Evaluationsergebnisse aus drei Lehrveranstaltungen und unsere Lessons Learned vor. |
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M L Yiu, P Karras, N Mamoulis, Ring-constrained Join: Deriving Fair Middleman Locations from Pointsets via a Geometric Constraint, In: 11th Intl Conf. on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), 2008-02-26. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
We introduce a novel spatial join operator, the ring-constrained
join (RCJ). Given two sets P and Q of spatial points, the
result of RCJ consists of pairs hp, qi (where p ∈ P, q ∈ Q)
satisfying an intuitive geometric constraint: the smallest cir-
cle enclosing p and q contains no other points in P, Q. This
new operation has important applications in decision sup-
port, e.g., placing recycling stations at fair locations between
restaurants and residential complexes. Clearly, RCJ is de-
fined based on a geometric constraint but not on distances
between points. Thus, our operation is fundamentally dif-
ferent from the conventional distance joins and closest pairs
problems. We are not aware of efficient processing algo-
rithms for RCJ in the literature. A brute-force solution
requires computational cost quadratic to input size and it
does not scale well for large datasets. In view of this, we de-
velop efficient R-tree based algorithms for computing RCJ,
by exploiting the characteristics of the geometric constraint.
We evaluate experimentally the efficiency of our methods on
synthetic and real spatial datasets. The results show that
our proposed algorithms scale well with the data size and
have robust performance across different data distributions. |
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P Höltschi, Felix-Robinson Aschoff, Gerhard Schwabe, wehmuetig, witzig, wunderbar - Subjektive tags als Wegweiser im Web 2.0, In: Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik (MKWI 2008), 2008-02-26. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit der Anwendung so genannter subjektivbewertender tags – einer möglichen Form von tags zur Bildung von Folksonomien, welche den emotionalen Inhalt einer Ressource beschreiben. Die dominierende Mehrheit von tags in heutigen Folksonomien besitzt einen eher objektiven
Charakter. Unklare subjektiv-gefärbte Begriffe gefährden die eindeutige Zuordnung von Inhalten zu Klassen, senken somit die innere Konsistenz der Taxonomie und werden aus diesem Grund eher vermieden. In der Anwendungsdomäne der Unterhaltungsmedien scheinen objektiv-beschreibende tags jedoch nicht immer geeignet zu sein, um deren Inhalt zu beschreiben. Gerade Konsumenten, die den Kontext nicht kennen, innerhalb dessen sie Inhalte suchen, wie beispielsweise eine bestimmte Art von Musikstück der klassischen Musik, haben es oft schwer sich zu Recht zu finden. Subjektiv-bewertende tags könnten dabei Abhilfe schaffen. Man sucht nicht taxonomisch, also in Kategorien einer bestimmten Domäne denkend, sondern mittels tags, die den emotionalen Inhalt beschreiben. In einem Experiment wurde untersucht, ob und wie weit diese Form des tagging effektiv ist. Tagging ist dann effektiv, wenn es eine intersubjektive Übereinstimmung über die passende Zuordnung von tags zu Objekten gibt. Im Experiment mussten die Teilnehmer aus einer begrenzten Menge solcher tags auswählen und diese Bildern zuordnen. Es kristallisierte sich heraus, dass bei Bildern auf denen Menschen und vor allem Gesichter zu sehen waren, eine hohe Übereinstimmung unter den Teilnehmern herrschte. Emotionales tagging ist dort also effektiv. Bei eher materialistischen Sujets war die Übereinstimmung deutlich geringer. Diese Arbeit präsentiert erste empirische Erkenntnisse, welche subjektivbewertenden tags heute bereits häufig verwendet werden, sowie welche Art von Inhalten sich für subjektive tags als besonders vielversprechend erweisen. Abschliessend diskutieren wir aufgrund dieser Ergebnisse Implikationen für
Plattformbetreiber und die zukünftige Verwendung von subjektiv-bewertenden tags in Web 2.0-Szenarien. |
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Andrea Schenker-Wicki, Michel Maiorano, Soft Skills, In: Alpha (Beilage des Tages-Anzeiger), p. 1, 23 February 2008. (Newspaper Article)
Der Begriff Soft Skills wird sehr unterschiedlich verwendet. Wir verstehen darunter überfachliche, nicht berufsspezifische Kompetenzen, welche für den Erfolg in der Arbeitswelt unabdingbar sind. Sie umfassen sowohl die Fähigkeit, mit anderen zu kommunizieren und zusammenzuarbeiten (interpersonell) als auch sich selbst zu organisieren und zu disziplinieren (intrapersonell).
Zu den Soft Skills zählen im Wesentlichen die Kommunikations-, Team- und Konfliktlösungs- sowie die Motivationsfähigkeit. Im Gegensatz zu den Hard Skills (berufsspezifische Kompetenzen) können Soft Skills nur indirekt über entsprechende Indikatoren gemessen werden. Der grosse Einfluss der Soft Skills für Erfolg oder Nichterfolg in der Arbeitswelt wurde in verschiedenen Studien für unterschiedliche Berufe und Kulturen nachgewiesen. Kurzum: erfolgreiche Arbeitnehmerinnen und Arbeitnehmer verfügen neben Hard Skills auch über ausgeprägte Soft Skills. Glücklicherweise sind Soft Skills zum Teil erlernbar! |
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