Economics Insights @ CBS

The rate of increase of longevity has varied considerably across U.S. states since 1991. This paper examines the effect of the quality of medical care, behavioral risk factors (obesity, smoking, and AIDS incidence), and other variables (education, income, and health insurance coverage) on life expectancy and medical expenditure using longitudinal state-level data. We examine the effects of three different measures of the quality of medical care.

What are the respective roles of the public and private sectors in drug development?

We examine how consumers update their confidences in ordinal (relative) judgments while evaluating sequential product-ranking and source-accuracy data in percentage versus frequency formats. The results show that when sequential data are relatively easier to mathematically combine (e.g., percentage data), consumers revise their judgments in a way that is consistent with an averaging model but inconsistent with the normative Bayesian model.

This paper proposes an accounting for revenues as an alternative to the proposals currently begin aired by the FASB and IASB. Existing revenue recognition rules are vague, resulting in messy application, so the Boards are seeking a remedy. However, their proposals replace the traditional criteria — revenue is recognized when it is both "realized or realizable" and "earned" — with similarly vague notions that require both the identification of a "performance obligation" and the "satisfaction" of a performance obligation.

In this research we propose a web-based adaptive self-explicated approach for multi-attribute preference measurement (conjoint analysis) with a large number (ten or more) of attributes. Our approach overcomes some of the limitations of previous self-explicated approaches. We developed a computer-based self-explicated approach that breaks down the attribute importance question into a sequence of constant-sum paired comparison questions.