A new assessment of the Medicare Part D program based on a proposal from the West Health Policy Center finds that Medicare beneficiaries would save $29 billion if drug manufacturer rebates were used to reduce their out-of-pocket costs at the pharmacy counter through the Part D benefit – as long as these rebate savings are not also used to...
Knowing a company’s true sales can help determine its value. Investors, for instance, often employ financial analysts to predict a company’s upcoming earnings using various public data, computational tools, and their own intuition. Now MIT researchers have developed an automated model that significantly outperforms humans in predicting business sales using very limited, “noisy” data. In...
Ten years after the publication of their first plan for powering the world with wind, water, and solar, researchers offer an updated vision of the steps that 143 countries around the world can take to attain 100% clean, renewable energy by the year 2050. The new roadmaps, published December 20 in the journal One Earth,...
Purchasing luxury goods can affirm buyers’ sense of status and enjoyment of items like fancy cars or fine jewelry. However, for many consumers, luxury purchases can fail to ring true, sparking feelings of inauthenticity that fuel what researchers have labeled the “impostor syndrome” among luxury consumers. “Luxury can be a double-edged sword,” write Boston College...
Increasing access to clean and affordable energy and improving gender equality are two major sustainable development goals (SDGs) that are believed to be strongly linked. With electricity access, less time and effort in the developing world is needed for tasks related to cooking, water collection, and other housework, which are typically undertaken by women. “The...
The Social Determinants of Health and Demographic Change (OPIK) research group of the UPV/EHU is a multidisciplinary team in the field of social and health sciences and is devoted, among other things, to research into the social factors influencing health and disease in the population, social inequalities in health and the policies having the potential...
A research team led by Professor OHTSUBO Yohsuke of Kobe University’s Graduate School of Humanities has been investigating how group apologies are perceived. Their results revealed that apologies that are costly for the apologizing organization are deemed to be more genuine. This was similar to previous findings by Professor Ohtsubo et al. when they looked...
Described as “living rocks”, giant land tortoises are lumbering beasts with a reputation for being sluggish in both speed and brainpower. But new research carried out by scientists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) suggests we have greatly underestimated the intelligence of these creatures, who can not only be trained but also...
Institutional investors tend to put their money largely in public companies, persuaded that market discipline makes their accounts more reliable than private ones’ and most financial literature confirms their beliefs. A new study by scholars from University of Bolzano, Bocconi University, and Stern School of Business concludes on the contrary that, if you circumscribe the...
Shoppers’ decisions are increasingly shaped by their experience and the desire for better service. Brick-and-mortar stores that work together to provide waiting area entertainment options can obtain higher profits than they would by providing their own entertainment. With the popularity of online shopping, it’s no secret brick-and-mortar stores are fighting to stay relevant. Waiting area...
