Suchergebnisse

Existing risk-equalization models in individual health insurance markets with premium-rate restrictions do not completely compensate insurers for predictable profits/losses, confronting insurers with risk selection incentives. To guide further improvement of risk-equalization models, it is important to obtain insight into the drivers of remaining predictable profits/losses. This article studies a specific potential driver: end-of-life spending (defined here as spending in the last 1–5 years of life). Using administrative ( N = 16.9 m) and health survey ( N = 384 k) data from the Netherlands, we examine the extent to which end-of-life spending contributes to predictable profits/losses for selective groups. We do so by simulating the predictable profits/losses for these groups with and without end-of-life spending while correcting for the overall spending difference between these two situations. Our main finding is that—even under a sophisticated risk-equalization model—end-of-life spending can contribute to predictable losses for specific chronic conditions.

Based on the requirement of OECD countries to permit substantial inflows of immigrants to compensate for the effects of the demographic change, this paper explores the incentives of heterogeneous migrants to acquire host country specific cultural skills to improve their labor market outcomes. The theoretical results predict that the migrants'ambition in achieving such skills is increased if the scope of their respective cultural group is small, social permeability of migrants in the native society is large and individual integration costs are low. Based on these results, I study whether cultural heterogeneity among the migrant population is welfare enhancing for the native population. I find that as long as migrants do not differ too much with regard to their costs of learning the native culture, cultural heterogeneity is beneficial for the host economy. The model provides an explanation for the shift in the immigration policies of the traditional host countries throughout the twentieth century as well as the current immigration policies in the EU member states.

Based on the requirement of OECD countries to permit substantial inflows of immigrants to compensate for the effects of the demographic change, this paper explores the incentives of heterogeneous migrants to acquire host country specific cultural skills to improve their labor market outcomes. The theoretical results predict that the migrants' ambition in achieving such skills is increased if the scope of their respective cultural group is small, social permeability of migrants in the native society is large and individual integration costs are low. Based on these results, I study whether cultural heterogeneity among the migrant population is welfare enhancing for the native population.I find that as long as migrants do not differ too much with regard to their costs of learning the native culture, cultural heterogeneity is beneficial for the host economy. The model provides an explanation for the shift in the immigration policies of the traditional host countries throughout the twentieth century as well as the current immigration policies in the EU member states.

I reformulate Mancur Olson's by-product theory of collective action as a theory of resource allocation by interest group managers. I then test alternative hypotheses about managers' objectives drawn from exchange theory and commitment theory. Financial data for 16 environmental citizen groups show that the production of public goods is subsidized by other activities, and revenues from member dues are not affected by spending on public goods. Spending on selective incentives and information generates revenues but also may contribute to the pursuit of collective goals. Estimated marginal revenues from fund-raising and selective incentives show that environmental citizen group managers are not preoccupied with maximizing revenues. Rather, they seek to maximize either spending on public goods or net resources available for influencing public policy and the environment, subject to a budget constraint.

This article explores the strategic motivations for insurgent violence against civilians. It argues that violence is a function of insurgent capacity and views violence and security as selective benefits that insurgents manipulate to encourage support. Weak insurgent groups facing collective action problems have an incentive to target civilians because they lack the capacity to provide sufficient benefits to entice loyalty. By contrast, stronger rebels can more easily offer a mix of selective incentives and selective repression to compel support. This relationship is conditioned by the counterinsurgency strategies employed by the government. Indiscriminate regime violence can effectively reduce the level of selective incentives necessary for insurgents to recruit support, thus reducing their reliance on violence as a mobilization tool. However, this relationship only holds when rebels are sufficiently capable of credibly providing security and other incentives to civilian supporters. These hypotheses are tested using data on one-sided violence from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. The statistical analysis supports the hypothesis that comparatively capable insurgents kill fewer civilians than their weaker counterparts. The results also suggest a complex interaction between insurgent capability and government strategies in shaping insurgent violence. While weaker insurgents sharply escalate violence in the face of indiscriminate regime counterinsurgency tactics, stronger groups employ comparatively less violence against civilians as regime violence escalates.

Platform sponsors typically have both incentive and opportunity to manage the overall value of their ecosystems. Through selective promotion, a platform sponsor can reward successful complements, bring attention to underappreciated complements, and influence the consumer's perception of the ecosystem's depth and breadth. It can use promotion to induce and reward loyalty of powerful complement producers, and it can time such promotion to both boost sales during slow periods and reduce competitive interactions between complements. We develop arguments about whether and when a platform sponsor will selectively promote individual complements and test these arguments on data from the console video game industry in the United Kingdom. We find that platform sponsors do not simply promote "best in class" complements; they strategically invest in complements in ways that address complex trade-offs in ecosystem value. Our arguments and results build significant new theory that helps us understand how a platform sponsor orchestrates value creation in the overall ecosystem.

AbstractUrban popular movements that organize illegal land invasion communities present an intriguing puzzle. When most invasion organizations acquire land titles, their participation levels plummet and their agendas stagnate; yet some neighborhoods achieve land titles, sustain high participation, and acquire other services, such as piped-in water. Why do these organizations achieve movement resilience? The more typical trajectory of movement collapse is explained by the disappearance of the key selective incentive, property security. Some organizations, however, evade this "security trap" through mixed motives: their basic material agenda is supplemented by a nonmaterial and often altruistic agenda, which sustains participation in the face of reduced selective incentives. Examining three neighborhood case studies in Lima and Quito, this article argues that a new, "innovator" type of invasion organization is more likely to exhibit sustained participation and movement resilience due to tactical innovation, democratic governance, and mixed motives.

This paper provides a systematic analysis of fiscal decentralization on the quality of government by studying jointly its effects on electoral discipline and selection, in a setting where, realistically, voters only have limited information about fiscal policy in other jurisdictions, ruling out yardstick competition. Fiscal centralization reduces the extent of electoral discipline, as a corrupt (rent-seeking) incumbent can target good behavior only at a "minimum winning coalition" of regions (selective rent- diversion) in order to retain office, but thus makes it more profitable for bad incumbents to pool with good ones, thus increasing the probability of electoral discipline occurring at all. Voters tend to prefer centralization when politicians are low quality i.e. more likely to be corruptible. Centralization with uniform taxes can dominate both unconstrained centralization and decentralization, explaining why uniform taxes are so widely observed. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]

While the presence of a strong civil society is recognized as desirable for democracies, an important question is what motivates citizens to join organizations. This article presents novel experimental evidence on the conditions under which citizens join interest organizations. We presented 1,400 citizens in two Mexican states with fliers promoting a new local interest organization. These fliers contain one of four randomly selected recruitment appeals. We find evidence that both brokerage of state patronage and demand-making for local public goods are effective recruitment appeals. The effect for patronage brokerage is especially pronounced among respondents with prior organizational contact, supporting our hypothesis of a "particularistic socialization" effect wherein organizational experience is associated with greater response to selective material benefits. Our findings suggest that under some conditions, rather than generating norms of other-regarding, interest organizations can reinforce members' individualistic tendencies.