In recent years, the performance-based approach to contracting for medical services has been gaining popularity across different healthcare delivery systems, both in the United States (under the name of "pay for performance") and abroad ("payment by results" in the United Kingdom). The goal of...

This paper studies the purchasing behaviour of a loss-averse engineer-to-order manufacturer, who purchases a key component for his final product from a supplier under a single-wholesale-price contract with spot purchase opportunities, where both the product demand and the component spot price...

Lin, Cai, and Li [Lin, Y., Cai, F., Li, Z., 1998. Competition, policy burdens, and state-owned enterprise reform. American Economic Review 88, 422-327] argue that under information asymmetry, SOE managers can use state-imposed policy burdens as excuses of poor performance and make the State...

We firstly combine multi-scale method (MS) and weighted-permutation entropy (WPE) to analyze chaotic, noisy, and fractal time series, and find that MSWPE can distinguish different nonlinear time series and exhibit a better robustness in the presence of higher levels of noise, a task that...

Existing studies disagree over the basic determinants of capital structure in Chinese firms. We identify profitability, industry leverage, asset growth, tangibility, firm size, state control, and the largest shareholding as reliable core factors explaining book leverage. Compared with evidence...

In general, gradient estimates are very important and necessary for deriving convergence results in different geometric flows, and most of them are obtained by analytic methods. In this paper, we will apply a stochastic approach to systematically give gradient estimates for some important...

Chen and Cook (2010) showed that the classical continuum regression with a nonzero tuning parameter may fail to produce a consistent estimator. In this article we show that the continuum regression with either slightly modified constraints or the tuning parameter being zero can estimate the...