The traditional payment system between an insurer and providers does not incentivize providers to limit their prices nor patients to choose less expensive providers, hence contributing to high insurer expenditures. Reference pricing has been proposed as a way to better align incentives and...

Cloud computing has been a rising trend in the business world. In this paper, we consider two most important pricing schemes offered to sustained customers by major service providers in the cloud industry: the reservation-based scheme (the R-scheme) by Amazon or Microsoft, and the...