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Sociological interest in Pharmaceuticals has intensified, heightening awareness of 'pharmaceuticalization'. It is argued that pharmaceuticalization should be understood by reference to five main biosociological explanatory factors: biomedicalism, medicalization, pharmaceutical industry promotion and marketing, consumerism, and regulatory-state ideology or policy. The biomedicalism thesis, which claims that expansion of drug treatment reflects advances in biomedicai science to meet health needs, is found to be a weak explanatory factor because a significant amount of growth in pharmaceuticalization is inconsistent with scientific evidence, and because drug innovations offering significant therapeutic advance have been declining across the sector including areas of major health need. Some elements of consumerism have undermined pharmaceuticalization, even causing de-pharmaceuticalization in some therapeutic sub-fields. However; other aspects of consumerism, together with industry promotion, medicalization, and deregulatory state policies are found to be drivers of increased pharmaceuticalization in ways that are largely outside, or suboptimal fon significant therapeutic advances in the interests of public health.

In a recent paper, Johnson et al. (2014) [Johnson K, Levi DS, Sun P (2014) Analyzing scrip systems. Oper. Res. 62(3):524–534.]use an infinitely repeated game with discounting, among a set of homogeneous players, to model a scrip system. In each period, a randomly chosen player requests service; all the other players have a choice of whether or not to volunteer to provide service. Among the players who volunteer, the service provider is chosen using the minimum-scrip rule : a player with the minimum number of scrips is chosen as the service provider. The authors study the always-trade strategy for a player, that is, the strategy of a player always willing to provide service, regardless of the distribution of scrips among the players. A key result of their work is that, under the minimum-scrip rule, for any number of players and for every discount factor close enough to one, there exists a Nash equilibrium in which each player plays the always-trade strategy. This result, however, is established under an assumption of severe punishment : If a player selected to provide service refuses to do so even once, then that player will be forever banned from participating in the system, thus losing all potential future benefit. Johnson et al. (2014) explain that this assumption is unsatisfactory, particularly for large scrip systems, because of difficulties in detecting players who refuse to provide service and verifying the reason(s) for their refusal, and the consequent possibility of players being unfairly banned. Motivated by this concern, the authors suggest an important direction of future research: investigate whether or not the always-trade strategy is an equilibrium without the punishment assumption. In this note, we address the question posed in Johnson et al. (2014) for a generalization of their model. Our generalization allows for the possibility that players might genuinely not be available to provide service, say because of sickness. Without using the assumption of punishment, we show that when the number of players is large enough and the discount factor is close enough to one, there exists an ε -Nash equilibrium in which each player plays the always-trade strategy.

Market design seeks to translate economic theory and analysis into practical solutions to real-world problems. By redesigning both the rules that guide market transactions and the infrastructure that enables those transactions to take place, market designers can address a broad range of market failures. In this paper, we illustrate the process and power of market design through three examples: the design of medical residency matching programmes; a scrip system to allocate food donations to food banks; and the recent ‘Incentive Auction’ that reallocated wireless spectrum from television broadcasters to telecoms. Our lead examples show how effective market design can encourage participation, reduce gaming, and aggregate information, in order to improve liquidity, efficiency, and equity in markets. We also discuss a number of fruitful applications of market design in other areas of economic and public policy.

No detailed description available for \"A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960\".

Cnidarians (corals, sea anemones, and jellyfish) produce toxins that play central roles in key ecological processes, including predation, defense, and competition, being the oldest extant venomous animal lineage. Cnidaria small cysteine-rich proteins (SCRiPs) were the first family of neurotoxins detected in stony corals, one of the ocean’s most crucial foundation species. Yet, their molecular evolution remains poorly understood. Moreover, the lack of a clear classification system has hindered the establishment of an accurate and phylogenetically informed nomenclature. In this study, we extensively surveyed 117 genomes and 103 transcriptomes of cnidarians to identify orthologous SCRiP gene sequences. We annotated a total of 168 novel putative SCRiPs from over 36 species of stony corals and 12 species of sea anemones. Phylogenetic reconstruction identified four distinct SCRiP subfamilies, according to strict discrimination criteria based on well-supported monophyly with a high percentage of nucleotide and amino acids’ identity. Although there is a high prevalence of purifying selection for most SCRiP subfamilies, with few positively selected sites detected, a subset of Acroporidae sequences is influenced by diversifying positive selection, suggesting potential neofunctionalizations related to the fine-tuning of toxin potency. We propose a new nomenclature classification system relying on the phylogenetic distribution and evolution of SCRiPs across Anthozoa, which will further assist future proteomic and functional research efforts.

Since its establishment in 2011, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has become a pivotal actor in EU financial market regulation and supervision. Its burgeoning influence extends from the rule-making process to supervisory convergence/coordination to direct supervision. Reflecting the now critical importance of ESMA to how the EU regulates and supervises financial markets, and with ESMA at an inflection point in its evolution, particularly in light of the Commission’s 2017 proposals to reform ESMA and the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, The Age of ESMA maps, contextualises, and examines ESMA’s role and the implications for EU financial market governance.

Scrip systems provide a nonmonetary trade economy for exchange of resources. We model a scrip system as a stochastic game and study system design issues on selection rules to match potential trade partners over time. We show the optimality of one particular rule in terms of maximizing social welfare for a given scrip system that guarantees players' incentives to participate. We also investigate the optimal number of scrips to issue under this rule. In particular, if the time discount factor is close enough to one, or trade benefits one partner much more than it costs the other, the maximum social welfare is always achieved no matter how many scrips are in the system. When the benefit of trade and time discount are not sufficiently large, on the other hand, injecting more scrips in the system hurts most participants; as a result, there is an upper bound on the number of scrips allowed in the system, above which some players may default. We show that this upper bound increases with the discount factor as well as the ratio between the benefit and cost of service. Finally, we demonstrate similar properties for a different service provider selection rule that has been analyzed in previous literature.

Individuals and businesses make numerous payments every day. They sometimes have choices about what forms of payment to make or accept, and at other times are effectively forced to use a particular form. Often there is an asymmetric power relationship between payer and payee that raises the issue of whether one side unfairly exploits the other. Is it unethical exploitation for an employer to pay employees with a fee-laden payroll card over other more convenient forms of payment? Does the fee structure of payment networks such as Visa and MasterCard unfairly exploit merchants? The bitcoin payment system is an ethical as well as technological evolution as it was designed to be an electronic payment system that does not rely upon trust. Can an entire payment system like bitcoin be \"evil,\" as charged by Krugman (2013)? Payment tools as such are ethically neutral, but can be used in an ethical or unethical manner.

In Chapters 1 to 4, this monograph introduces the legal system of four English-Language jurisdictions, namely Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States of America, and then considers the regulators, and some of the laws that regulate, transactions in corporate securities there. Chapter 5 is comprised of concluding comments, based upon the work performed for the earlier chapters. Canadian securities' law is enacted by administrations in its constituent provinces and territories, rather than by the federal Government, which creates a point of interest for this book.

Homesteading the Plainsoffers a bold new look at the history of homesteading, overturning what for decades has been the orthodox scholarly view. The authors begin by noting the striking disparity between the public's perception of homesteading as a cherished part of our national narrative and most scholars' harshly negative and dismissive treatment.Homesteading the Plainsreexamines old data and draws from newly available digitized records to reassess the current interpretation's four principal tenets: homesteading was a minor factor in farm formation, with most Western farmers purchasing their land; most homesteaders failed to prove up their claims; the homesteading process was rife with corruption and fraud; and homesteading caused Indian land dispossession. Using data instead of anecdotes and focusing mainly on the nineteenth century,Homesteading the Plainsdemonstrates that the first three tenets are wrong and the fourth only partially true. In short, the public's perception of homesteading is perhaps more accurate than the one scholars have constructed.Homesteading the Plainsprovides the basis for an understanding of homesteading that is startlingly different from current scholarly orthodoxy.