Despite Prague’s exponential growth in the early twentieth century, its musical communities of Germans and Czechs still operated like small villages, locked in a perpetual struggle over cultural values, long-standing grudges, and personal advancement. Not only did the Czech and German music critics inhabit almost entirely separate musical worlds – rarely, if ever, commenting on the other community’s accomplishments – but each also contained rival factions, most notoriously those of the Czechs at the Prague Conservatory and the emerging Musicology faculty at Charles(-Ferdinand) University. Though these divisions existed before 1900, the appearance of musicologist/critic Zdeněk Nejedlý (1879–1962) on the musical landscape of Prague became a watershed moment that solidified polemic lines of battle over much of the twentieth century. Though less virulent, conditions at the German University paralleled the Czechs’ near obsession in this generation over what constituted Czech or Bohemian music, and who might be included or excluded as its representatives.

This chapter investigates price discrimination among buyers and sellers of healthcare. It is very common for different buyers to pay different prices for the same medical service or drug. Economics does not predict that profit-maximizing sellers will increase the price to other buyers if one buyer reduces price (no cost-shifting), but it does hypothesize that buyers with less price-responsive demands can be charged more than those with more responsive demands by sellers with market power. Likewise, buyers with more buyer market power (e.g., larger insurers) often pay less than smaller insurers or individual uninsured consumers. This chapter explains why price discrimination may improve efficiency compared to simple monopoly by allowing a lower price to be charged to those with lower willingness to pay that is still above marginal cost. The role of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) in extracting discounts for drugs is described.

Immediately after World War II, a left-wing kabuki company called Zenshinza started the seinen gekijo undo (‘Theatre for Young People’), performing four Shakespearian plays for young audiences throughout Japan. This article examines how Zenshinza’s interpretations of Shakespeare first supported, and then later contradicted, the changing cultural policies of occupied Japan.

This chapter describes the concept of “value-based” healthcare as an attempt to prioritize value (or quality) over volume (or quantity). However, it points out that the problem with fee-for-service is not that it prioritizes volume per se but that it may prioritize volume of the wrong (low-value) things. This chapter also acknowledges that “value” is difficult to define and quantify – if we are going to pay on it, how do we determine which health services are valuable for which patients? It then outlines an economic model of supplier payment that would lead to maximizing net value and discusses supply curves more in depth. The chapter discusses several forms of value-based payment, including pay-for-performance, bundled episode-based payments, and capitated population-based payments, as well as value-based insurance design. It concludes that the optimal payment mechanism may be a hybrid payment between part capitated (fixed per-patient per-month) and part fee-for-service to carve out high-value services.

Musical life in the Czech lands was decisively shaped by the thirty-year presence of musicians employed by the Habsburg Emperor and King of Bohemia, Rudolf II (d. 1612), who established Prague as the imperial capital for the second time in its history. The teaching of imperial instrumentalists influenced performance practice throughout the region. Discerning Bohemian and Moravian music patrons and enthusiasts acquired the polyphony of imperial composers, most of whom were from the Low Countries. Latin sacred texts proved useful for worship, while vernacular partsongs satisfied the desire for fashionable amusement. The interpretation of music and musical practices connected to the Rudolfine court is complicated by its adoption and recontextualization by the linguistically and religiously diverse inhabitants of the Czech crown lands.

Chapter 5 shifts focus to the impacts of the regime complex – particularly financial and technical assistance (utility modifier and capacity-building mechanisms) coupled with policy advising (social learning mechanism) – on the removal of barriers to geothermal development in Indonesia. The chapter provides a political economy analysis of the domestic actors and interests involved in the energy sector in Indonesia, and then recounts the history of geothermal development in Indonesia with a focus on the impacts of the clean energy regime complex on the dynamics of barriers to geothermal development. This analysis reveals that the clean energy regime complex, through financial and technical assistance combined with policy advising, is critical to impacting geothermal development in Indonesia by filling gaps in financing for high-risk exploration and early-stage development. This chapter provides insights on how the regime complex impacted domestic politics and geothermal barriers despite the absence of a legally binding framework. It also sheds light on the narrow pathway of change in the face of domestic political barriers and energy security concerns affecting political will.

Chapter 7 focuses on the War Scroll, the most sustained portrait of the imagined end-time war against the Sectarian enemies. Alongside its elements of fantasy, the War Scroll simultaneously contains many prescriptive details for the eschatological war that the Sectarians believed was imminent. This chapter characterizes the War Scroll using the language of social anthropologists as a violent imaginary and argues that it functions as a propagandistic tool to prepare the Sectarians for this war.

This article traces close links between professional musicians and acting companies at the early modern Inns of Court. It also explores two plays with documented Inns performances – Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and James Shirley’s Hyde Park – considering how they may have been staged and received in this musically rich performance context.

This chapter reviews the potential use of cost-effectiveness (CE) analysis in health and health insurance management. The goal is to assure the supply of all medical services with positive benefits greater than cost and none with benefits less than cost. This method is sometimes unpopular in the US because it limits use of care with positive benefits but very high costs; however, the great majority of treatments studied are cost-effective by the usual standards for the dollar value of health improvements. It is shown than cost-sharing can make a service cost-effective. The relevance of the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) model for the use of CE analysis by insurers is questioned.

This chapter focuses on the history of the Prague Conservatory from its inception to the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Founded in 1811, the Prague Conservatory is the second oldest institution of its kind in Europe outside of Italy, following the Paris Conservatory established in 1795. The first part of the chapter explores the development of the institution’s curriculum under the director Friedrich Dionys Weber. Subsequently, the chapter explores how the conservatory achieved international prestige in the second half of the nineteenth century. The last part of the chapter discusses how the rising nationalistic tensions in Prague during the late Habsburg period influenced the conservatory’s operations.

This chapter focuses on Palmyra’s choices in weaving a wider network of social ties to both the Mediterranean and eastern world in order to enjoy the recognizable success that lasted several centuries. It gleans evidence of the presence of Palmyrenes in the Mediterranean, Egypt, the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, before discussing the observable strategies in terms of strengthening commercial ties or choices in items of trade based on their high commercial value and lightness in terms of transport, such as silk or pearls.

Consumer items and gendered identities on display and in transition, existing materially and symbolically within a matrix of relations of production and desire. The practical frustrations and self-confirming identity choices of local shopping lead to consideration of twentieth-century consumer society’s essentialization of individual gender identities despite apparent freedoms and autonomy of choice. Marx’s analysis of the reification of the object and the fetishization of the commodity informs public displays of youth culture: masculine, feminine, and trans. Modern young women and men shape their gendered public personas through the knowing appropriation of brands as identity performance, yet risk repression by the state, society, and family. Whether dancing too exclusively to Pharrell Williams’ Happy, or performing gender identity too essentially through transsexual identification, Iranian youth encounter the limits of branded identity even as they claim the freedoms apparently promised by the social market. Borrowing from Jacques Lacan’s positing of gender as a choice between two doors, the question of what is behind the doors might matter more than deciding between them.

Kant’s distinction between different uses of judgments – determining and reflecting – sheds light on two areas of recent debates about thought experiments as a method: (1) the question of bizarre cases and (2) the problem of missing context. On the question of bizarre cases, I show how a Kantian explains why it is sometimes acceptable for thought experiments to be far-fetched. For philosophical problems that call for reflecting judgment (i.e., the creation or discovery of new concepts), bizarre cases can be particularly effective. The problem of bizarre cases is closely related to the problem of missing context, which is another common objection to their use. The problem is that readers are often left to fill in background context that might be relevant for how they evaluate the thought experiment scenario. I will argue that missing context is a problem only if readers evaluate scenarios based on their prior knowledge and familiar experience. If instead, as I claim, the fictional case makes a new presentation possible, the additional context may be irrelevant and might distract from the presentation the thought experiment is designed to recreate.