The typical American nonprofit hospital does not fit well with the economic theory of the firm. That theory, as explained by Ronald Coase, imagines that a firm is an organization in which a manager directs the allocation of capital and labor already contracted with the firm. In contrast, US hospital management historically did not employ physicians, supplies of a key input. Physicians were a parallel entity, the medical staff, who billed separately and could issue orders for deployment of other hospital inputs (such as nursing staff). More physicians are not salaried hospital employees, but they still bill separately and have independent control. This chapter outlines a model of the nonprofit hospital in which the objective is maximization of net income of the medical staff and argues that this theory explains much of hospital behavior. Care coordination, tax advantages for nonprofits, and community benefits are also discussed.

Despite international instruments on trafficking and forced labour that stipulate the importance of ensuring rightsholders can access effective remedy, instances of remediation for harms including forced, bonded, and child labour, as well as trafficking, have been rare. While remedy is also a common feature of strategies to address modern slavery adopted by nation states and multinational businesses, in practice workers who have been subject to severe forms of labour exploitation in global value chains (GVCs) continue to face significant obstacles to securing redress from those who have violated, or contributed to violation, of their rights.

Obstacles to remedy are multifarious and well-documented (OHCHR, 2016; ICAR et al., 2013). GVCs are complex, involving multiple actors and crossing multiple jurisdictions, rendering it challenging to assign accountability and secure appropriate remedial measures, and most legal systems have not adapted to the reality of service and production within GVCs. Even where powerful (‘lead’) companies in the value chain shape the terms of supply and working conditions and are in the same jurisdiction in which the harm arising from their actions or omissions has occurred, remedial action is often stymied by labour law systems that only allow claims against direct employers. Where claims of joint employment or accessorial liability are possible under labour law, such claims are infrequent because of the stringency of tests of control or contribution, and the costs of such litigation (Marshall et al., 2023). In rare cases where litigants are successful in their legal claims, they often struggle to secure enforcement of any court order. Where the lead company that is influencing working conditions in the value chain is in another jurisdiction to where the harm has occurred, the chances of such claims succeeding are even lower (Fudge and Mundlak, 2023). Key principles underpinning private international law – such as those pertaining to jurisdiction and choice of law – largely operate to the benefit of businesses rather than those affected by their activities.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Origen’s surprising presence within David F. Strauss’s genealogy of the critical examination of the life of Jesus ought to stir contemporary readers from slipping into their own forms of presumption regarding when, exactly, reading of the Gospels first became critical or what the term “critical” even means. Strauss’s presentation also underscores the difficulty of fashioning a portrait adequate to such a unique figure and introduces the need to retrieve Origen’s own first principles of Gospel reading. Here, I lay the requisite groundwork for addressing Part I’s overarching question (“What is a Gospel?”) by showing that, for Origen, the term “Gospel,” strictly speaking, does not designate just any discourse bearing the early Christian proclamation, but rather one that does so under the form of narratives of the life of Jesus. The stage is thus set for the more pivotal – and tortuous – question: What kind of narratives are they?

This chapter explores the sacral aspects of Achaemenid Persian kingship. It attempts to precisely illuminate the ruler’s relationship with the divine and to demonstrate that the assumption of priestly prerogatives was an important aspect of his office. To better appreciate the political function of religion, this study provides cultural and historical contexts for the royal appropriation of sacral attributes. It further contributes to the recent field of study regarding a possible soteriological dimension to Achaemenid ideology by assessing and synthesising new and previously cited evidence for the existence of such an element, as well as its possible applications.