This study examines how elite political and media actors strategically leverage moral claims for partisan ends, transforming political identities, issues, and campaigns into zero-sum moral contests ...against their opposition. Here, I develop a framework for and approach to the study of morality as a strategic and identity-based tool in political communication, in the process developing a way of studying powerful and pervasive forms of political discourse often overlooked by scholarship. I show how partisan actors have identity-based motivations for employing particular forms of moral political communication, including religious, social, and civic morality. I then apply this framework to the case of the U.S. 2020 election, conducting context-sensitive computational and qualitative content analyses of elite political communication across political talk shows, op-eds, and campaign Twitter discourse. Results reveal the pervasive nature of moral political communication in these spaces. This work shows how, as U.S. political parties increasingly represent divergent and less cross-cutting groups of people, elite actors draw upon moral claims to attract and perform for particular ideological, religious, racial, and ethnic identity coalitions—often drawing from the same moral vocabulary to articulate opposing visions of democracy and civic life.
Purpose
In the era of Industrial Revolution (IR) 4.0, the integration of digital technologies, automation and data-driven insights has generated a broad wave of transformation across all industries, ...including the insurance sector. The study focuses on determining how the adoption of these technologies (InsurTech) is changing the life insurance industry, ultimately enhancing the level of customer satisfaction.
Design/methodology/approach
The data analysis has been performed with 304 useable responses from the policyholders of life insurance in the north-west region of India. The methodology adopted for this study is partial least squares (PLS) structural equation modeling (SEM). To investigate the predictive relevance of customer satisfaction, the PLS predict technique has been used. Also, importance performance map analysis (IPMA) has been applied to assess the important and performing dimensions of customer satisfaction.
Findings
The outcomes show that the adoption of InsurTech has a positive impact on customer satisfaction. Customer service management and policy management are among the strongest predictors of customer satisfaction, and the predictive relevance is reported to be moderate. IPMA results have suggested that improvements in online distribution of insurance services and customer service management lead to higher customer satisfaction.
Research limitations/implications
The conceptual model can be tested with the moderating effect of different demographic factors (age, gender etc.), and future research can be done to analyze the mediating role of customer satisfaction between InsurTech adoption and customer loyalty.
Practical implications
The study offers valuable contributions to the marketing literature, shedding light on the influence of InsurTech adoption on customer satisfaction within the Indian life insurance sector. The research offers a practical approach that could help marketing professionals and policymakers comprehend the utilization of online insurance services, and this understanding can help industry experts to develop customer-oriented products and services.
Originality/value
This research is the first of its kind to test the association between InsurTech adoption and customer satisfaction in the life insurance sector in the Indian context. Research also provides novel insights for policymakers to enhance the satisfaction of customers towards using online insurance services in the near future in developing countries like India.
Objectives
We evaluated healthcare cost differences at the end of life (EOL) between language regions in Switzerland, accounting for a comprehensive set of variables, including treatment intensity.
...Methods
We evaluated 9716 elderly who died in 2014 and were insured at Helsana Group, with data on final cause of death provided by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office. EOL healthcare costs and utilization, ≥ 1 ICU admission and 10 life-sustaining interventions (cardiac catheterization, cardiac assistance device implantation, pulmonary artery wedge monitoring, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, gastrostomy, blood transfusion, dialysis, mechanical ventilation, intravenous antibiotics, cancer chemotherapies) reimbursed by compulsory insurance were examined.
Results
Taking into consideration numerous variables, relative cost differences decreased from 1.27 (95% CI 1.19–1.34) to 1.06 (CI 1.02–1.11) between the French- and German-speaking regions, and from 1.12 (CI 1.03–1.22) to 1.08 (CI 1.02–1.14) between the Italian- and German-speaking regions, but standardized costs still differed. Contrary to individual factors, density of home-care nurses, treatment intensity, and length of inpatient stay explain a substantial part of these differences.
Conclusions
Both supply factors and health-service provision at the EOL vary between Swiss language regions and explain a substantial proportion of cost differences.
We study the optimal reinsurance-investment problem for the compound dynamic contagion process introduced by Dassios and Zhao (2011). This model allows for self-exciting and externally-exciting ...clustering effect for the claim arrivals, and includes the well-known Cox process with shot noise intensity and the Hawkes process as special cases. For tractability, we assume that the insurer’s risk preference is the time-consistent mean–variance criterion. By utilizing the dynamic programming and extended HJB equation approach, a closed-form expression is obtained for the equilibrium reinsurance-investment strategy. An excess-of-loss reinsurance type is shown to be optimal even in the presence of self-exciting and externally-exciting contagion claims, and the strategy depends on both the claim size and claim arrivals assumptions. Further, we show that the self-exciting effect is of a more dangerous nature than the externally-exciting effect as the former requires more risk management controls than the latter. In addition, we find that the reinsurance strategy does not always become more conservative (i.e., transferring more risk to the reinsurer) when the claim arrivals are contagious. Indeed, the insurer can be better off retaining more risk if the claim severity is relatively light-tailed.
•Self-exciting and externally-exciting effect of claim arrivals are considered.•Closed-form mean-variance reinsurance-investment strategies are derived.•Excess-of-loss type of reinsurance is optimal.•The self-exciting effect is more dangerous than the externally-exciting effect.•The insurer can be better off retaining more risk if the claim size is light-tailed.
•Comparing Mongolia, Papua New Guinea and El Salvador shows great diversity in mining conflicts and negotiations.•In mining conflicts, forms of legitimate authority have become increasingly diverse ...across types and scales.•Claim-making in relation to diverse forms of authority shape constructions of “community” in mining conflicts.•The pluralisation of authorities offers precarious benefits when these effectively replace state-based entitlements.•Synergistic relationships exist between the strategic absences of the state, mining company demands, and claim-making.
This article challenges simplified and idealised representation of conflicts between corporations, states and impacted populations in the context of extractive industries. Through comparative discussion of mineral extraction in Papua New Guinea, Mongolia and El Salvador, we argue that strategies of engagement over the terms of extraction vary significantly as a result of the interaction between relations of authority and recognition in the context of specific projects and the national political economy of mining. As mineral extraction impinges on their lands, livelihoods, territories and senses of the future, affected populations face the uncertain question of how to respond and to whom to direct these responses. Strategies vary widely, and can involve confrontation, litigation, negotiation, resignation, and patronage. These strategies are targeted at companies, investors, the national state, local government, multilateral institutions, and international arbitrators. We argue that the key to understanding how strategies emerge to target different types and scales of authority, lies ultimately with inherited geographies of state presence and strategic absence. This factor shapes the construction of “community” claim-making in relation to state and non-state authorities, and calculations regarding the relative utility of claiming rights or mobilizing relationships as a means of seeking redress, compensation or benefit sharing. In the context of plural opportunities for claim-making, we query whether plurality is more emancipatory or, ironically, more constricting for impacted populations. In response to this question, we argue that “community” strategies tend to be more effective where they remain linked in some way to the territorial and legislative structure of the national state.
The goal of predictive policing is to forecast where and when crimes will take place in the future. The idea has captured the imagination of law enforcement agencies around the world. Many agencies ...are purchasing software tools with the goal of reducing crime by mapping the likely locations of future crime to guide the deployment of police resources. Yet the claims and promises of predictive policing have not been subject to critical examination. This paper provides a review of the theories, techniques, and assumptions embedded in various predictive tools and highlights three key issues about the use of algorithmic prediction. Assumptions: The algorithms used to gain predictive insights build on assumptions about accuracy, continuity, the irrelevance of omitted variables, and the primary importance of particular information (such as location) over others. In making decisions based on these algorithms, police are also directed towards particular kinds of decisions and responses to the exclusion of others. Evaluation: Media coverage of these technologies implies that they are successful in reducing crime. However, these claims are not necessarily based on independent, peer reviewed evaluations. While some evaluations have been conducted, additional rigorous and independent evaluations are needed to understand more fully the effect of predictive policing programmes. Accountability: The use of predictive software can undermine the ability for individual officers or law enforcement agencies to give an account of their decisions in important ways. The paper explores how this accountability gap might be reduced.
Abstract
Background
The Veterans Affairs Frailty Index (VA-FI) is an electronic frailty index developed to measure frailty using administrative claims and electronic health records data in Veterans. ...An update to ICD-10 coding is needed to enable contemporary measurement of frailty.
Method
International Classification of Diseases, ninth revision (ICD-9) codes from the original VA-FI were mapped to ICD-10 first using the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) General Equivalence Mappings. The resulting ICD-10 codes were reviewed by 2 geriatricians. Using a national cohort of Veterans aged 65 years and older, the prevalence of deficits contributing to the VA-FI and associations between the VA-FI and mortality over years 2012–2018 were examined.
Results
The updated VA-FI-10 includes 6422 codes representing 31 health deficits. Annual cohorts defined on October 1 of each year included 2 266 191 to 2 428 115 Veterans, for which the mean age was 76 years, 97%–98% were male, 78%–79% were White, and the mean VA-FI was 0.20–0.22. The VA-FI-10 deficits showed stability before and after the transition to ICD-10 in 2015, and maintained strong associations with mortality. Patients classified as frail (VA-FI > 0.2) consistently had a hazard of death more than 2 times higher than nonfrail patients (VA-FI ≤ 0.1). Distributions of frailty and associations with mortality varied with and without linkage to CMS data and with different assessment periods for capturing deficits.
Conclusions
The updated VA-FI-10 maintains content validity, stability, and predictive validity for mortality in a contemporary cohort of Veterans aged 65 years and older, and may be applied to ICD-9 and ICD-10 claims data to measure frailty.
Debunking Myths While Understanding Limitations Hess, Lisa M; Winfree, Katherine B; Muehlenbein, Catherine E ...
American journal of public health (1971),
05/2020, Volume:
110, Issue:
5
Journal Article
PDF
