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Many countries have some kind of energy-system transformation either planned or ongoing for various reasons, such as to curb carbon emissions or to compensate for the phasing out of nuclear energy. One important component of these transformations is the overall reduction in energy demand. It is generally acknowledged that the domestic sector represents a large share of total energy consumption in many countries. Increased energy efficiency is one factor that reduces energy demand, but behavioral approaches (known as “sufficiency”) and their respective interventions also play important roles. In this paper, we address citizens’ heterogeneity regarding both their current behaviors and their willingness to realize their sufficiency potentials—that is, to reduce their energy consumption through behavioral change. We collaborated with three Swiss cities for this study. A survey conducted in the three cities yielded thematic sets of energy-consumption behavior that various groups of participants rated differently. Using this data, we identified four groups of participants with different patterns of both current behaviors and sufficiency potentials. The paper discusses intervention types and addresses citizens’ heterogeneity and behaviors from a city-based perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outcomes of bargaining over losses, the subject of this paper, have rarely been studied. But experimental studies of related situations, such as those involving bankruptcies or bequests in which the sum of the legal claims that can be made against a bank or firm or estate are greater than their values, have produced strong support for the proportionality principle. To test whether this principle would find support in other situations involving losses we designed an experimental game in which four players start out with differing initial endowments of real money. They are then informed that a certain amount of this resource has to be given back to the experimenter. How should the loss be shared among the agents? This game was run at different locations and under different treatments over a period of almost three years. We found that the proportionality principle was rarely proposed and even less frequently accepted as a solution to this problem. One of the main reasons for this result was that the two players with the smallest endowments opposed most of the proposals which asked them to contribute at least some positive amount of their own initial resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Value of information (VOI) analysis provides information on opportunity cost of a decision in healthcare by estimating the cost of reducing parametric uncertainty and quantifying the value of generating additional evidence. This study is an application of the VOI methodology to the problem of choosing between home telemonitoring and nurse telephone support over usual care in chronic heart failure management in the Netherlands. Methods: The expected value of perfect information (EVPI) and the expected value of partially perfect information (EVPPI) analyses were based on an informal threshold of €20K per quality-adjusted life-year. These VOI-analyses were applied to a probabilistic Markov model comparing the 20-year costs and effects in three interventions. The EVPPI explored the value of decision uncertainty caused by the following group of parameters: treatment-specific transition probabilities between New York Heart Association (NYHA) defined disease states, utilities associated with the disease states, number of hospitalizations and ER visits, health state specific costs, and the distribution of patients per NYHA group. We performed the analysis for two population sizes in the Netherlands—patients in all NYHA classes of severity, and patients in NYHA IV class only. Results: The population EVPI for an effective population of 2,841,567 CHF patients in All NYHA classes of severity over the next 20 years is more than €4.5B, implying that further research is highly cost-effective. In the NYHA IV only analysis, for the effective population of 208,003 patients over next 20 years, the population EVPI at the same informal threshold is approx. €590M. The EVPPI analysis showed that the only relevant group of parameters that contribute to the overall decision uncertainty are transition probabilities, in both All NYHA and NYHA IV analyses. Conclusions: Results of our VOI exercise show that the cost of uncertainty regarding the decision on reimbursement of telehealth interventions for chronic heart failure patients is high in the Netherlands, and that future research is needed, mainly on the transition probabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Romani people are a significant minority in Europe counting about 10 million individuals scattered throughout the continent. They are a migratory group originating from Northwestern India. Their exodus from India occurred approximately 1000–1500 years ago. The migration route of the Romani people was reconstructed with the help of cultural anthropology, linguistics and historical records. Their migration made them through Central Asia, Middle East and the Caucasus region, prior to the arriving into Europe. Yet the significance of these regions, especially of the Caucasus, in Roma ancestry was a rather neglected topic. Contribution of the Caucasus and further affected regions to the ancestry of Roma was investigated based on genome-wide autosomal marker data. 158 European Roma samples and 41 populations from the Caucasus region, from Middle East, Central Asia and from South Asia were considered in our tests. Population structure and ancestry analysis algorithms were applied to investigate the relationship of Roma with these populations. Identical by descent DNA segment analyses and admixture linkage disequilibrium based tests were also applied. Our results suggest that the Caucasus region plays also a significant role in the genetic legacy of Romani people besides the main sources, Europe and South Asia, previously investigated by other population genetic studies. The Middle East and Central Asia seems slightly less important but far from negligible in connection with the sources of Roma ancestry. Our results point out that the Caucasus region and altogether the area of the Caspian and Black Seas had a significant role in the migration of Romani people towards Europe and contributed significantly to the genetic legacy of Roma rival to the European and Indian main sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]