• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.1-23
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• 2003

General drug prices involve three stages: shipment stage, wholesaler stage and retail stage. Policies on drug price differ from country to country. Shipment stage prices are tightly regulated in countries like France and Netherlands. They are free in only a minority of advanced countries, even if these include some major players such as the US, Germany and, in a very limited sense, Japan. The situation in the UK is very complex with a semi-free system, where drug companies are free to set their own prices but cannot exceed a predetermined profit ceiling. Mark-up at both wholesaler and retail stages is formally admitted in most countries observed. Apart from the general drug prices, reimbursement price of insured drugs has been major policy concerns. Most countries reviewed in this study has exerted some control over reimbursement prices, but differ both in the way how and in the extent to which prices are admitted or fixed. Price fixing has been used in France and Japan. Some countries have transformed their system over time, particularly to move to reference pricing in the last decade. This mechanism has empowered the customer, and improved price competition on the market. Referring to the drug price policies in the advanced countries, this study makes some suggestions for the redirection of Korean price policy for reimbursement drug in health insurance as follows: to match appropriate policy tools to each policy goal; to maximize market mechanism through effective reimbursement price fixing which admits mark-ups in wholesaler and retail prices; to introduce reference pricing system in order to redirect patient's demand with a financial incentive to choose the best-priced drugs and to save the finance of health insurance; and to strengthen surveillance and monitoring mechanism in the drug market.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.35-47
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• 2013

This study aims to understand haiku phenomena from the viewpoint of communication, which emerges from reciprocal relationships among haiku poets, haiku societies, media on haiku, and other establishments relating to haiku. Such an analytic point of view, which tries to consider both the operation of each autonomous agent and that of the whole system consisted by the agents, is included in the realm of second-order cybernetics. The operation of a system cannot be reduced completely to a system's individual components, which is why such a viewpoint is required. Fundamental informatics, which is employed as a theoretical framework, and two haiku movements, which include shin keiko haiku ("new-trend" haiku) and dento ha haiku (Hototogisu-school haiku), forming an important part of modern haiku history, are the focus of this study. As a result, modern haiku history is considered to be an evolution of a haiku system, whose main incentive is an awareness of the production mechanism of haiku communication occurring through second-order observations in the system. This study also illuminates how haiku poets, haiku societies, and media covereage of haiku play roles in the evolution of the haiku system.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aviation and Aeronautics
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.25-36
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• 2018

This paper presents a new airport slot allocation model that uses AIP model to balance the use of airport slots within existing capacity based on the limitation of capacity expansion of airport slots. This new model is called a 'balanced airport slot allocation model', which integrates the airport facility usage system, which is applied independently without linkage, with the airport slot allocation system, introducing the market logical characteristic of 'administered incentive pricing. In this paper, we propose a new proposal to dramatically change the airport slot allocation system in the current situation where the expansion of facilities is limited in the urgent problem of the airport slot shortage, and it is necessary to balance the airport slot allocation. Airline paying for the use of an airport slot can determine the slot of the desired time slot based on the costs incurred by differentiating in the new airport slot allocation model. This is a system that allows the airlines that are willing to pay a lot of money in the market to use preferred airport slots.

• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.89-112
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• 2014

This paper characterizes an optimal combination of grant and income-contingent loans (ICL) from efficiency and equity points of view as a government subsidy program for higher-education. In particular, we show that it is always desirable to introduce ICL for students regardless of their household incomes, and also provide arguments for the superiority of tax-financing system to loans with risk-premium as a financing mechanism of ICL. From policy point of view, this paper suggests a need for the extended coverage of our ICL system, while justifying its current tax-financing system.

• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.113-140
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• 2016

Achieving the two goals of providing stable remuneration and promoting market based incentive for generation capacity with only one kind of capacity price is a difficult proposition. This paper suggests a market design in which two different kinds of capacity prices are used to achieve these goals. It maintains the current capacity price that is determined administratively based on the fixed cost of the gas-turbine generator. A second capacity price is added that covers generators with higher fixed costs and lower fuel costs such as combined-cycle gas turbine, coal-powered, and nuclear generators. This second capacity price is conditional on a lower energy price ceiling and determined by the interaction of the market supply and a demand schedule derived from the optimal fuel mixed principle.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.228-239
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• 2013

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have proved the most effective and popular file sharing applications in recent years. Previous studies mainly focused on equal service and differentiated service strategies when peers have no initial data before their downloads. For an upload-constrained P2P file sharing system, we model both the equal service process and the differentiated service process when the initial data distribution of peers satisfies some special conditions. Moreover, we show how to minimize the time required to distribute the file to any number of peers. The proposed fluid-based models can reveal the intrinsic relations among the initial data amount, the peer set size, and the minimum last finish time. The closed-form expressions derived from the extended models can closely approximate chunk-based models and systems, especially for relatively large files. As an application of the extended models, we show how to provide differentiated service efficiently to multiple peer sets. Since no limits are imposed on the upload bandwidth of peers or the size of each peer set, we believe that our analytic process and the results achieved can provide not only fundamental insights into bandwidth allocation and data scheduling but also a helpful reference for both improving system performance and building an effective incentive mechanism for P2P file sharing systems.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.9 no.11
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• pp.75-81
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• 2018

Anonymity and privacy issues are becoming important as all transactions in the blockchain are open to users. Public blockchains appear to guarantee anonymity by using public-key addresses on behalf of users, but they can weaken anonymity by tracking with various analytic techniques based on transaction graph. In this paper, we propose a scheme to protect anonymity and privacy by converging various security techniques such as k-anonymity, mixing, blind signature, multi-phase processing, random selection, and zero-knowledge proof techniques with incentive mechanism and contributor participation. Through performance analysis, our proposed scheme shows that it is difficult to invade privacy and anonymity through collusion attacks if the number of contributors is larger than that of conspirators.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.1516-1539
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• 2022

This article shows a set of physical information fusion IoT systems that we designed for smart buildings. Its essence is a computer system that combines physical quantities in buildings with quantitative analysis and control. In the part of the Internet of Things, its mechanism is controlled by a monitoring system based on sensor networks and computer-based algorithms. Based on the design idea of the agent, we have realized human-machine interaction (HMI) and machine-machine interaction (MMI). Among them, HMI is realized through human-machine interaction, while MMI is realized through embedded computing, sensors, controllers, and execution. Device and wireless communication network. This article mainly focuses on the function of wireless sensor networks and MMI in environmental monitoring. This function plays a fundamental role in building security, environmental control, HVAC, and other smart building control systems. The article not only discusses various network applications and their implementation based on agent design but also demonstrates our collaborative information fusion strategy. This strategy can provide a stable incentive method for the system through collaborative information fusion when the sensor system is unstable in the physical measurements, thereby preventing system jitter and unstable response caused by uncertain disturbances and environmental factors. This article also gives the results of the system test. The results show that through the CPS interaction of HMI and MMI, the intelligent building IoT system can achieve comprehensive monitoring, thereby providing support and expansion for advanced automation management.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.2286-2309
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• 2016

Overlay networks have been widely deployed upon the Internet by Service Providers (SPs) to provide improved network services. However, the interaction between each overlay and traffic engineering (TE) as well as the interaction among co-existing overlays may occur. In this paper, we adopt both non-cooperative and cooperative game theory to analyze these interactions, which are collectively called hybrid interaction. Firstly, we model a situation of the hybrid interaction as an n+1-player non-cooperative game, in which overlays and TE are of equal status, and prove the existence of Nash equilibrium (NE) for this game. Secondly, we model another situation of the hybrid interaction as a 1-leader-n-follower Stackelberg-Nash game, in which TE is the leader and co-existing overlays are followers, and prove that the cost at Stackelberg-Nash equilibrium (SNE) is at least as good as that at NE for TE. Thirdly, we propose a cooperative coalition mechanism based on Shapley value to overcome the inherent inefficiency of NE and SNE, in which players can improve their performance and form stable coalitions. Finally, we apply distinct genetic algorithms (GA) to calculate the values for NE, SNE and the assigned cost for each player in each coalition, respectively. Analytical results are confirmed by the simulation on complex network topologies.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.65-77
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• 2013

Recently the ratio of the Internet traffic generated by video streaming applications including video-on-demand (VOD) is getting higher and higher, while P2P-based naive content distribution has been the main source of the Internet traffic in the past. As a result, the paradigm of cooperatively distributed systems (e.g., P2P) is changing to support streaming applications. Most P2P assisted approaches for video streaming today are based on Bit Torrent thanks to its simplicity of implementation and easy adaptability. They, however, have immanent vulnerability to free-riding inherited from Bit Torrent, which inevitably hurts their performance under limited system resources with free-riding. This paper studies the weakness to free-riding of existing Bit Torrent-based video streaming applications and investigates the adaptability of T-Chain (which was originally designed to prevent free-riding in cooperatively distributed systems) to video streaming applications. Our experiment results show that the video streaming approach based on T-Chain outperforms most existing Bit Torrent-based ones by 60% on average under limited system resources with free-riding.