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The study aims to address a critical gap in existing healthcare payment schemes and care service pricing by recognizing the influential role of patients' decisions on self-management efforts. These decisions not only impact health outcomes but also shape the demand for care, subsequently influencing care costs. Despite the significance of this interplay, current payment schemes often overlook these dynamics. The research focuses on investigating the implications of a novel behavior-based payment scheme, designed to align incentives and establish a direct connection between patients' decisions and care costs. The primary objective is to comprehensively understand whether and how this innovative payment scheme structure influences key stakeholders, including patients, care providers, insurers and overall social welfare.

In this paper, we propose a game-theoretical model to incorporate the performance of self-management with the demand for healthcare service, compare the patient's effort decision for self-management and provider's price decision for healthcare service under a behavior-based scheme with that under two implemented widely payment schemes, that is, co-payment scheme and co-insurance scheme.

Our findings confirm that the behavior-based scheme incentives patient self-management more than current schemes while reducing their possibility of seeking healthcare service, which indirectly induces the provider to lower the price of the service. The stakeholders' utility under various payment schemes is sensitive to the cost of treatment and the perceived health utility of patients. Especially, patient health awareness is not always benefited provider profit, as it motivates patient self-management while diminishing the demand for care.

We provide a novel framework for characterizing behavior-based payment schemes. Our results confirm the need for modification of the current payment scheme to incentivize patient self-management.

Several studies have examined the relationship between service quality and willingness to pay in many industries. However, this relationship has not been explored through the lens of customer perceived value and their willingness to pay for improving and sustaining water service. This study aims to examine the impact of technical and functional service quality dimensions on customer perceived value and assess the influence of customer perceived value and socio-economic factors on customers' willingness to pay for improving and sustaining the water service.

Technical service quality includes core water service such as water delivery and maintenance, while functional service quality refers to the appearance of facilities, employees’ dress, and communication. SERVQUAL questionnaire responses were collected from 333 Palestinian household customers. Cronbach’s alpha was conducted to measure internal consistency and convergent validity. Path analysis was utilized to evaluate a causal diagram by examining the relationships among the constructs.

The results showed that technical and functional service quality and relative price explain 52% of the customer perceived value variation. Additionally, the results revealed that customer perceived value, technical service quality, and relative price significantly impact the customer’s willingness to pay for improving and sustaining service. In contrast, the functional service quality and socio-economic factors have insignificant effects. These predictors explain 60% of the customer’s willingness to pay for improving and sustaining service.

The study suggests that water providers should prioritize improving and sustaining technical service quality to increase customer willingness to pay. Furthermore, they should be aware that other factors, such as employee appearance and politeness, are less influential in driving customers’ willingness to pay.

The study presents a water service improvement model that utilizes data from a developing country to assess the influence of perceived customer value, along with its dimensions, on the willingness to pay for improving and sustaining water service quality.

An ever-increasing number of companies outsource logistics activities to third-party logistics (3PL) providers to beat the competition. From the buyer's (shippers') perspective, selecting the right 3PL provider is crucial, and from the 3PL provider's perspective, it is imperative to be attractive and to retain clients. To this aim, a potential lever can be physical assets, such as warehouses, which the literature has traditionally neglected. The objective is to benchmark the importance of warehouses for 3PL providers to attract/retain clients and for shippers to select the right 3PL provider.

The authors performed an empirical investigation through interviews on dyads (3PL providers/shippers) and utilized the Best-Worst Method (BWM) to rank the criteria used in the 3PL buying process and allow the warehouse's role to emerge.

Results show that the 3PL buying process consists of four phases and three evaluation steps. The selection criteria are classified into three groups: order qualifiers, order winners and retention factors. The warehouse has different levels of importance throughout the process. It appears that it can indirectly enhance the attractiveness and retention capability of 3PL providers through other selection criteria.

By combining the resource-based view and the customer value theory, this research extends the theory on logistics outsourcing by studying the phases of the 3PL buying process and scrutinizing the criteria used in different evaluation steps. The research adds a double perspective of analysis (3PL providers and shippers), which is missing in the literature, and focuses on the importance of warehouses.

The scope of this study is to explore and summarize the pool of dimensions, models and measurement techniques of service quality used in healthcare services and to propose a comprehensive conceptual model for practitioners and researchers.

This research employs a comprehensive review of available literature by using multiple keywords on different electronic repositories using the recommendations of the PRISMA approach for the selection of articles. A critical analysis of available studies helped in compiling a list of core service quality dimensions in healthcare services.

This paper presents a comprehensive account of different dimensions and their measurement items used by various researchers to assess service quality in healthcare systems. Most of the researchers have used SERVQUAL model either in its original or modified form while the others have proposed and used totally different dimensions to assess the service quality in healthcare. Many dimensions are just an existing dimension of SERVQUAL that has undergone a name change while others are completely new. The dimensions used by many researchers have items drawn from more than one dimension of SERVQUAL model. The availability of so many dimensions and models adds to the confusion that researchers and practicing managers experience when determining the appropriate model to be used in their work. To mitigate this confusion, there is a need to develop a comprehensive model; the current work is an attempt to meet this need. Through our analysis, we identify four major service quality dimensions: clinical quality, infrastructural quality, relationship and managerial quality and propose a model named CIRMQUAL.

After exploring all available models in the domain of healthcare, this research presents the best possible areas to enhance the quality of healthcare services. It also enhances the research insights for academicians and working professionals by developing and proposing a comprehensive model for measuring healthcare service quality. The proposed model covers almost all of the service quality dimensions used by other researchers and will make the choice of dimensions/model easy for the future researchers/practitioners interested in measuring and improving the quality of services offered by their healthcare units. Such a comprehensive model has not been developed by any researcher thus far.

This paper aims to explore how accounting is fostering neoliberal citizenship through the participants of Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). More specifically, this paper aims to understand how accounting discourse and the management accounting technique of budgeting, when intertwined with automated administrative processes of the NDIS, are giving rise to a pastoral form of power that directs people’s behaviour toward certain ends.

Publicly available data has been crafted into an autoethnographic case study of one fictitious person’s experiences with the NDIS – Mina. Mina is an amalgam created from material submitted to the Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on the NDIS. Mina’s experiences are then analysed through the lens of Foucault’s concept of pastoral power to explore how accounting has contributed to marketising and digitising public disability services.

Accounting rhetoric appears to be a central part of rationalising the decision to shift to individualised disability funding. Those receiving payments are treated as self-governable, financially responsible subjects and are therefore expected to have knowledge of management accounting techniques and budgeting. However, NDIS’s strong reliance on the accounting concepts of funds, budgets, cost and price is limiting people’s autonomy and subjecting them to intervention and control.

This paper addresses calls to explore the interplay between accounting and current disability policies. The analysis shows that incorporating accounting into the NDIS’s algorithms serves to conceal the underlying ideology of the programs, subtly driving behaviours towards neoliberal objectives. Further, this research extends the Foucauldian accounting literature by revealing the contribution of accounting to reinforcing the authority of digital pastors in contemporary times.

Current and predicted continued dramatic increases in international migration and ethnocultural diversity of older adult cohorts pose challenges for health care services. Review studies on ethnoculturally diverse older adults and health care show a lack of focus on their service use experiences. This study aims to report a meta-ethnography that addresses this knowledge gap through answering the review question: How do ethnoculturally diverse older adults who are immigrants experience health careservices?

The authors applied a seven-phase method of meta-ethnography to guide the review. The authors conducted two literature searches (April 2018 and June 2020) in MEDLINE, CINAHL, Embase, Sociological Abstracts and Abstracts in Social Gerontology that yielded 17 papers eligible for review.

“There’s always something positive and something negative” is the overarching metaphor for answering the review question. Findings highlight positive and negative tensions within ethnoculturally diverse older adults’ health care use experiences of understanding and being understood, having trust in providers and the health care system, having needs, preferences and resources met and desire for self-care over dependency. The majority of experiences were negative. Tipping points towards negative experiences included language, fear, provider attitudes and behaviours, service flexibility, attitudes towards Western and traditional health care and having knowledge and resources.

The authors propose concrete actions to mitigate the tipping points. The authors discuss policy recommendations for health care system changes at the micro, meso and macro service levels to promote positive experiences and address mainstream service policy inequities.

Despite a growing body of research focusing on the dark side of sharing economy development, arguments are fragmented and incomplete. This study aims to address the gap by integrating existing viewpoints based on a provider’s perspective.

This study conducted a bibliometric analysis using text mining and clustering algorithm techniques to measure the scope of scientific output on this topic and identify the main research themes.

Through the bibliometric analysis, this study developed an integrative framework based on the platform providers’ internal management issues and external conflicts with consumers, society, government regulations and traditional business. It also identified significant gaps within each research theme and proposed a future research agenda.

Sharing economy development has not yet been fully understood and regulated, leading to unprecedented challenges to existing business systems. The study addresses knowledge gaps and advances the understanding of the dark side of the sharing economy based on the provider’s internal management and interplay with external forces. It offers a roadmap for future research to advance understanding of the “hidden” dark side of the sharing economy.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union (EU) was passed to protect data privacy. Though the GDPR intended to address issues related to data privacy in the EU, it created an extra-territorial effect through Articles 3, 45 and 46. Extra-territorial effect refers to the application or the effect of local laws and regulations in another country. Lawmakers around the globe passed or intensified their efforts to pass laws to have personal data privacy covered so that they meet the adequacy requirement under Articles 45–46 of GDPR while providing comprehensive legislation locally. This study aims to analyze the Malaysian and Saudi Arabian legislation on health data privacy and their adequacy in meeting GDPR data privacy protection requirements.

The research used a systematic literature review, legal content analysis and comparative analysis to critically analyze the health data protection in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia in comparison with GDPR and to see the adequacy of health data protection that could meet the requirement of EU data transfer requirement.

The finding suggested that the private sector is better regulated in Malaysia than the public sector. Saudi Arabia has some general laws to cover health data privacy in both public and private sector organizations until the newly passed data protection law is implemented in 2024. The finding also suggested that the Personal Data Protection Act 2010 of Malaysia and the Personal Data Protection Law 2022 of Saudi Arabia could be considered “adequate” under GDPR.

The research would be able to identify the key principles that could identify the adequacy of the laws about health data in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia as there is a dearth of literature in this area. This will help to propose suggestions to improve the laws concerning health data protection so that various stakeholders can benefit from it.

The UAE is among the fastest-growing facilities management (FM) markets globally. Nevertheless, conclusive evidence on this market is scarce in the literature. Therefore, this paper aims to provide an in-depth insight into the FM market in the UAE.

Fourteen interviewees were purposively selected to provide insight into FM status through their field experiences. A SWOT analysis of their answers held place.

Interviewees revealed that the main trends of FM in the UAE include interests in sustainability, integration of technology, health and safety, outsourcing FM, switching to total facilities management (TFM), and performance management systems use. Besides, the quality of the service in the FM market is driven by the real-estate boom, services sophistication, the increasing awareness of FM and focus on the quality of services. Furthermore, the interviews found that the recruitment of poorly skilled labors can threaten the FM market to meet the allocated budget, misperception of FM, the value of money, the lack of continuous follow-up with recent advancements in technologies and the lack of performance measurement models.

This paper highlights the major trends, drivers and threats of the FM market in the UAE, and the implications of its findings can direct FM organizations and researchers in their practices.

As populations are ageing and the global average life expectancy is rising, the provision of care for older people is an increasingly salient issue. This paper aims to focus on family-provided care for older immigrants, examining how older immigrants and care providers experience and construct family caregiving.

Based on interviews with care recipients, family care providers, municipal staff and representatives for migrant organisations in Sweden, this study presents a typology of family caregiving for older immigrants.

The authors found three caregiving types, namely, solely family-provided care and a combination of family care and public care (predominantly one or the other). The decision to select family-provided or publicly-funded care depends on personal and institutional factors.

The paper makes three empirical contributions to the literature on care provision for older immigrants. Firstly, this study provides insights into the structural and personal factors that shape care-giving arrangements for older immigrants. Secondly, this study examines the perspectives of care recipients and care providers on family-provided care. Care expectations differ between both groups and sometimes result in intergenerational disagreement. Thirdly, in terms of institutional support, this study finds that the Swedish state’s notion of individual needs does not match the needs of immigrant elderly and their caregivers. The paper places the care types in a broader discussion about eldercare provision in the Swedish welfare state, which has experienced a decline in publicly funded care services and an increase in family caregiving in the past 30 years. In addition, it addresses questions of dignified ageing from a minority perspective.