Economics

The Medicaid program is one of the largest social insurance programs in the United States, providing health insurance to approximately 67 million poor and disabled people. In order to reduce the program's costs, several states now mandate that most or all of their Medicaid beneficiaries enroll in comprehensive managed care plans. This is a proposal to evaluate Florida's experience with mandated managed care. In 2005, the Florida legislature passed Senate Bill 838 to roll out a Medicaid reform pilot.

This project will explore models of the cognitive processes underlying human choice behavior in economic contexts. The models to be explored allow for departures from fully-informed optimal choice. Rather than positing that behavior is simply "irrational," they will explain departures from optimal decision-making as resulting from the (generally pre-conscious) use of choice algorithms that are well-suited to mostly achieving decision makers' objectives. The choice algoritms also would not require greater information-processing capacity.

Over the past 30 years, the incarcerated population in the United States has grown by close to 300 percent. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2009, 7.2 million adults in the United States, or 1 out of every 31 adults, were under "correctional supervision," a status that includes probation and parole in addition to incarceration. The wide reach of corrections activity translates into roughly $51.7 billion dollars or 7.4 percent of state budgets in fiscal year 2011.