As it reduces in size, however, the costs become proportionately larger: the price of managing 100,000 policies is not that much smaller than the costs of running 10,000.
Aside from the bandwidth and storage problem, which is growing as spam goes increasingly multimedia, it's one of the primary entry points for security risks, and the price of managing everything effectively can move from the point of just noise to a line item on an IT budget.
The Schizophrenia Outpatient Health Outcomes (SOHO) study, using unit costs based on UK Department of Health data and inflated to 2005 prices showed that the cost of managing relapse in patients with schizophrenia is about £14,055 [ 9].
Mr. Wigand and Mr. Jiampietro contend that the arrangement helps raise prices and eases the burden of managing billions of dollars of troubled assets, ultimately saving the insurance fund money.
We assume that reduced maintenance costs for utilities will balance with the costs of managing the real-time pricing system.
Some airports have long sought time-of-day pricing to manage traffic, and the Transportation Department recently gave that power to Logan International Airport in Boston, contingent on traffic rising above a certain level.
In addition, she said, hospitals have shown an increased ability to negotiate higher prices as the constraints of managed care have waned.
Google Inc and other names were considered for inclusion but passed over because of high stock prices, David Blitzer, managing director and chairman of the S&P Index Committee, told CNBC.
Some venture firms "are desperate to get in, and a lot of them are bidding up the prices," said Judith Elsea, managing director of Weathergage Capital, a venture fund of funds.
"They have done more than Alan Greenspan to lower prices," said Burt Flickinger III, managing director of Reaching Marketing, a consulting firm in Westport, Conn., that frequently works for the Federal Trade Commission.
