Recent reforms in health care have introduced a variety of pay-for-performance programs using financial incentives for physicians to improve the quality of care. Their effectiveness is, however, ambiguous as it is often difficult to disentangle the effect of financial incentives from the ones of...

We study risk aversion and prudence in medical treatment decisions. In a laboratory experiment, we investigate the frequency and intensity of second- and third-order risk preferences, as well as the effect of the medical decision context. Risk preferences are assessed through treatment...

In recent health care reforms, several countries have replaced pure payment schemes for physicians (fee-for-service, capitation) by so-called mixed payment schemes. Until now it is still an unresolved issue whether patients are really better off after these reforms. In this study we compare the...

Recent health policy reforms try to increase consumer choice. We use a laboratory experiment to analyze consumers’ tastes in typical contract attributes of health insurances and to investigate their relationship with individual risk preferences. First, subjects make consecutive insurance...

Most common physician payment schemes include some form of traditional capitation or fee-for-service payment. While health economics research often focuses on direct incentive effects of these payments, we demonstrate that the opportunity to sort into one’s preferred payment scheme may also...

Mixed payment systems have become a prominent alternative to paying physicians through fee-for-service and capitation. While theory shows mixed payment systems to be superior, empirically, causal effects on physicians’ behavior are not well understood when introducing mixed systems. We...