This paper examines the spatial dimension of marginal willingness to pay (MWP) for reduction of nuclear risks through increased insurance coverage. The effect of distance from a nuclear power plant on individuals’ MWP is ambiguous. MWP is expected to decrease with distance because the risk of...

A key stated objective of the Australian Plain Packaging Act 2011 is to influence smoking prevalence, in particular of minors. We use the Roy Morgan Single Source (Australia) data set on minors, (that is, Australians aged 14 to 17 years) over the time period January 2001 to December 2013 to...

A stated objective of the Australian Plain Packaging Act 2011 is to reduce smoking prevalence. We use the Roy Morgan Single Source (Australia) data set over the time period January 2001 to December 2013 to analyze whether this goal has been achieved in the first year since the implementation. In...

This article assesses how the form of the utility function in discrete-choice experiments (DCEs) affects estimates of willingness-to-pay (WTP). The utility function is usually assumed to be linear in its attributes. Non-linearities, in the guise of interactions and higher-order terms, are...

Many politicians blame physician dispensing (PD) to increase health care expenditure and to undermine independence of drug prescription and income leading to a suboptimal medication. Therefore, PD is not allowed in most OECD countries. In Switzerland, PD is allowed in some regions depending on...

This paper sheds light on some unexpected consequences of health insurance regulation that may pose a big challenge to insurers’ risk management. Because mandated uniform contributions to health insurance trigger risk selection efforts risk adjustment (RA) schemes become necessary. A good deal...

This study seeks to provide evidence for deciding whether or not a pharmaceutical innovation should be included in the benefit list of social health insurance. A discrete choice experiment (DCE) was conducted in Germany to measure preferences for modern insulin therapy. Of the 1,100 individuals...

When premiums are community-rated, risk adjustment (RA) serves to mitigate competitive insurers’ incentive to select favorable risks. However, unless fully prospective, it also undermines their incentives for efficiency. By capping its volume, one may try to counteract this tendency, exposing...

In this paper, we propose a decision framework where people are individually asked to either actively consent or dissent to some pro-social behavior. We hypothesize that confronting individuals with the choice of engaging in a specific pro-social behavior contributes to the formation of...

This paper examines costs in the Swiss nursing home industry, an issue of concern to Swiss policy makers because of the explosion of elderly care costs and the aging of the population. The paper considers estimation of a translog cost function employing panel data for a sample of 36 nonprofit...