This paper analyzes the implications of the inherent conflict between two tasks performed by direct marketing agents: prospecting for customers and advising on the product's "suitability" for the specific needs of customers. When structuring salesforce compensation, firms trade off the expected...

Popular accounts suggest that advertising revenue per unit of consumer attention is lower online than offline, and has fallen in traditional media as the Internet has made advertising markets more competitive. I assess these claims theoretically and empirically, and compare the patterns we...

If profit maximization is the objective of a firm, new information about quality should affect firm behavior only through its effects on market demand. I consider an alternate model in which suppliers are motivated by a desire to perform well in addition to profit. The introduction of quality...

We investigate whether physicians' financial incentives influence health care supply, technology diffusion, and resulting patient outcomes. In 1997, Medicare consolidated the geographic regions across which it adjusts physician payments, generating area-specific price shocks. Areas with higher...

I explore the association between regional variations in physician behavior and the geographical scope of malpractice standards of care. I estimate a 30-50 percent reduction in the gap between state and national utilization rates of various treatments and diagnostic procedures following the...

This paper exploits a sharp reduction in patient cost sharing at age 70 in Japan, using a regression discontinuity design to examine its effect on utilization, health, and financial risk arising from out-of-pocket expenditures. Due to the national policy, cost sharing is 60–80 percent lower at...

This paper studies the effect of improved early life health care on mortality and long-run academic achievement in school. We use the idea that medical treatments often follow rules of thumb for assigning care to patients, such as the classification of Very Low Birth Weight (VLBW), which assigns...

Organs for transplantation are a scarce resource. Paying to increase the supply of organs is illegal in much of the world. We review efforts to increase transplantation by increasing the supply of available organs from living and deceased donors. Progress has been made in increasing the...

Commercial health insurers in California use provider capitation payments to different extents. These are similar to arrangements introduced by the recent health reforms to give physicians incentives to control costs. In a previous paper we showed that patients whose insurers used capitation...