We study the incentives for hospitals to provide quality and expend cost-reducing effort when their budgets are soft, i …. Softer budgets reduce cost efficiency, while the effect on quality is ambiguous. For given cost efficiency, softer budgets … increase quality since parts of the expenditures may be covered by the payer. However, softer budgets reduce cost …

We analyse the effect of competition on quality in hospital markets with regulated prices, considering both the effect … structure, we show that the relationship between competition and quality is generally ambiguous. In contrast to the received …