Virtual patients’ communities are developing on the Internet. These communities allow frequent interactions among patients, who can share health-related information within an interactive environment. However, we know very little about what determines patients’ online collective action on Web...

Technical standards take such a big part in our daily life (cars, mobile phones, food and so on) that it seems to become an invisible phenomenon. The construction of these standards is mainly embedded in international arenas and networks. Scholars still know few of actors and know-how in this...

Dès son arrivée aux affaires, l’administration Clinton a entrepris une politique d’amélioration de la compétitivité de l’économie américaine par la technologie : « Technology for Economic Growth ». Cette politique, qui doit beaucoup au vice président Al Gore, vise à réorienter...

This paper analyses the potentially defensive behaviour of patent race winners and its effect on aggregate R&D effort. It proposes a quality-ladders model that endogenously determines leaders technology advantages and who innovates. Product market regulation can have either a positive or a...

In many areas of health care financing, there is controversy over the sources of cost variability and about the respective roles of inefficiency versus legitimate heterogeneity. This paper proposes a payment system that creates incentives to increase hospital efficiency when hospitals are...

In this paper, we want to characterize the optimal health insurance contract with adverse selection and moral hazard. We assume that policyholders differ by the permanent health status loss and choose an unobservable preventive effort in order to reduce the probability of illness which is...

European health care systems are facing diverse challenges. In health policy, strong primary care is seen as key to deal with these challenges. European countries differ in how strong their primary care systems are. Two groups of traditionally weak primary care systems are distinguished. First a...

This article examines the link between restrictions on the number of physicians and general practitioners' (GPs) earnings. Using a representative panel of 6016 French self-employed GPs over the years 1983-2004, we estimate an earnings function to identify experience, time and cohort effects. The...

In France, a significant number of General Practitioners (GPs) earn less than 1.5 times the French minimum salary. Using a representative panel of self-employed GPs over the years 1993-2004, this paper tests whether these low-income GPs choose to work less than all other GPs or whether they are...