Two ingredients seem essential in understanding the patient-physician relationship: (i) the physician's informational advantage and (ii) the relevance of the patient's emotions. Health economics has placed great emphasis on the first phenomenon, whereas the second has been considered only...

Internet and e-commerce have profoundly changed society, the economy, and the world of health care. The web offers opportunities to improve health, but it may also represent a big health hazard since it is a basically unregulated market with very low consumer protection. In this paper we analyze...

The paper studies the impact of alternative reimbursement systems on two provider decisions: whether to adopt a technology whose provision requires a sunk investment cost and how many patients to treat with it. Using a simple economic model we show that the optimal pricing policy involves a...

In this note we study the value for money of purchases of fluoxetine made through on-line pharmacies without prescription. We show that this channel is not good value from an economic point of view and that it can be dangerous in medical terms because of the poor quality of the drugs received...