When public long-term care (LTC) insurance is provided by insurers, they typically lack incentives for purchasing cost-effective LTC. Providing insurers with appropriate incentives for efficiency without jeopardizing access for high-risk individuals requires, among other things, an adequate...

Does medical insurance affect health care demand and in the end contribute to improvements in the health status? Evidence for China for the year 2004, by means of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), shows that health insurance does not affect health care demand in a significant manner....

Physicians are supposed to serve patients' interests, but some are more inclined to do so than others. This paper studies how the system of health care provision affects the allocation of patients to physicians when physicians differ in altruism. We show that allowing for private provision of...

This paper investigates the effects of health-care spending on mortality rates of heart attack patients. We relate in-hospital deaths to in-hospital end-of-life spending and post-discharge deaths to post-discharge health-care spending. In our analysis, we use detailed administrative data on...

Does medical insurance affect health care demand and in the end contribute to improvements in the health status? Evidence for China for the year 2004, by means of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), shows that health insurance does not affect health care demand in a significant manner....

Physicians are supposed to serve patients' interests, but some are more inclined to do so than others. This paper studies how the system of health care provision affects the allocation of patients to physicians when physicians differ in altruism. We show that allowing for private provision of...

This paper studies the relationship between three key elements of the marketing mix, namely, price, product, and promotion, in a model where a seller employs informative advertising to launch a new product. We propose a fairly general advertising technology for the study of three promotional...

The search literature assumes that consumers know which firms sell products they are looking for, but are unaware of the particular variety and the prices at which each firm sells. In this paper, we consider the situation where consumers are uncertain whether a firm carries the product at all by...

We consider a duopoly in a homogenous goods market where part of the consumers are ex ante uninformed about prices. Information can come through two different channels: advertising and sequential consumer search. We arrive at the following results. First, there is no monotone relationship...

This paper shows how a firm can use non-targeted advertising to exploit consumers' desire for social status. A monopolist sells multiple varieties of a good to consumers who each care about what others believe about his wealth. Advertising allows consumers both to buy different varieties and to...