We study the competitive effects of restricting direct access to secondary care by gatekeeping, focusing on the informational role of gatekeeping general practitioners (GPs). We consider a secondary care market with two hospitals choosing the quality and specialisation of their care. GPs...

We analyse how the internal organisation of firms affects the correspondence between private and social incentives for horizontal merger. Applying a model of endogenous merger formation in a three-firm asymmetric Cournot industry, we contrast the cases of entrepreneurial and managerial firms....

We formulate an analytic equilibrium model for simultaneously functioning electricity market and a market for Green Certificates. The major focus of the paper is the effect of market power in a Green Certificate system. One of the main results from the analysis is that the certificate system...

This paper analyses the impact of economic conditions and access to primary health care on health outcomes in Norway. Total mortality rates, grouped into four causes of death, were used as proxies for health, and the number of general practitioners (GPs) at the municipality level was used as the...

In many countries, the social insurance system is under pressure from an ageing population. An increasing number of people are on sickness benefits and disability pensions in Norway. The general practitioner (GP) is responsible for assessing work capacity and issuing certificates for sick leave...

We analyze the dynamic interaction between imitation and myopic optimization in an environment of changing marginal payoffs. Focusing on finite irreducible environments, we unfold a trade-off between the degree of interaction and the size of environmental shocks. The optimizer outperforms the...

We present a model of optimal contracting between a purchaser and a provider of health services when quality has two dimensions. We assume that one dimension of quality is veri?able (dimension 1) and one dimension is not verifiable (dimension 2). We show that the power of the incentive scheme...

A health policy reform aiming to reduce hospital waiting times and sickness absences, the Faster Return to Work (FRW) scheme, is evaluated by creating treatment and control groups to facilitate causal interpretations of the empirical results. We use a unique dataset on individuals where we match...

This work carries out an empirical evaluation of the impact of the main mechanism for regulating the prices of medicines in the UK on a variety of pharmaceutical price indices. The empirical evidence shows that the overall impact of the rate of return cap appears to have been slight or even...

This paper discusses how a decision maker should deal with uncertainty, both in the sense of a well-known probability distribution of different outcomes and as a situation where also the probability distribution is unknown. A simple baseline model is used throughout the paper, where the decision...