Today, the global pharmaceutical product value chain is becoming increasingly complex and this has led to the emergence of 'multiple quality standards' for medicines. But this non-uniformity in the quality of medicine is also contingent upon both the regulatory milieu in the country of...

I analyze optimal natural resource use in an intergenerational model with the risk of a catastrophe. Each generation maximizes a weighted sum of discounted utility (positive) and the probability that a catastrophe will occur at any point in the future (negative). The model generates time-...

This paper studies optimal decision rules for a decision maker who can consult two experts in an environment without monetary payments. This extends the previous work by Holmström (1984) and Alonso and Matouschek (2008) who consider environments with one expert. In order to derive optimal...

Since at least de Finetti [7], preference symmetry assumptions have played an important role in models of decision making under uncertainty. In the current paper, we explore (1) the relationship between the symmetry assumption of Klibanoff, Mukerji and Seo (KMS) [21] and alternative symmetry...

The α-MEU model and the smooth ambiguity model are two popular models in decision making under ambiguity. However, the axiomatic foundations of these two models are not completely understood. We provide axiomatic foundations of these models in a symmetric setting with a product state space...

This paper analyses the equilibrium effects of individual information filters. Information is modelled as advertisements which are distributed across a population of consumers with heterogeneous preferences. An advertisement that provides knowledge about a product with little or no utility for a...

Patients are reluctant to use telemedicine health services. Telemedicine is an "experience good," one that can be accurately evaluated and compared to its substitute (in this case, in-person visits) only after the product has been adopted and experienced. As such, an intervention that increases...

The German health care reform of 1997 provides a natural experiment for evaluating the price sensitivity of demand for physicians' services. As a part of the reform, co-payments for prescription drugs were increased step up to 200%. However, certain groups of people were exempted from the...

This paper reports on a re-evaluation of the German health care reform of 1997. A previous evaluation found a limited effect of a 4.4 percent reduction of the number of doctor visits in a sample of pharmacy customers. The re-evaluation based on a representative household survey, the German...

The paper evaluates the German health care reform of 1997, using the individual number of doctor visits as outcome measure and data from the German Socio- Economic Panel for the years 1995-1999. A number of modified count data models allow to estimate the effect of the reform in different parts...