Emergency Department (ED) activity involves a consistent absorption of resources varying from medical staff to laundry services. Moving from the consideration that staff cost is the most relevant item among those reported in the ED balance sheet, we have conducted a statistical survey in one of...

This paper provides a theoretical model to analyse public funding of family elderly care when two severity type are present (the high and the low), under asymmetry of information and increasing costs. The social planner can redistribute between households, but because of incomplete information...

Competition in hospital care is often implemented through mixed markets where public and private hospitals compete for patients. The optimality of this market form has long been debated in the literature. In this paper, we investigate the role of soft budget constraint in affecting patient...

The Accident and Emergency Departments (A&EDs) are responsible for a large share of overall hospitalization, diagnostic activity, and ultimately health care expenditure. Most health care systems use retrospective reimbursement systems to finance A&E departments, but this system may not be...

This paper focuses on the mean vote procedure for choosing the quantity of a public good, a social choice rule that selects the mean of the quantities voted for. The available theoretical models of mean voting give rise to conflicting predictions about the extent of the strategic bias that might...

<em>Voting Rule and Collective Choice: An Experiment </em> (by Carla Marchese, Marcello Montefiori) - This paper concerns the problem of collective choices and misrepresentation of preferences. Even if many mechanism have been suggested in the literature, the problem of free riding and strategic...