Starting in 1995, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) transformed a bureaucratic healthcare system into a performance driven patient focused integrated health-care network. The VHA’s experience may offer lessons for private and public sector providers as the U.S. explores alternative...

This study utilizes a national survey of physicians in the United States, administered four times between 1996 and 2005, to examine the use of non-financial performance measures in physician compensation contracts. Consistent with agency theory, we find that non-financial measures are used more...

To address agents' moral hazard over effort, incentive contracts impose risk on the agents. As performance measures become noisier, the conventional agency analysis predicts that principals will reduce the incentive weights assigned to such measures. However, prior empirical results (Prendergast...

As part of a federal government initiative to increase efficiency and quality, in 1996 the United States' VHA (Veterans Health Administration) radically restructured its organizational design and management processes. This study uses 1992-1998 clinical, workload and financial data to examine the...