We address the question of how a third-party payer (e.g. an insurer) decides what providers to contract with. Two different mechanisms are studied and their properties compared. A first mechanism consists in the third party payer setting up a bargaining procedure with both providers. The second...

The interpretation of the loss of utility as transport costs in address models of differentiation poses a methodological difficulty. Transport costs implicitly amounts to assume that there is a good neither included in the differentiated sector nor in the composite (numeraire) good of the...

This paper addresses the impact of payment systems on the rate of technology adoption. We present a model where technological shift is driven by demand uncertainty, increased patients benefit, financial variables, and the reimbursement system to providers. Two payment systems are studied: cost...

The paper offers an overview of the literature on bundling in the telecommunications sector and its application in the Spanish market. We argue that the use of bundling in the provision of services is associated to technological reasons. Therefore, there appears no need to regulate bundling...

This paper aims at assessing the importance of the initial technological endowments when firms decide to create R&D agreements. We study a Bertrand duopoly where firms evaluate the returns of an agreement according to its length. A learning process allows us to depict a close connection between...

Ramsey pricing has been proposed in the pharmaceutical industry as a principle to price discriminate among markets while allowing to recover the (fixed) R&D cost. However, such analyses neglect the presence of insurance or the fund raising costs for drug reimbursement. By incorporating these new...

Recently the Portuguese Government announced the launching of public private partnerships to build hospitals with the distinctive feature that both infrastructure construction and the clinical activities management will be awarded to a private party. Accordingly there appear coordination issues...

A feature present in countries with a National Health Service is the coexistence of a public and a private sector. Often, the public payer contracts with private providers while holding idle capacity. This is often seen as inefficiency from the management of public facilities. We present here a...

In several instances, third-party payers negotiate prices of health care services with providers. We show that a third-party payer may prefer to deal with a professional association than with the sub-set constituted by the more efficient providers, and then apply the same price to all providers....