The discussion about health care systems focuses on the dynamics of expenditures and on the weak growth of the revenue base. In this discussion it is widely overseen that medical expenditures and supply of medical services crucially depend on the compensation of physician services. The paper...

The importance of the physician-patient relationship for the health care market is beyond controversy. Recent work emphasizes a two-sided asymmetric information relationship between physician and patient. In contrast to most work looking only at the physician's perspective, our paper...

The paper reviews models of the physician-patient relationship to derive testable hypotheses about the relation between health, demand for medical services and patient's compliance. The models imply that in addition to existing information asymmetries the actions that physician and patient...

The paper presents a principal-agent model to analyse the relationship between physicians and patients. The application of the standard principal-agent model shows some shortcomings of the analysis when being implemented into the field of health economics. Therefore it is necessary to look at...

The economic costs of chronic health conditions and severe illnesses like diabetes, coronary heart disease or cancer are immense. Several clinical trials give information about the importance of individual behaviour for the prevalence of these illnesses. Changes in health relevant behaviour may...

In 2001, the voluntary additional Riester pension scheme was implemented in Germany. Financial subsidies should incentivize people to increase their private pension savings. In this paper, we hypothesize that these publicly subsidized savings mainly replace existing not subsidized savings and...

The ambulatory physician payment system in the German Social Health Insurance (SHI) offers incentives to reduce practice activity at the end of a billing period. Most services within a period are reimbursed at full cost only up to a certain threshold. Furthermore, capitated payments make...

Auf den Märkten für medizinische Leistungen und in der Beziehung zwischen Arzt und Patient existieren Informationsasymmetrien in einer Vielzahl, wie sie in kaum einem anderen Bereich einer Ökonomie anzutreffen sind. In der Arbeit wird die beidseitige Informationsasymmetrie zwischen Arzt und...

This paper explores the effects of insurance parameters and complementary information environment on the patient's primary prevention activity. The theoretical model is based on a principal-agent setting in which the patient acts as an agent in deciding about his prevention efforts. The insurer...