A common reform used to increase consumer choice and competition in public services has been to allow private providers to compete with public incumbents. However, there remains a concern that not all consumers are able to benefit equally from wider choice. We consider the case of publicly...

We develop a dynamic model of hospital competition where (i) waiting times increase if demand exceeds supply; (ii) patients choose a hospital based in part on waiting times; and (iii) hospitals incur waiting time penalties. We show that, whereas policies based on penalties will lead to lower...

In recent years, the accreditation of private hospitals followed by the decentralisation of the Italian NHS into 21 regional health systems, has furnished a good empirical ground for investigating the "voting with their feet" Tiebout principle. We consider the competition between public and...

Policies aimed to spur quality competition among health care providers are ubiquitous, but their impact on quality is ex ante ambiguous. This study contributes to the sparse empirical literature on primary care quality by examining the heterogeneous impact of recent competition enhancing reforms...

Patient empowerment calls for an intensified participation of (informed) patients with more treatment opportunities to choose from. A growing body of literature argues that confronting consumers with too many opportunities can lead to a choice overload (CO) resulting in uncertainty that the...

When consumers face a large number of alternatives, they tend to simplify the decision problem by reducing the number of available alternatives to a subset of relevant alternatives, i.e. a consideration set. Since consideration sets are typically unobserved, most studies in the demand literature...

We provide a new framework to identify demand elasticities in markets where managers rely on algorithmic recommendations for price setting, and apply it to a dataset containing bookings for a sample of mid-sized hotels in Europe. Using non-binding algorithmic price recommendations and observed...

To insure policyholders against contemporaneous health expenditure shocks and future reclassification risk, long-term health insurance constitutes an alternative to community-rated short-term contracts with an individual mandate. Relying on unique claims panel data from a large private insurer...

One cornerstone of current attempts to reform the German public health care system by introducing private insurance schemes is the assumption that economic incentives play an important role in individual decision-making about using medical help. This hypothesis is examined for the case of demand...

This paper investigates competition between health care insurance companies under different funding regulations. We consider two alternatives advanced in recent German health care reform discussions: competition by contribution rates (health contributions) and by fees (health premia). We find...