This paper explores the adoption choice of electronic medical records by U.S hospitals, which could exhibit strategic complements or substitutes. I find complementarities in adoption through a reduced-form analysis with instruments for the unobserved market characteristics. I further develop a...

This paper seeks to understand the incentives of affiliated hospitals in choosing health information technology (IT) vendors. By adopting a system popular in the local market, hospitals may benefit from complementarities but also worry about losing patients. If benefits outweigh the competitive...

This study examines how industry peers share information when they are engaged in tacit collusion. We develop a model of firms' information sharing and production decisions and use it to establish that firms engaged in tacit collusion are more likely to share information when current market...

This paper summarizes four stylized facts about the prescription drug markets after patent expiration during the 80s: (i) generic firms entered the market at different points of time after patent expiration and they seldom exited; (ii) the brand-name price remained much higher than generic prices,...

This study was prepared by Annika B. Bergbauer while she was working at the Ifo Center for the Economics of Education. It was completed in March 2019 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich in July 2019. It consists of four self-contained...

Insurance products are distributed both by independent and dependent agents, although the use of independent agents is more costly. The product quality hypothesis states that independent agents provide both insurers and customers with higher service quality and therefore, remain on the market....

Until its liberalisation in 1994 exclusive agents dominated the distribution of products in the German life insurance industry. Since then, their importance has been declining for the benefit of both distribution via direct distribution channel and independent agents. However, the market shares...