Martin Stuart ("Marty") Feldstein, currently George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University and President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. (NBER), is a renowned American economist who has made important contributions to public finance, macroeconomics,...

Deductibles in health insurance generate nonlinear budget sets and dynamic incentives. This paper uses detailed individual claims data from a large Swiss insurance company to estimate the response in health care demand to the discrete price increase that is generated by resetting the deductible...

Intermediaries may bargain with several upstream providers on behalf of consumers who do not directly pay for consumption, such as an insurer bargaining with hospitals. We show that the common Nash- in-Nash solution, while useful for estimation, can predict Nash overpricing: prices that exceed...

This paper examines the competition of nonprofit sickness funds in the market for supplementary health insurance. We investigate product quality strategies when quality is costly and the sickness funds are competing for customers. As long as the sickness funds choose the qualities for...

Using a vertical differentiation model, we investigate the product quality strategies of two competing firms maximizing market shares. The firms are facing variable costs of quality improvement and choose their prices under the constraint of nonnegative profits. We show that in equilibrium there...