One of the reasons why regulators are hesitant about permitting price competition in healthcare markets is that it may damage quality when information is poor. Evidence on whether this fear is well-founded is scarce. We provide evidence using a reform that permitted Dutch health insurers and...

Many service industries, including the medical and legal professions in some countries, display a gated structure. Rather than approaching a final producer directly, a consumer will first seek a referral from an intermediary. In this paper, we provide one possible explanation for such an...

Many service industries, including the medical and legal professions in some countries, display a gated structure. Rather than approaching a final producer directly, a consumer will first seek a referral from an intermediary. Such an industry structure might help to alleviate adverse selection...

One of the reasons why regulators are hesitant about permitting price competition in healthcare markets is that it may damage quality when information is poor. Evidence on whether this fear is well-founded is scarce. We provide evidence using a reform that permitted Dutch health insurers and...

We analyze health care option demand markets with vertical restraints divided along two dimensions: naked and conditional exclusion, and vertical integration; applicable to the upstream, the downstream, and both markets. Our unified framework includes forward and backward integration, and joint...

The extension of patent protection to biological material is by no means a recent phenomenon in Belgium. In 1836 the Belgian Patent Office granted the first patent for a micro-organism, viz. a yeast for the production of beer. A century later, in 1949, the Office delivered the first patent for a...

U.S. Prison health care has recently been in the news and in the courts. A particular issue is whether prisons should contract out for health care. Contracting out has been growing over the past few decadest. The stated motivation for this change ranges from a desire to improve the prison health...

In recent years, decentralization of financial and political power has been perceived as a useful means to improve outcomes of the health care sector. Such reforms are often a result of fashion, rather than being based on knowledge of “what works”. If decentralization is the favored strategy...

Within the debate about the rise of costs in the German health system, the argument has put forth that patients' excessive demand for benefits is caused by the existence of a moral hazard problem. One way of influencing an insured person's consumer behaviour is the introduction of several...