Health plans create competition among hospitals by threatening to “steer” patients to preferred facilities. Mergers can reduce this competition and economists have begun using travel cost demand models to predict their effects. In this paper, we document an anomaly in estimation: for any...

Many intensive care units (ICUs) face overcrowding. One response to this overcrowding is to bump ICU patients to other departments of the hopsital to make room for new patient arrivals. Such bumping clearly has the potential to reduce quality care. In this paper we develop a stochastic model of...