This brief considers the interaction between physician incentive systems and product market competition in the delivery of medical services via managed care organizations. At the center of the analysis is the process by which health maintenance organizations (HMOs) assemble physician networks...

Many incentive contracts are inherently ambiguous, lacking an explicit mapping between performance and pay. Using an online labor market, Amazon Mechanical Turk, we study the effect of ambiguous incentives on willingness to accept contracts to do a real-effort task, the probability of completing...

We analyze the effect that competition between HMOs has on the cost and quality of medical services. Our key result is that increasing competition enhances consumer utility while also moderating the impact of managed care on quality and costs. Indeed, we find that heightened competition between...