One of the main features of health insurance is moral hazard, as defined by Pauly (1968); people face incentives for excess utilization of medical care since they do not pay the full marginal cost for provision. To mitigate the moral hazard problem, a coinsurance can be included in the insurance...

We study a health-insurance market where individuals are o.ered coverage against both medical expenditures and losses in income. Individuals vary in their level of innate ability. If there is private information about the probability of illness and an individual’s innate ability is su.ciently...

In this paper, we view health insurance as a combined hedge against the two consequences of falling ill: treatment expenditures and loss in income. We discuss how an individual’s ability when healthy affects her decision on whether to buy health insurance with treatment to full recovery if ill...

The U.S. tax policy on health insurance favors only those offered a group insurance through their employers. This policy is highly regressive since the subsidy takes the form of deductions from the progressive tax system. The paper investigates alternatives to the current policy. We find that...

Given heterogeneity in incomes and health risks, with asymmetric information in the latter, preferences over the public-private mix in health insurance and care are derived. Results concerning crowding-out in the presence of adverse selection are established. For low-risk individuals,...

Several empirical studies provide evidence that their actual health state affects people's attitudes towards health and medical care in hypothetical health states. In the tradition of behavioural economics this paper considers the actual health state as a point of reference and builds a model...

Conventional theory holds that moral hazard - the additional health care purchased as a result of becoming insured - is an opportunistic price response and is welfare-decreasing because the value of the additional health care purchased is less than its costs. The theory of the demand for health...

This paper presents theory that an important source of value is missing from conventional theory of the demand for health insurance, namely, the effect of the transfer of income (from those who purchase insurance and remain healthy to those who purchase insurance and become ill) on purchases of...

We consider physicians with fixed capacity levels. If a physician's capacity exceeds demand, she may have an incentive to overtreat, i.e., she may provide unnecessary treatments to use up idle capacity. By contrast, with excess demand she may undertreat, i.e., she may not provide necessary...

One of the main features of health insurance is moral hazard, as defined by Pauly (1968); people face incentives for excess utilization of medical care since they do not pay the full marginal cost for provision. To mitigate the moral hazard problem, a coinsurance can be included in the insurance...