Even with the expansion of modern medicine, African traditional healers remain popular. The paper advances an economic perspective of healers to contribute to an explanation of this phenomenon. An important element of their practice has previously been ignored: healers use and are able to...

In this paper, we construct a joint production model of health with two-sided asymmetric information and ask the question, "How should physicians be compensated?" We demonstrate theoretically that the preferred physician compensation scheme depends on the illness condition. Outcome-contingent...