This chapter reviews the literature on payment schemes for government purchases of health services. It focuses on four themes: (1) the tension between obtaining appropriate quality of services and keeping the cost of those services at an acceptable level; (2) the role of cost sharing by the...

This paper investigates the impact of monitoring institutions on market outcomes in health care. Health care markets are characterized by asymmetric information. Physicians have an information advantage over patients with respect to the appropriate treatment for the patient and may exploit this...

This experiment examines the relationship between payment systems and the quality and quantity of services provided in credence goods markets. By using a real-effort task to stimulate the decision making of service providers, the study finds that payment systems do indeed have an impact on...

Based on the cultural formation of continuous preferences framework of Pichler [16], this paper analyzes the evolution of preferences and behavior in a two cultural groups setting. We show that the qualitative dynamic properties depend crucially on what parents perceive as the optimal...