In this article we analyse the market for drugs in health care markets where third payers (an insurance company or a government agency) bear the cost and we suggest a common and transparent methodology to set the price for new drugs as well as active principles for which an alternative already...

There is increasing concern that overlapping patents in the field of genetics will create a costly and legally complex situation known as a patent thicket, which, along with the associated issues of accumulating royalty payments, can act as a disincentive for innovation. One potential means of...

Patents are a key element of our knowledge based economy. They are meant to operate as an instrument for fostering innovation by generating incentives through the grant of temporary exclusive rights. The present paper starts by describing some major trends in patent law and practice and throws...

We analyse the effect of competition on quality in hospital markets with regulated prices, considering both the effect of (i) introducing competition (monopoly versus competition) and (ii) increasing competition through lower transportation costs (increased substitutability) or a higher number...

This paper investigates competition between health insurance companies under different financing regulations. We consider two alternatives advanced in recent German health care reform discussions: competition by contribution rates (health contributions) and by fees (health premia). We find that...

Competition among health insurers is widely considered to be a means of enhancing efficiency and containing costs in the health care system. In this paper, it is argued that this could be unsuccessful since health care providers hold a strong position on the market for health care services....

This article assesses how the form of the utility function in discrete-choice experiments (DCEs) affects estimates of willingness-to-pay (WTP). The utility function is usually assumed to be linear in its attributes. Non-linearities, in the guise of interactions and higher-order terms, are...

We investigate the effect of reputational motivation on output in a scenario of overprovision of medical treatment. We assume that physicians differ in their degree of altruism, enjoy being perceived as good but dislike being perceived as greedy. We show that better reputational motivation...

This paper investigates competition between health insurance companies under different financing regulations. We consider two alternatives advanced in recent German health care reform discussions: competition by contribution rates (health contributions) and by fees (health premia). We find that...