This paper examines the competition of nonprofit sickness funds in the market for supplementary health insurance. We investigate product quality strategies when quality is costly and the sickness funds are competing for customers. As long as the sickness funds choose the qualities for...

The relationship between physicians and hospitals has dramatically changed over the last decade, with the employer-employee model supplanting the traditional model of private physicians with hospital admitting privileges. We examine the motivation for this form of vertical integration by...

Vertical integration in the health sector refers to the government structure designed to coordinate and control attention services in the different states of the value chain, and to facilitate the collaboration and communication between the suppliers. In Colombia, the vertical integration allows...

General (or family) practice and its role within primary care is increasingly regarded as the key to achieving efficiency and equity in many health care systems. This is particularly relevant where general practitioners (GPs) act as gatekeepers to specialist care. This chapter outlines the main...

We develop a partial equilibrium, perfectly competitive framework of a (potentially) vertically oriented industry. There are three types of firms: Upstream firms that use primary factors to produce an intermediate; downstream firms that use primary factors and intermediates to produce a final...

This paper examines how the density and governance of vertically related populations affect the life chances of organizations. We integrate the literatures on organizational ecology and vertical integration to develop a theory of how 1) specialized upstream industries affect downstream survival...