Regulatory reforms across European countries have attempted to increase consumer welfare by introducing competition and choice into public service markets. But it has been questioned whether reforms have benefited all people equally, suggesting that vulnerable groups of service users are...

Introducing choice and competition in public services was supposed to put citizens in the “driver's seat”, making them in charge of their service provision. Introducing choice often is indeed beneficial for citizens. However, it sometimes also leads to increased inequality among citizens....

We study the following game: each agent i chooses a lottery over nonnegative numbers whose expectation is equal to his budget b_i. The agent with the highest realized outcome wins (and agents only care about winning). This game is motivated by various real-world settings where agents each choose...

The effect of competition on the quality of health care remains a contested issue. Most empirical estimates rely on inference from non-experimental data. In contrast, this paper exploits a pro-competitive policy reform to provide estimates of the impact of competition on hospital outcomes. The...

We consider a Hotelling model, in which a public firm competes with a foreign firm, at the mean time cooperates with it through subcontracting. We find that when there exists subcontracting, the presence of a foreign firm raises social welfare. Comparing to competing with the domestic private...

The U.S. health care system is organized around markets. There has, however, been ongoing concern about the functioning of these markets, so much so that some have despaired of these markets working at all. The policy response to this concern has been disjointed. Health care markets are subject...

The U.S. health care system is organized around markets. There has, however, been ongoing concern about the functioning of these markets, so much so that some have despaired of these markets working at all. The policy response to this concern has been disjointed. Health care markets are subject...

Fund-raising expenditures represent an important strategic decision for nonprofit managers inthe face of scarce donor resources. Privately, nonprofit managers weigh the trade-off between reaching new donors and increasing the implicit price of output to its constituents. Socially, competition...

We discuss the effect of pricing strategies by two firms on the total firm revenue, consumer and total welfare using simulation and numerical analysis. We consider pricing decisions for mixed bundling and where each firm offers two closely related products as well as a bundle. Bundling is a key...

In this chapter we review issues relating to antitrust and competition in health care markets. The chapter begins with a brief review of antitrust legislation. We then discuss whether and how health care is different from other industries in ways that might affect the optimality of competition....