Performance indicators are increasingly used to regulate quality in health care and other areas of the public sector. We develop a model of contracting between a purchaser (principal) and a provider (agent) under the following scenarios: a) higher ability increases quality directly and...

We discuss the social welfare improvement under centralized and decentralized hierarchies and focus on supervisoris ability to monitor quality. Although the possibility of collusion against the principal is eliminated under decentralized hierarchy, the decentralization is dominating only if...

We discuss the social welfare improvement under centralized and decentralized hierarchies and focus on supervisoris ability to monitor quality. Although the possibility of collusion against the principal is eliminated under decentralized hierarchy, the decentralization is dominating only if...

We discuss the social welfare improvement under centralized and decentralized hierarchies and focus on supervisoris ability to monitor quality. Although the possibility of collusion against the principal is eliminated under decentralized hierarchy, the decentralization is dominating only if...

We present a model of optimal contracting between a purchaser and a provider of health services when quality has two dimensions. We assume that one dimension of quality is veri?able (dimension 1) and one dimension is not verifiable (dimension 2). We show that the power of the incentive scheme...

Using a spatial competition framework with three ex ante identical firms, we study the effects of a horizontal merger on quality, price and welfare. The merging firms always reduce quality. They also increase prices if demand responsiveness to quality is sufficiently low. The non-merging firm,...

We examine (a) the effect of market structure on the level of mortality for AMI, hip fracture, and stroke between 2002/3 and 2010/11 and (b) whether this effect changed after the introduction of Choice policy in 2006 which gave patients the right to a wider choice of hospital. For AMI and hip...

We study the incentives for hospitals to provide quality and expend cost-reducing effort when their budgets are soft, i.e., the payer may cover deficits or confiscate surpluses. The basic set up is a Hotelling model with two hospitals that differ in location and face demand uncertainty, where...

We investigate the effect of competition on quality in regulated markets (e.g., health care, higher education, public utilities), using a Hotelling framework, in the presence of sluggish demand. We take a differential-game approach, and derive the open-loop solution (providers choose the optimal...