The relationship between physician and patient has been discussed intensively in the literature. Nevertheless, they neglect the fact that the production of health not only depends on the medical services supplied by the physician but is also influenced by the patient's compliance. We present a...

The paper presents a principal-agent model to analyse the relationship between physicians and patients. The application of the standard principal-agent model shows some shortcomings of the analysis when being implemented into the field of health economics. Therefore it is necessary to look at...

The discussion about health care systems focuses on the dynamics of expenditures and on the weak growth of the revenue base. In this discussion it is widely overseen that medical expenditures and supply of medical services crucially depend on the compensation of physician services. The paper...

Estimation procedures for ordered categories usually assume that the estimated coefficients of independent variables do not vary between the categories (parallel-lines assumption). This view neglects possible heterogeneous effects of some explaining factors. This paper describes the use of an...

The economic costs of chronic health conditions and severe illnesses like diabetes, coronary heart disease or cancer are immense. Several clinical trials give information about the importance of individual behaviour for the prevalence of these illnesses. Changes in health relevant behaviour may...

The importance of the physician-patient relationship for the health care market is beyond controversy. Recent work emphasizes a two-sided asymmetric information relationship between physician and patient. In contrast to most work looking only at the physician's perspective, our paper...