We use a model of horizontal and vertical differentiation to study physicians’ incentives to provide quality in the physician-patient relationship under price regulation. If the price is the only regulatory variable, the social planner cannot implement the first-best policy. Moreover, the...

A competitive rent-seeking club (CRSC) offers its members the chance of winning a prize (status, position, privilege) by being selected, typically, by a civil servant or a politician. The selector replaces in our setting the usual contest success function; instead of determining the winner on...

This paper presents a detailed econometric investigation of vertical product (i.e. quality) differentiation in EU markets. Use is made of trade statistics at the most detailed (8-digit CN) level to analyse the pattern of quality positioning in EU trade (of EU memebers and non-EU countries.) Two...

We propose a general model of imperfect competition among multi-productfirms, the consumption of whose goods yields externalities from oneconsumer to another. We extend the allocation approach of Weyl (2010)'smonopoly model, proposing a solution concept, Insulated Equilibrium,that allows for...

Based on a Salop model with regulated prices, we investigate quality provision behavior of competing hospitals before and after a merger. For this, we use a controlled laboratory experiment where subjects decide on the level of treatment quality as head of a hospital. We find that the...

New empirical evidence shows substantial heterogeneity in the altruism of healthcare providers. Spurred by this evidence, we build a spatial quality competition model with altruism heterogeneity. We find that more altruistic healthcare providers supply relatively higher quality levels and...

In this paper, we study the rational for an incumbent to launch a second brand when facing potential entry in a market with quality differentiated products and a fringe producer. Depending on market size, costs for a second brand and a potential entrant's setup cost the incumbent might use a...

We investigate the quality provision behavior and its implications for the occurrence of collusion in competitive health care markets where providers are assumed to be altruistic towards patients. For this, we employ a laboratory experiment with a health care market framing where subjects decide...

In the international health care literature there is a broad discussion on impactsof competition in health care markets. But aspects of standardization in regionalhealth care markets with no price competition received comparatively little attention.We use a typical Hotelling-framework (reference...