There is growing interest in discrete-choice experiments (DCE) as a method to elicit consumers' preferences in the health care sector. Increasingly this method is used to determine willingness-to-pay (WTP) for health-related goods. However, its external validity in the health care domain has not...

Health insurance is potentially subject to risk selection, i.e. adverse selection on the part of consumers and cream skimming on the part of insurers. Adverse selection models predict that competitive health insurers can eschew high-risk individuals by o¤ering contracts with low deductibles or...

The paper analyzes the effects of more intense competition on firms'incentives to invest in process innovations. We carry out experiments for two-stage games, where R&D investment choices are followed by product market competition. As predicted by theory, an increase in the number of firms from...

Health economists have studied the determinants of the expected value of health status as a function of medical and nonmedical inputs, often finding small marginal effects of the former. This paper argues that both types of input have an additional benefit, viz. a reduced variability of health...

This contribution starts out by noting a conflict of interest between consumers and insurers. Consumers face positive correlation in their assets (health, wealth, wisdom, i.e. skills), causing them to demand a great deal of insurance coverage. Insurers on the other hand eschew positively...

The German health care reform of 1997 provides a natural experiment for evaluating the price sensitivity of demand for physicians’ services. As part of the reform, copayments for prescription drugs were increased by up to 200 percent. However, certain groups of people were exempted from the...

In the literature on optimal indemnity schedules, indemnities are usually restricted to be non-negative. Gollier (1987) shows that this constraint might well bind: insured could get higher expected utility if insurance contracts would allow payments from the insured to the insurer at some...

We develop a product market theory that explains why firms invest in general training of their workers. We consider a model where firms first decide whether to invest in general human capital, then make wage offers for each others’ trained employees and finally engage in imperfect product...