Recent healthcare reforms have sought to increase efficiency by introducing managed care (MC) while respecting consumer preferences by admitting choice between MC and conventional care. This article proposes an institutional change designed to let German consumers choose between the two settings...

For optimal solutions in health care, decision makers inevitably must evaluate trade-offs, which call for multiattribute valuation methods. Researchers have proposed using best-worst scaling (BWS) methods which seek to extract information from respondents by asking them to identify the best and...

Best-worst scaling (BWS), also known as maximum-difference scaling, is a multiattribute approach to measuring preferences. BWS aims at the analysis of preferences regarding a set of attributes, their levels or alternatives. It is a stated-preference method based on the assumption that...

In their seminal contributions, Pauly, Kunreuther and Hirth (1995) as well as Cochrane (1995) addressed the feature of time consistency and guaranteed renewability (GR) in insurance contracts. GR means an insurer's unilateral commitment to the continuation of the contract after the occurrence of...

The starting point of the debate about the pros and cons of multipayer systems is the suspicion that in many health care systems, consumers do not get sufficient value for money. This contribution argues that one cause may be a non-optimal choice of payment systems. Optimal payment of health...