We investigate the effect of reputational motivation on output in a scenario of overprovision of medical treatment. We assume that physicians differ in their degree of altruism, enjoy being perceived as good but dislike being perceived as greedy. We show that better reputational motivation...

In many public health care systems treatment is rationed by waiting time. We examine the optimal allocation of a .xed supply of a treatment between di¤erent groups of patients. Even in the absence of any distributional aims welfare is increased by third degree waiting time discrimination....

The optimal allocation of a public health care budget across treatments must take account of the way in which care is rationed within treatments since this will affect their marginal value. We investigate the optimal allocation rules for health care systems where user charges are fixed and care...

Primary care physicians have two roles: the healer and the gatekeeper. We show that, due to information asymmetries, they cannot be expected to fulfill the latter role. Better gatekeepers will be poorer healers; hence all patients, both truly sick and shirkers, will strictly prefer physicians...

We use the same methodology, that Ecofin-Oecd apply for projecting expenditure in the medium-long term, to reconstruct expenditure in the medium-long past. It is possible to compare the effective expenditure with the reconstructed one. The effective expenditure is of course influenced by policy...

We study how the optimal public provision of health care depends on whether or not individuals have an option to seek publicly financed treatment in other regions. We find that, relative to the first-best solution, the government has an incentive to over-provide health care to low-income...

Invoking Yaari's dual theory we develop a model of individual vaccination decisions that incorporates quasi-hyperbolic discounting (present-biasedness), risk aversion, and information. We test the resulting hypotheses for the flu season 2010/2011 using a representative German data set. It turns...

We study how market conditions influence referrals of patients by general practitioners (GPs).We set up a model ofGP referral for theNorwegian health care system, where a GP receives capitation payment based on the number of patients in his practice, as well as fee-for-service reimbursements. A...

Medicare continues to implement payment reforms that shift reimbursement from fee-for-service toward episode-based payment, affecting average and marginal payment. We contrast the effects of two reforms for home health agencies. The home health interim payment system in 1997 lowered both types...

Patients switching physicians involves costs to the patients because of less continuity of care. From a theoretical model we derive that inferior physician quality as perceived by patients, implies patient shortage for the physician and more patients switching physicians. By means of a unique...