Adverse selection death spirals in health insurance are dramatic, and so far, exotic economic events. The possibility of death spirals has garnered recent policy and popular attention because the pricing regulations in the Affordable Care Act of 2010 make health plans more vulnerable to them...

The Areeda-Turner rule in U.S. antitrust jurisprudence limits successful predatory pricing cases to circumstances where prices can be shown to have been set below marginal costs. While not cast so, the rule reflects the view that predatory pricing is rarely attempted; and even where attempted is...

This article extends the received literature on optimal provider payment by accounting for consumer heterogeneity in preferences for health insurance and health care. This heterogeneity breaks down the separation of the relationship between providers and the health insurer and the relationship...

Taking an evolutionary view of markets, Harold Demsetz hypothesized that firms differ persistently in efficiency and that industry concentration results from growth of efficient firms at the expense of inefficient ones. We test the hypothesis with high quality microdata from the US hospital...

The economic and legal view of vertical integration has varied over time. But, a constant source of concern is the fear that the integrated firm will foreclose competitors from intermediate markets. At the same time, most commentators have considered the economics of vertical contracts,...

Exclusive contracts assign to certain physicians the right and duty to provide all services covered by the contract. All other physicians are foreclosed from providing these services. Many physicians have brought legal complaints alleging that their exclusion constitutes an exclusive contracts...

U.S Prison health care has recently been in the news and in the courts. A particular issue is whether prisons should contract out for health care. Contracting out has been growing over the past few decades. The stated motivation for this change ranges from a desire to improve the prison health...

The hospital competition literature demonstrates that estimates of the effect of local market structure on competition are sensitive to geographic market definition. Our spatial lag approach effects smoothing of the explanatory variables across the discrete market boundaries. This approach...

In U.S. antitrust, pricing below some level of cost has become almost necessary to a finding of predatory pricing. The case law is ambiguous on this, and the Circuits have differing standards, but many courts require a showing that price is, or was, below marginal (sometimes called incremental)...