Rationing by waiting time is commonly used in health care systems with zero or low money prices. Some systems prioritise particular types of patient and offer them lower waiting times. We investigate whether prioritisation is welfare improving when the benefit from treatment is the sum of two...

Waiting times have been a central concern in the English NHS, where care is provided free at the point of delivery and is rationed by waiting time. Pro-market reforms introduced in the NHS in the 1990s were not accompanied by large drops in waiting times. As a result, the English government in...

This paper demonstrates that inertia driven by switching costs leads to more rapid evolution in a class of games that includes m x m pure coordination games. Under the best-response dynamic and a fixed rate of mutation, the expected waiting time to reach long-run equilibrium is of lower order in...

This paper shows how graphs can be used to calculate expected waiting times in models of equilibrium selection. It also shows how reducing the state space can simplify the calculations both of waiting times and selected equilibria. The results are applied to potential games and games with...

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...

The length of waiting lists for treatment in the British National Health Service is an issue of current political and economic concern. This paper presents estimates of the costs to consumers of waiting lists for non-urgent medical care. The estimates are derived from data collected using...

This paper studies the impact of hospital competition on waiting times. We use a Salop-type model, with hospitals that differ in (geographical) location and, potentially, waiting time, and two types of patients; high-benefit patients who choose between neighbouring hospitals (competitive...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between satisfaction with waiting times in the Public Primary Health Care Service in Andalucía and a host of individual variables as well as market determinants. Since waiting time is imposing an opportunity cost on individuals, we...