This paper addresses the issue of hospital bed capacity by considering the stochastic demand for United States hospitals. An equilibrium condition for the optimal number of "excess" beds is derived and applied using a cost function estimated with a panel data model for the period 1987-1992....

In recent years, concern in the United States over rising health care costs has led to precipitous reductions in the lengths of hospitalizations. While perceptions of compromised medical care quality following this practice and others have prompted policy makers to consider stricter regulation...

This paper presents new estimates of scale economies for US hospitals. We show that the common translog specification of hospital costs is a misspecification, and employ nonparametric, local linear estimation with both continuous and discrete covariates. A bootstrap method is used to provide...

A moratorium in the US on referrals of Medicare and Medicaid patients to new cardiac, orthopedic, or surgical specialty hospitals by physician-investors was recently lifted, yet the considerable controversy stirred by this growing hospital organizational form continues. This paper calls...

This article compares the strategic announcement of a reservation price by a bid-taking buyer in a first-price sealed bid auction with the strategy of no announcement. Simulation results indicate that an operative ceiling price that is unknown to bidders will yield lower supply costs to the...

Ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs), limited-service alternatives for treating surgery patients not requiring an overnight stay, are a health‐care service innovation that has proliferated in the U.S. and other countries in recent years. This paper examines the effects of ASC competition on...

This paper explores changes in traditional commodity programs from the perspective of domestic welfare. A theoretical model was developed which describes domestic welfare changes that follow from policies consistent with reductions in international price distortions. The model was applied to the...