Despite heated debate about the pros and cons of online physician ratings, very little systematic work examines the correlation between physicians’ online ratings and their actual medical performance. Using patients’ ratings of physicians at RateMDs.com and the Florida Hospital Discharge...

Large, urban tertiary care hospitals often acquire outlying community hospitals. One possible motivation is to increase referrals. Sophisticated acquirers may even attempt to concentrate additional referrals among more profitable patients. We explore these issues by studying 26 vertical...

Large, urban tertiary care hospitals often acquire outlying community hospitals. One possible motivation is to increase referrals. Sophisticated acquirers may even attempt to concentrate additional referrals among more profitable patients. We explore these issues by studying 26 vertical...

Background: In this paper we propose the use of the within-subject coefficient of variation as an index of a measurement's reliability. For continuous variables and based on its maximum likelihood estimation we derive a variance-stabilizing transformation and discuss confidence interval...

We construct a model to analyze the willingness of Health Authorities to reach agreements with private hospitals to have some of their public sector patients treated there. When physicians are dual suppliers, we show that a problem of cream-skimming arises and reduces the incentives of the...