This paper considers the problem of voting about the quantity of a public good. An experiment has been run in order to test the extent of the strategic bias that arises in the individual vote when the social choice rule is to select the mean of the quantities voted for; conflicting theoretical...

This paper aims to theoretically analyse recent health system reforms. Generally patients are free to choose, within the region they live in, the best provider among the private "accredited" and public ones. The criterion patients use to choose the provider which fits their expectations best is...

This work is intended to analyze the market for health care through a computational approach based on unsupervised neural networks. The paper provides a theoretical framework for a computational model that relies on Kohonen's self organizing maps (SOM), arranged into two layers: in the upper...

The model studies the role of reputation in contracts between providers and purchasers of health care services. The economic literature has examined the case when the demand for health services depends on the quality offered, but because of information asymmetry, we assume that quality is not...

Cream skimming is an illegal behaviour that consists in choosing to treat patients according to their ability to recover. It arises from the use of prospective payment schemes in an asymmetry of information framework. In this context in fact the provider can observe some relevant information...

Global public goods, differently from what it might be thought, are quite common in the real world. This work suggests that both the governments' struggle against Mafia and the prevention of immigration can be regarded as global public goods. We assume a federation of jurisdictions with two...