We present causal evidence from a controlled experiment on the effect of pay for performance on physicians' behavior and patients' health benefits. At a within-subject level, we introduce performance pay to complement either fee-for-service or capitation. Performance pay is granted if a health...

We explore how competition between physicians affects medical service provision. Previous research has shown that, without competition, physicians deviate from patient-optimal treatment under payment systems like capitation and fee-for-service. While competition might reduce these distortions,...

Mixed payment systems have become a prominent alternative to paying physicians through fee-for-service and capitation. While theory shows mixed payment systems to be superior, empirically, causal effects on physicians’ behavior are not well understood when introducing mixed systems. We...

Most common physician payment schemes include some form of traditional capitation or fee-for-service payment. While health economics research often focuses on direct incentive effects of these payments, we demonstrate that the opportunity to sort into one’s preferred payment scheme may also...

Recent health policy reforms try to increase consumer choice. We use a laboratory experiment to analyze consumers’ tastes in typical contract attributes of health insurances and to investigate their relationship with individual risk preferences. First, subjects make consecutive insurance...

Based on a Salop model with regulated prices, we investigate quality provision behavior of competing hospitals before and after a merger. For this, we use a controlled laboratory experiment where subjects decide on the level of treatment quality as head of a hospital. We find that the...