The use of government-mandated report cards to diminish uncertainty about the quality of products and services is widespread. However, report cards will have little effect if they simply confirm consumers' prior beliefs. Moreover, documented "responses" to report cards may reflect learning about...

This paper investigates whether managers who fail to exploit regulatory loopholes are vulnerable to replacement. We use the U.S. hospital industry in 1985-1996 as a case study. A 1988 change in Medicare rules widened a pre-existing loophole in the Medicare payment system, presenting hospitals...

This paper investigates whether management teams that fail to exploit regulatory loopholes are vulnerable to replacement. We use the U.S. hospital industry in 1985-96 as a case study. A 1988 change in Medicare rules widened a preexisting loophole in the Medicare payment system, presenting...

Estimated responses to report cards may reflect learning about quality that would have occurred in their absence (market-based learning). Using panel data on Medicare HMOs, we examine the relationship between enrollment and quality before and after report cards were mailed to 40 million Medicare...

Existence problems have been pervasive in the economics literature on horizontal product differentiation. Adding a directional constraint to a standard Hotelling location model leads to a general result of non-existence of a pure strategy Nash equilibrium. Here we present a slightly different...

Prevention has been a main issue of recent policy orientations in health care. This renews the interest on how different organizational designs and the definition of payment schemes to providers may affect the incentives to provide preventive health care. We focus on the externality resulting...

We introduce a counterfactual analysis of banks mergers, combining the pre-merger equilibrium setting with post-merger environmental characteristics, while accounting for endogenously propagated changes in market structure. Using this procedure we are able to estimate the effects on loan flows...

We present a model of competition between two advertising-financed media firms when consumers dislike advertising. We apply the model to analyze competition between Internet portals and find that equilibrium prices of advertising are higher the less differentiated the portals are perceived to...