Even with the expansion of modern medicine, African traditional healers remain popular. The paper advances an economic perspective of healers to contribute to an explanation of this phenomenon. An important element of their practice has previously been ignored: healers use and are able to...

In African health care the "miracle of the market" has not occurred. Patients exhibit willingness to pay for health care and yet practitioners are unable to sell their services. Simultaneously non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are running successful health facilities for which patients are...

In this paper, we construct a joint production model of health with two-sided asymmetric information and ask the question, "How should physicians be compensated?" We demonstrate theoretically that the preferred physician compensation scheme depends on the illness condition. Outcome-contingent...

In African health care the "miracle of the market" has not occurred. Patients exhibit willingness to pay for quality health care and yet good private practitioners are unable to sell their services. Simultaneously nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are running successful health facilities for...