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...

Traditional healers in Cameroun are paid on an outcome--contingent basis, where payments are linked to the recovery of the patient. On the other hand, organizational providers (government clinics and hospitals and church--based clinics and hospitals) are paid a fixed fee at the time of...

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...

The benefit of health care comes not just from the ability of health care providers to produce health but from their motivation to do so as well. The fact that traditional healers in Africa are paid on the basis of health outcomes not services provided changes the incentives they face compared...