In recent health care reforms, several countries have replaced pure payment schemes for physicians (fee-for-service, capitation) by so-called mixed payment schemes. Until now it is still an unresolved issue whether patients are really better off after these reforms. In this study we compare the...

How to effectively combine performance pay with the traditional payment methods capitation and fee-for-service to improve the quality of care is not well understood. To establish a systematic comparison of physicians’ behavior under these payment methods, we employ a parsimonious experimental...

A central concern in health economics is to understand the influence of commonly used physician payment systems. We introduce a controlled laboratory experiment to analyze the influence of fee-for-service (FFS) and capitation (CAP) payments on physicians' behavior. Medical students decide as...

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...

We study how patient-regarding altruism is formed by medical education, a so far under-researched question. We structurally estimate altruistic preferences using experimental data from a large sample of medical students (N=733) in Germany at different stages in their studies. The estimates...

We present causal evidence on the effect of performance pay on health care provision, from a behavioral experiment with a representative sample of German primary care physicians. Randomly assigning physicians to two performance incentive levels, we analyze how performance pay, compared to...

Recent reforms in health care have introduced a variety of pay-for-performance programs using financial incentives for physicians to improve the quality of care. Their effectiveness is, however, ambiguous as it is often difficult to disentangle the effect of financial incentives from the ones of...

There is considerable controversy about what causes (in)effectiveness of physician performance pay. Using a behavioral experiment with a representative sample of German primary-care physicians, we study the incentive effect of performance pay on service provision and quality of care. To explain...