Pay-for-performance (P4P) has emerged in the US as a key strategy for improving quality of care. The basic concept is to give providers, typically hospitals or physicians, financial incentives to achieve assigned quality goals. This paper compares and contrasts a broad set of quantitative and...

Research on hospital productivity has progressed over the last few decades considerably from early models where measurements of hospital services simply counted inpatient days, and perhaps outpatient visits or numbers of surgeries performed. This simplicity represents an extreme of aggregation,...