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 are a source of health care for which Africans have always paid and even with the expansion of modern medicine healers are still popular. This paper advances the unique view that traditional healers neither possess supernatural power nor do they take advantage of their...

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...

Many doctors in developing countries provide considerably lower levels of quality to their patients than they have been trained to provide. The gap between best practice and actual performance is difficult to measure for individual doctors who differ in levels of training and experience and who...