When a patient's illness perception is inconsistent with a doctor's diagnosis result, she may seek for more doctoral opinions, a behavior called doctor shopping. Patients then update their beliefs about their health status, following the Bayes' rule. In this study, we model and derive patients'...

We study strategic customer behavior in a multiserver stochastic service system with a congestion-based staffing (CBS) policy. With the CBS policy, the number of working servers is dynamically adjusted according to the queue length. Besides lining up for free service, customers have the option...

This paper studies the efficiency of two subsidy schemes widely used in health-care systems: unconditional and conditional. Unconditional schemes partially subsidize customers seeking private care without pre-requirement, whereas conditional schemes fully subsidize those who have waited...