Recent health policy reforms try to increase consumer choice. We use a laboratory experiment to analyze consumers' tastes in typical contract attributes of health insurances and to investigate their relationship with individual risk preferences. First, subjects make consecutive insurance choices...

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...

Since Mancur Olson's “Logic of collective action” it is common conviction in social sciences that in large groups the prospects of a successful organization of collective actions are rather bad. Following Olson's logic, the impact of an individual's costly contribution becomes smaller if the...

The dynamics of behavior observed in standard public-good experiments can be explained by imperfect conditional cooperation combined with social learning (Fischbacher and Gächter, 2010). But it is unclear what determines first-round contributions. We argue that first-round contributions depend...

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...