RAND Journal of Economics articles from December 2003

RAND Journal of Economics archives from December 2003

Network competition in nonlinear pricing.
December 22, 2003... Previous research, assuming linear pricing, has argued that telecommunications networks may use a high access charge as an instrument of collusion. I show that this conclusion is difficult to maintain when operators compete in nonlinear...

Dominant retailers and the countervailing-power hypothesis.
December 22, 2003... I assess rigorously the countervailing-power hypothesis using a model that captures the main ingredients of Galbraith's (1952) arguments as well as some of the important features of the retail industry. I demonstrate that an increase in the...

Introduction.
December 22, 2003... In June 2002, the Heinz School at Carnegie Mellon University and the Management Science Group of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs sponsored an economics conference focusing on problems of incentives and competition in health care...

AIDS policy and psychology: a mechanism-design approach.
December 22, 2003... Economic theorists have given little attention to health-related externalities, such as those involved in the spread of AIDS. One reason for this is the critical role played by psychological factors, such as fear of testing, in the continued...

Prior health expenditures and risk sharing with insurers competing on quality.
December 22, 2003... Insurers can exploit the heterogeneity within risk-adjustment classes to select the good risks because they have more information than the regulator on the expected expenditures of individual insurees. To counteract this cream skimming, mixed...

Structural estimation of a principal-agent model: moral hazard in medical insurance.
December 22, 2003... Despite the importance of principal-agent models in the development of modern economic theory, there are few estimations of these models. I recover the estimates of a principal-agent model and obtain an approximation to the optimal contract....

Contracting with limited commitment: evidence from employment-based health insurance contracts.
December 22, 2003... Impediments to worker mobility serve to mitigate the attrition of healthy individuals from employer-sponsored insurance pools, thereby creating a de facto commitment mechanism that allows for more complete insurance of health risks than would...

The welfare impact of Medicare HMOs.(Health Maintenance Organization)
December 22, 2003... We estimate the welfare associated with the Medicare HMO program, now known as Medicare+Choice (M+C). We find that the creation of the M+C program resulted in approximately $18.7 billion in consumer surplus and $52 billion in profits from 1993...

Competition and market power in option demand markets.
December 22, 2003... We call markets in which intermediaries sell networks of suppliers to consumers who are uncertain about their needs "option demand markets." In these markets, suppliers may grant the intermediaries discounts in order to be admitted to their...

Competition among hospitals.
December 22, 2003... We examine competition in the hospital industry, in particular the effect of ownership type (for-profit, not-for-profit, government). We estimate a structural model of demand and pricing in the hospital industry in California, then use the...

Assessing competition in hospital care markets: the importance of accounting for quality differentiation.
December 22, 2003... Quality differentiation is especially important in the hospital industry, where the choices of Medicare patients are unaffected by prices. Unlike previous studies that use geographic market concentration to estimate hospital competitiveness,...

RAND journal of economics turnaround times.(Illustration)
December 22, 2003... RAND Journal of Economics Turnaround Times First Decision (%) Month 0-3 4-6 7-9 10+ No Decision Total Submitted Months Months Months Months (%) (%) ...