Hotelling competition on quality in the health care market

Marcello Montefiori

POLIS Working Papers from Institute of Public Policy and Public Choice - POLIS

Abstract: This paper aims to theoretically analyse recent health system reforms. Generally patients are free to choose, within the region they live in, the best provider among the private "accredited" and public ones. The criterion patients use to choose the provider which fits their expectations best is not, at least in a tax financed system, the price of the treatment since patients do not pay directly for the treatment they receive. Crucial in determining their choice is the quality level and the provider spatial location. In a normative perspective we want to analyse hospitals' Nash/Counot and Stackelberg equilibriums in a Hotelling spatial competition scenario. Because of asymmetric information, patients could be unable to observe the true quality provided. Thus the demand for health care services is assumed to depend on a perceived quality (different from true quality). New equilibrium outcomes are investigated when patient choice is affected by uncertainty.

JEL-codes: I11 L13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2003-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ind
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aBCTz-nMaXBx7xZ9s ... 7GP/view?usp=sharing (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uca:ucapdv:33

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in POLIS Working Papers from Institute of Public Policy and Public Choice - POLIS
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucia Padovani ().