Insurance with Multiple Actors

Jason Abaluck, Oren Sarig and Jintaek Song

No 35352, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We analyze how social-planner insurers split cost-sharing between consumers and firms (e.g. patients and doctors, or drivers and car mechanics). With no contracting frictions, firm cost-sharing can replace consumer cost-sharing other than “visit copays.” Optimal firm contracts depend on the marginal rate of substitution between consumer and firm cost-sharing. For Medicare physician services, paying physicians more up front but less as spending increases reduces risk for both patients and providers; in our calibration, net benefits are twice those from eliminating Medigap externality. For prescription drugs, a dollar of physician paperwork costs is 45–110 times more impactful than a dollar of consumer cost-sharing.

JEL-codes: D82 I11 I13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Note: AG EH PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35352.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:35352

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35352
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().