Health Insurance Competition in Germany - the Role of Advertising

Bettina Becker () and Silke Uebelmesser

Schmollers Jahrbuch : Journal of Applied Social Science Studies / Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, 2010, vol. 130, issue 2, 169-194

Abstract: In the 1990s, competition among health insurance funds (‘sickness funds’) was introduced in Germany. As one means of competition, free choice of initial health funds and subsequent switching between them was made available to all insured. Since then, the number of funds has decreased substantially, and funds have had to engage in competitive strategies to remain in the market. In this paper, we want to analyse the funds’ advertising activities in the face of the changed competitive environment. This has not been possible to date due to a lack of data. We use two new datasets to get a first insight into the potential effects of competition on funds’ advertising strategies; one of the volume and cost of advertisements and one of their contents. Our results suggest that competition has been associated with an increase in the amount of advertising. As to the adverts themselves, we find that there was a decrease in the share of advertisements of a ‘general’ content in favour of advertisements of a more ‘fund-specific’ content. The data therefore indicate that once the market was open to switching of funds by the insured, funds’ advertising efforts changed to differentiating their own perceived strengths from those of competitor funds. These observations allow us to draw some tentative conclusions about the relevance of (attempts of) risk selection by health funds via advertisements and about the general success of the pro-competitive legislation.

JEL-codes: G22 I11 I18 M37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.3790/schm.130.2.169 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers (2008 onwards); Pay-per-view access from http://www.genios.de (2000 onwards with 2 years moving wall) and http://ejournals.duncker-humblot.de/loi/schm (2008 onwards)

Related works:
Working Paper: Health Insurance Competition in Germany - The Role of Advertising (2010)
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:aeq:aeqsjb:v130_y2010_i2_q2_p169-194

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.duncker-h ... llersjahrbuch-1.html

Access Statistics for this article

Schmollers Jahrbuch : Journal of Applied Social Science Studies / Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften is currently edited by Gert G. Wagner and Joachim Wagner

More articles in Schmollers Jahrbuch : Journal of Applied Social Science Studies / Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften from Duncker & Humblot, Berlin
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriele Freudenmann ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).