Market structure and technology: evidence from the Italian National Health Service

Silvana Robone and Alberto Zanardi ()

International Journal of Health Economics and Management, 2006, vol. 6, issue 3, 215-236

Abstract: Sutton (1991, Sunk costs and market structure. Cambridge: MIT Press; 1998, Technology and market structure. Cambridge: MIT Press) theorised that industries evolve into distinct market configurations in terms of concentration, depending upon product homogeneity and whether R&D or advertising are relevant relative to set-up costs. This paper tests the existence of such a relationship between technological profiles and market structure empirically, using the health care services provided by the Italian National Health Service as the specific economic framework. Our results support the empirical predictions made by Sutton. In particular, in markets where the technological intensity is low the lower bound to concentration converges monotonically to zero when the market size increases, for any level of product homogeneity. Conversely, in markets where the technological intensity is high the lower bound of concentration converges to some positive (non-zero) value when market size increases, while the lower bound increases (from zero) when the level of product homogeneity increases. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2006

Keywords: Health care; Market structure; Technology; I11; L1; L8; O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10754-006-9002-7 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:ijhcfe:v:6:y:2006:i:3:p:215-236

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... th/journal/10754/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10754-006-9002-7

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Health Economics and Management is currently edited by Leemore Dafny, Robert Town, Mark Pauly, David Dranove and Pedro Pita Barros

More articles in International Journal of Health Economics and Management from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().