Patients' free choice of physicians is not always good

Xinyu Li and Christian Waibel

Health Economics, 2021, vol. 30, issue 11, 2751-2765

Abstract: We present a model of learning in healthcare markets. Hospitals have junior physicians with low and senior physicians with high ability. Junior physicians turn senior if they treat enough patients. Patients face heterogeneous costs for waiting if a physician's capacity is utilized. Hospitals choose to either allocate patients to physicians randomly or let patients choose their physicians. In a monopolistic market, the hospital always chooses the welfare‐maximizing allocation system. In a competitive market, inefficiencies may arise due to two externalities. If patients are free to choose their physician, the marginal patient neither internalizes her impact on other patients' waiting costs nor the learning of junior physicians.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.4407

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:wly:hlthec:v:30:y:2021:i:11:p:2751-2765

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().