Testing for Price Leadership and for Reputation Goods Effects: Swedish Dental Services

Rickard Eriksson ()

No 5/2004, Working Paper Series from Stockholm University, Swedish Institute for Social Research

Abstract: Sweden deregulated the prices for dental services in 1999. Twenty-one Swedish county councils provide public dental services. They compete with 3000 small independent private firms. Public and private providers are subsidized by the government to an equal extent, but most of the costs are borne by the consumers. The private firms’ price setting is strongly influenced by the county councils’ prices after the deregulation, i.e. the county councils act as price leaders. Prices increased more in large markets, which is consistent with dental services being a reputation good. There was no effect of the dentist’s gender on prices, but immigrant dentists increased their prices slightly less than native ones.

Keywords: dental services; price leadership; reputation goods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I11 L11 L13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2004-10-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:374597/FULLTEXT01.pdf (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:hhs:sofiwp:2004_005

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Stockholm University, Swedish Institute for Social Research SOFI, Stockholm University, SE-10691 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Daniel Rossetti ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).