Commentary All editorial matter in CMAJ represents the opinions of the authors and not necessarily those of the Canadian Medical Association. M ost doctors feel that they provide good to above-average patient care. However, Canadian physicians rarely receive feedback about their clinical performance or patient outcomes. Although both of us believe that we provide excellent patient care, we have...

We present a model of optimal contracting between a purchaser and a provider of health services when quality has two dimensions. We assume that: (i) the provider is (at least to some extent) altruistic; (ii) one dimension of quality is verifiable (dimension 1) and one dimension is not verifiable (dimension 2); (iii) the two quality dimensions can be either substitutes or complements. Our main r...

Although there is a voluminous psychological literature on performance evaluation (PE), surprisingly little of this research examines the consequences of linking pay to evaluated performance in work settings. Rather, PE research has been dominated by cognitive processing, measurement, and construct validity issues. At the same time, a large literature on pay-for-performance (PFP) linkages does ...