Background In recent years, accreditation of private hospitals followed by decentralisation of the Italian National Health Service (NHS) into 21 regional health systems has provided a good empirical ground for investigating the Tiebout principle of “voting with their feet”. We examine the infra-regional trade-off between greater patient choice (due to an increase in hospital services supply) an...

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The expectation of a random variable is its average value, where each value is weighted according to the probability that it comes up. The expectation is also called the expected value or the mean of the random variable. For example, suppose we select a student uniformly at random from the class, and let R be the student’s quiz score. Then E [R] is just the class average —the first thing everyo...