The following is a model of psychological contracting with unmonitorable performance, implicit o¤ers, and screening for non-performance by the announcement of the expectation of performance. It is motivated by the $250 billion prescription drug industry, which spends $19 billion per year on marketing to US doctors, mostly on ‘gifts’, and often, as at Yale, with no monitoring for reciprocation. ...

In this paper we develop a general equilibrium overlapping generations (OLG) model with health shocks to study the life-cycle behaviors of health care spending and financing. We show that a calibrated version of our model is able to match the life-cycle trend of insurance take up ratios and average medical expenditure from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) data in 2004/05. We then app...

This paper analyzes the impact of a negotiated scheme and a generic reference price system in comparison to a simple copayment system in a vertical di¤erentiation model with switching costs. The duopolistic market structure with an o¤-patent brand-name drug competing in a Stackelberg-mode with a generic version is adopted from Merino-Castéllo 2003. Brand-name drug and generic version di¤er in p...

Medical Technology and the Production of Health Care This paper investigates the factors that determine differences across OECD countries in health outcomes, using data on life expectancy at age 65, over the period 1960 to 2007. We estimate a production function where life expectancy depends on health and social spending, lifestyle variables, and medical innovation. Our first set of regressions...

HIV/AIDS is a disease for which we ourselves are the vector. Consequently, a high prevalence of the disease in the population is likely to generate a high incidence of new infections. This paper argues that in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the prevalence of other fatal diseases is high, there is a counter-intuitive effect of health care spending: such spending increases the life expectancy of the i...

In response to the growing burden of obesity, public primary prevention programs against obesity have been widely recommended. Several studies estimated the cost effects of diabetes prevention trials for different countries and found that diabetes prevention can be costeffective. Nevertheless, it is still controversial if prevention conducted in more real-world settings and among people with in...

In repeated games with di®erential information on one side, the labelling \general case" refers to games in which the action of the informed player is not known to the uninformed, who can only observe a signal which is the random outcome of his and his opponent's action. Here we consider the problem of minimizing regret (in the sense ̄rst formulated by Hannan [8]) when the information available...