Competition between insurance companies for employees of a firm often increases the prices and reduces the availability of high-quality health plans offered to employees. An insurance company can reduce competition by signing an exclusive contract, which guarantees that the company is the only insurance provider. The study assesses whether exclusive contracts can alleviate the negative conseque...

Today's competitive world has led managers to shift from traditional management to scientific management. Supply chain management is one of key issues in industries because, considering a high number of competitors in today's competitive world, competition has been extended from company level to the level of competition on their supply chain. For any organization seeking to achieve its goals in...

Competition plays an ambiguous role in markets for credence goods. We examine the nursing home industry and find a U-shaped relationship between competition and quality where private and public patients coexist, and a monotonic relationship where the public segment dominates. These observations are consistent with a repeated game model that highlights two opposing effects: the reputation buildi...

Different approaches to measure the hospital competition index might lead to inconsistent results of the effects of hospital competition on innovation adoption. The purpose of this study is to adopt a different approach to define market area and measure the level of competition to examine whether hospital competition has a positive effect on hospital behavior, taking quality indicator projects ...

Managers like to think well of themselves and of the firms that employ them. Yet, such positive illusions can prejudice the evaluation of market outcomes and, as a result, provoke biased responses. In particular, we examine the possibility that managers self-servingly credit success in the market to product quality but blame failure on price. We draw on the social psychology of causal attributi...

This paper presents empirical evidence that endogenous fixed costs play a central role in determining the equilibrium structure of the retail food industry. Using the framework developed in Sutton [Sutton, J. (1991). Sunk Cost and Market Structure: Price Competition, Advertising, and the Evolution of Concentration (MIT Press, Cambridge).], I construct a structural model of retail competition in...

Despite the obvious differences between the USA and UK health care systems, they share the characteristics of being motivated and managed in relation to cost and process rather than quality (the improved health status of patients). Whilst governments and insurers across the world use the rhetoric of quality, they, as epitomized by the behaviours of UK and USA decision makers, fail to define, me...